Robert Fisk has written a column decrying the failure of American journalists to "tell it like it is" about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says that "vociferous readers" (a better euphemism than "Zionists," I suppose) have caused a number of US media outlets to use language that downplays the severity of Israeli policies and actions. For instance, instead of calling Jewish settlements in the West Bank "colonies," as Fisk thinks they should, American reporters choose such wimpy alternatives as "settlements" or "outposts." Similarly "occupied territory" becomes "disputed territory" and a "wall" becomes a "fence" or a "barrier." Now we’ve had many discussions here about politicized word choices, and I’m sure Fisk can provide detailed arguments for why his favored words are always the most precise. But I find it ironic that this is the same Robert Fisk who routinely refers to Palestinian terrorists with quotation marks around "terrorists." So it appears that for Fisk, the most damning words are always appropriate for Israeli behavior but never for Palestinian behavior.

Geldof remains unimpressed by the idea that the aid he helped to raise was used in ways that may have cost as many lives - in MSF’s view, more - as were saved. He has never been drawn on whether MSF’s accusations were right or wrong. As far as he is concerned, Live Aid raised a lot of money and used that money to feed people who would have starved. Live Aid, Geldof would say later, had been "almost perfect in what it achieved". In the context of such near perfection, raising the issue of resettlement looks ungrateful. As Geldof put it to one interviewer: "If Live Aid had existed during the second world war, and if we’d heard that there were people dying in concentration camps, would we have refused to bring food and assistance to those camps? Of course not!"

Geldof was presumably unaware when he responded that the question of the collusion between the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Nazi regime remains one of the great controversies in the humanitarian world. The ICRC was indeed aware of the Nazi death camps. But it decided that its ability to fulfil its mandate of assisting prisoners of war would have been endangered by public acknowledgment of Auschwitz. Today, the official line of the ICRC is that its actions during the second world war were a tragic mistake - that faced by the radical evil of the concentration camps, the organisation should have defied its own norms of neutrality and confidentiality and spoken out.

With the exception of MSF, what neither the relief world, nor the UN, nor Geldof have ever come to terms with is that the Mengistu regime - ousted in 1991 - also committed mass murder in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used and in which NGOs using Live Aid funds were active. The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what the Nazis did with the ICRC: it made them unwilling collaborators.

Geldof has proclaimed that Live 8 is about "social justice, not charity". That is certainly an improvement from the simplicities of the original Live Aid. But simplicities still abound. Showing a film from Ethiopia in 1985 at a press conference, Geldof said the famine was "still going on". He also insisted that "the G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history". It would be great if it were that simple, just as it would have been great if the effect of Live Aid on the ground in Ethiopia had been simple, or entirely benign. But it wasn’t true then and, though the Dergue is mercifully gone, it isn’t true now.

Ondanks de heftige spanningen tussen Cuba en de VS voelt het eerste land blijkbaar niets voor een diplomatiek conflict rond het niemandsland tussen de basis en Cubaans grondgebied. Het niemandsland lig vol landmijnen en prikkeldraad en is 117 vierkante kilometer groot. Een Cubaanse woordvoerder zei: ’ Dit is een heel gevoelige zone waar twee vijanden al tientallen jaren tegenover elkaar staan.’ Hoewel de verbale strijd over Guantanamo vaak scherp is, wordt door beide landen grote voorzichtigheid betracht. Vlak na de terrorisme-acties in New York zei vice-president Raúl Castro geen overwegende bezwaren te hebben tegen het feit dat de VS terrorisme-verdachten in Guantanamo opsloot. Hoewel Havana de behandeling van gevangen door de VS in Guantanamo en de gevangenis van Abu Ghraib omschreef als ‘fascistisch’ werken Cubaanse en Amerikaanse militairen buiten en op de basis nauw samen, ondermeer door telefonische contacten, om de stabiliteit te bewaren.

In the late 1990’s, McKinsey found that six of the economy’s 59 sectors accounted for virtually all productivity growth. Among the biggest contributors were new-economy industries like telecommunications, computer manufacturing and semiconductors. But from 2000 to 2003, the top seven sectors accounted for only 75 percent of the productivity increase. And five of the top contributors were service industries, including retail trade, wholesale trade and financial services. That is surprising, since economists have generally believed that it is much harder for service industries to reap sharp productivity gains than it is for manufacturers.

One mystery of recent years has been the enduring gap in productivity growth between the United States and Europe. In this case, another structural force - regulation - may be at work. "In economies with less regulation, companies can use information communications technology that link sectors to one another in ways that create joint productivity," said Gail Fosler, executive vice president and chief economist at the Conference Board.

Because domestic retailers don’t face the same sorts of restrictions on working hours and road use that European retailers do, for example, the Americans have been better able to use technology to manage trucking fleets, deliveries and inventory.

The encouraging news, some economists say, is that a major breakthrough in information technology is not required to fuel further productivity growth. "It’s not research and development that cause the big gains in productivity," Professor Jorgenson said. "The real drivers are things like competition, deregulation, the opening of markets and globalization."

Eight countries plus the Palestinian Authority, not yet officially a country, moved up — either from "not free" to "partly free" or from "partly free" to "free." Four countries moved down. In all, this made it a good year for freedom.

But here’s the really interesting part. Of the nine countries that improved their ratings, no fewer than six are Muslim countries. Indonesia moved from "partly free" to "free," while Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mauritania and the Palestinian Authority moved from "not free" to "partly free." Of the four countries that became less free in 2005, none was a Muslim country.

To anyone who has followed the Freedom House data year to year, these changes are remarkable. Since the fall of Portugal’s military dictatorship in 1974, a tide of freedom and democracy has washed over the globe. Every region has recorded strong gains, including even such a poor and troubled area as sub-Saharan Africa and the socially mutilated lands of the former Soviet empire. But until this year, the Muslim world had remained a stubborn exception.

If the Bush agenda were going to score high marks anywhere, you’d think it would be at the University of Chicago, long known for its conservative bent on economics. But when the Tribune turned toward Hyde Park for a year-end assessment of the president’s fiscal management, the graders weren’t inclined to cut Bush much slack. The last time we did something like this--right before the 2004 presidential election--Bush got much higher marks. But after lots of unchecked spending and stalled momentum on big issues like Social Security, this year’s panel of three prominent economists with ties to the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business turned out to be fairly tough critics. That’s partly because we recruited graders from across the political spectrum. Edward Snyder, dean of Chicago’s business school, leans right but has a strong independent streak. The same could be said of former Reagan economic adviser Michael Mussa, a onetime U. of C. Graduate School of Business professor and chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute of International Economics. Hailing from the left is economics professor Austan Goolsbee, an avowed Democrat and an informal adviser to the Kerry campaign in last year’s election. While conservative economists like Mussa and Snyder say the president’s tax cuts and stimulus package helped lay the foundation for the current economic expansion, they tend to join Goolsbee in lamenting that the administration’s lack of spending discipline is mortgaging the nation’s future.

Libertarians still tend to identify with the Republican party. Save for historical reasons, it is hard to see why. The current administration, despite its free market rhetoric, has been no better--arguably worse--than its predecessor on economic issues. Its policy on public schooling, the largest governent run industry in the U.S., has been a push towards more central control, not less. Its support for free trade has been at best intermittant. Reductions in taxes have been matched by increases in government spending, increasing, not shrinking, the real size and cost of government. It has been strikingly bad on civil liberties. Its Supreme Court nominees have not been notably sympathetic to libertarian views of the law. Libertarians disagree among themselves on foreign policy, but many support a generally non-interventionist approach and so find themselves unhappy with the Iraq war.

The obvious solution to both sets of problems is for the Democrats to try to pull the libertarian faction out of the Republican party. How large that faction is is hard to judge, but it is clearly a lot larger than the vote of the Libertarian Party would suggest. The current administration’s use of pro-market rhetoric suggests that it, at least, believes that a significant fraction of its base cares about such things. The conversion of a mere ten percent of current Republicans into Democrats would strikingly alter the current political balance. How can the Democrats appeal to libertarian Republicans without alienating their own base? Support for school vouchers would meet the former requirement--but in a party where public school teachers make up one of the most powerful interest groups, it is unfortunately not a viable option. I think I have an answer. In 2004, Montana went for Bush by a sizable margin. It also voted in medical marijuana, by an even larger margin. Legalizing medical marijuana is a policy popular with libertarians, acceptable to Democrats, and opposed by the current administration. At the very least, prominent Democrats should come out in favor of the federal government respecting state medical marijuana laws, as it has so far refused to do. Better yet, let them propose a federal medical marijuana law. That will send a signal to a considerable number of voters that, at least on this issue, one of the parties is finally on their side. It would be a beginning.

Consumers often benefit from increased competition in differentiated product settings. In this paper we consider consumer benefits from increased competition in a differentiated product setting: the spread of non-traditional retail outlets. In this paper we estimate consumer benefits from supercenter entry and expansion into markets for food. We estimate a discrete choice model for household shopping choice of supercenters and traditional outlets for food. We have panel data for households so we can follow their shopping patterns over time and allow for a fixed effect in their shopping behavior. We find the benefits to be substantial, both in terms of food expenditure and in terms of overall consumer expenditure. Low income households benefitthe most.

Both Hindustan Motors of India and Toyota of Japan began production around the same time, and faced similar challenges as they sought to grow as companies.

And yet there were some crucial differences in the respective cultures, political and economic environments within which these companies existed.

The results of over a half-century of competing philosophies and circumstances are starkly evident in some of these highlights:

At the Hindustan Motors plant near Calcutta, over 11,000 workers make 18,000 Ambassadors a year. At the Toyota City Lexus factory ouside Tokyo, 66 workers helped by robots produce over 100,000 cars a year.

Until the 1980s almost every car sold in India was an Ambassador. In the following decade, as India’s closed auto market was opened up and auto sales doubled, the market share for the Ambassador shrank to less than 5%. Meanwhile, Toyota continues to be a world leader in the automobile industry. Why such an astounding disparity in results? The answers may lie in the controls, regulations, protections and licensing requirements under which Hindustan Motors has operated in India.

While Toyota has competed on the global market, Hindustan Motors spent much of its corporate history sheltered from competition.

The Ambassador is based on a 1950s British model and the design has stayed essentially unchanged ever since. Although Hindustan Motors is now investing $43.5 million to revamp its workhorse, the changes hold little promise for the survival of the company. Similar investments in the past few years have produced little results.

The Ambassador, like Hindustan Motors, is a dinosaur from an era in which there was no need to improve, innovate, and improve productivity.

Writing from Uttarpara, site of the Hindustan Motors plant near Calcutta, New York Times reporter Barry Bearak writes, "Streets in India are an extraordinary sight for two reasons, one of them the cows that wander sacredly and indifferently through traffic, the other an antiquated-looking automobile with a bowler hat of a roof called the Ambassador. Little in the look of the car has changed during its 41 years on the road."

He continues that "until the early 1980s, most every car sold in India was an Ambassador, and, for its manufacturer, Hindustan Motors Ltd., this was clearly too much of a good thing. Near monopoly conditions led to lingering corporate somnolence."

When the Indian government opened its auto market to competition in the 1990s, Indian drivers migrated en masse to smaller, sleeker, and better made cars.

While the Ambassador, now priced at around $8,000, has always been a very easy car to keep running, the ride is bumpy and the manufacturing quality is poor. Indians often joke that everything in the Ambassador makes a sound except the horn.

Over the years, little was done to streamline production or attend to quality control. "A fresh-from-the-factory Ambassador already could be a rattletrap with doors that did not quite fit and windows that allowed water to seep in around the edges", wrote Bearak.

Faced with imminent extinction, Hindustan Motors has been scrambling to cut costs and improve quality. But the resistance to change can be formidable.

The bloated workforce is heavily unionized, and any attempts at restructuring the work week or laying off any of the 11,000 workers have met with fierce opposition.

The company has gone ahead with its plans to operate with a reduced work week, but without government approval, it must continue to pay the workers their full wages. The price tag: losses of over $25 million and counting in the past year.

The West Bengal labor department rejected the company’s proposed retrenchment plan as "absurd," issuing a decision that chastised management for inefficiency.

As far as the bureaucrats and unions are concerned, the company’s financial woes are the results of "poor management." There may be truth to this claim, but a stalemate between management and labor may result in the loss of all 11,000 if the company shuts down.

"The car has so many benefits - its so big it can be used as a mobile office," says Hindustan Motors’ chief executive. "On Indian roads, where safety is a big issue, it’s rugged. Mechanically, it is unlikely to fail. If it does, any mechanic in India knows how to fix it."

But, as reporter Barry Bearak has written that the "final virtue - the Ambassador’s ease of repair - may in the end prove its undoing as much as any cheaper, faster and flashier competitors."

One Indian mechanic says, "What goes on inside an Ambassador is simple to understand, no electric parts that no one’s ever seen before. You can fix anything with a hammer and a wrench. Six-year-olds can do it."

In Calcutta and most other big cities, there are entire markets where dozens of resourceful mechanics not only sell used Ambassador parts but home-made "knock-offs" ones as well.

These copies are cut-rate. An entirely "new" Ambassador body can be bought for $350, an entire shiny "new" car for under $1,000.

"I can take a 1960 Ambassador and make it look and run the same as an Ambassador just out of the factory," the mechanic says. "The Ambassador never changes. Why would anyone buy a new one?"

Meanwhile, in July 2002, Toyota Motors celebrated the ten millionth vehicle manufactured in North America alone, at a ceremony at its Erlanger, Ky. facility, the headquarters of Toyota’s manufacturing operations in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Occasionally we debate globalisation as if it were something imposed by Governments or business on unwilling people. Wrong. It is the individual decisions of millions of people that is creating and driving globalisation. Globalisation isn’t something done to us. It is something we are, consciously or unconsciously doing to and for ourselves. ...There are some who argue that the poor will lose from an ambitious liberalising round. Far better to continue to offer them preferences - an old form of welfare. In one sense they are right. In the short term they may loose from some changes to the preference system if we do not take other actions. But ultimately the preference system is not the way forward. They stand to gain far more if we are bold; if we are confident; if we are ambitious. Developing countries could gain $47 billion in increased agricultural exports. We know the current system of preferences is not helping Africa. African trade with the EU has fallen over thirty years under the Lome and Cotonou Preferences. We also do not give enough market access to larger developing countries including countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa who are not LDCs. Yet the blunt reality is that it is they who will drive African economic recovery. And most of the world’s poor live in India and China. They will benefit from an ambitious trade deal too.

The clock is ticking on the Doha round. This is a race against time. We have to act before President Bush’s negotiating mandate runs out in mid-2007. President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet with his commitments on reducing global tariffs. But Europe has stuck its head in the sand. If Europe does not do more, the noble aim to ‘make poverty history’ in 2005 will have been sold down the river. As every schoolchild knows, if you haven’t done your homework, you aren’t going to get a good mark in the class test. And the failure of Europe to do its homework before Hong Kong means that real success here is unlikely to be forthcoming. The EU’s intransigence has placed the credibility of the WTO in mortal peril. Should the Doha Round fail, countries will be left to make preferential agreements. Unlike multilateral WTO agreements, such agreements discriminate against those not party to them. They would most likely exclude Africa – the countries we want to help the most. So if we want the best trading system possible for the world’s poorest, then we need to do more to make the Doha Development Round a success. As part of this, we must win the battle of ideas on trade. Conservatives believe that free trade is fair trade. We believe that poor people, not their politicians, should be free to choose where they buy their goods and services. If they want to buy cheaper goods from abroad, and spend the money they save on food or medicines, they should be free to do so. Free trade facilitates voluntary co-operation between people all over the world. It is blind to race, creed or religion. It trade increases the range of goods available to people. It allows countries to specialise in what they produce most efficiently, thus leading to greater wealth creation.

In October the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization voted 148 to 2 to pass a Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, giving participant countries unspecified authority to “take all appropriate measures to protect and preserve cultural expressions”—widely interpreted to mean protection from U.S. movies and television. Israel and the United States alone voted against, four countries abstained, and the minister of culture from France (which, with Canada, co-sponsored the initiative) bragged that “we are no longer the black sheep” in the fight against “cultural invasion.” The United Kingdom’s delegate called the vote against American culture “a great day for UNESCO,” saying the two countries had “agreed to disagree.”

At the same moment France’s culture apparatchik voted to keep Hollywood out, his countrymen were voting very differently with their euros: They made Dreamworks’ Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit the top French film two weeks running. Among France’s other hits of 2005: Bewitched, Fantastic Four, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Star Wars: Episode III. (French audiences still have a nose for neglected American gems: Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, a relative nonperformer stateside, spent two weeks atop the French box office.) And France’s partner in cultural protection? Canadians this year doffed their toques to American fare such as Doom, Flightplan, Four Brothers, and Wedding Crashers. U.K. audiences liked all the above plus The Longest Yard, The Dukes of Hazard, and The Ring Two. This is not to engage in national chest-thumping—irrelevant given that every major Hollywood release is to some extent an international co-production. Nick Park’s British-to-the-bone Wallace and Gromit is a Hollywood film only in its studio. The Ring franchise remade an inventive series of Japanese originals. The biggest losers of a downturn in Hollywood production—beyond Los Angeles itself—would be the film boards of Toronto and Vancouver, Hollywood’s favorite locations. (The UNESCO plan has more sinister implications as well: The U.S. argues that dictators could use the Convention to keep subversive content away from their populations.)

Coldplay singer Chris Martin is always going on about global warming. Fair enough - if listening to him hectoring us about scarce resources and carbon emissions is what it takes to conserve the planet then it’s a price worth paying. But what if he’s a big fat hypocrite? Coldplay frontman Chris Martin avoided serious injury when his BMW X5 hit another car in London yesterday December 19. Martin had a minor shunt on a busy road near Belsize Park. Nobody was hurt. Martin’s actress wife Gwyeth Paltrow is also thought to have been in the vehicle. These things do between 12 (city) and 21 (motorway) miles to the gallon.

The simple fact is, if Bush had wanted to gather this surveillance legally, all he had to do was to make an application to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. This court has, throughout its history, granted such applications in all but four instances. What’s more, it is incredibly easy to get such permission (...) The only time a FISA court is likely to refuse permission--remember, they don’t require evidence or probable cause--is if the request was so tenuous, that is, had no likely bearing on protecting the populace, or was sought to watch people who could not reasonably be considered a risk or likely to bear watching. So the fact is, Bush could have easily got the legal cover he needed to allow this surveillance if he wanted it. The only reason he would not have sought such permission is if he thought it would likely be rejected by a FISA court. The only reason a FISA court would reject such a request is if the request was so far outside the bounds of relevance that they had no choice but to reject it. The question George W. Bush therefore needs to answer is: which citizens were you spying on such that you considered it unlikely that a FISA court would grant you permission? Who were you spying on that you thought that even the relatively lax standards of a FISA court would be too restrictive?

when one thinks of bad behavior leading down the road to possible impeachment, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind first. Although Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with an intern and then lying about it to a grand jury, a better case could have been made to impeach him for conducting an unconstitutional war over Kosovo without approval by Congress. The articles of Nixon’s impeachment centered on his use of illegal surveillance methods against political opponents and obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress in covering it up. His launching of an unconstitutional war in Cambodia without congressional approval was equally serious, but was left out of the articles. Curiously, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s predecessor, also used illegal surveillance activities against political rivals, but was not impeached.

Ronald Reagan, who is now a celebrated past president and icon of conservatives, justifiably feared impeachment for the Iran-Contra affair. He knowingly violated the Arms Export Control Act, a criminal statute, and sold arms to radical supporters of terrorists. His administration also unconstitutionally violated a congressional prohibition on providing money and support to the Nicaraguan Contra fighters. The Reagan administration’s violation of the Boland Amendment stuck a knife in the heart of the checks and balances system in the U.S. Constitution by circumventing Congress’s most important power—the appropriation of public monies.

the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution essentially says that the people have the right to be secure against unreasonable government searches and seizures and that no search warrants shall be issued without probable cause that a crime has been committed. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that warrants for national security wiretaps be authorized by the secret FISA court. The law says that it is a crime for government officials to conduct electronic surveillance outside the exclusive purviews of that law or the criminal wiretap statute. President Bush’s authorization of the monitoring of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA) without even the minimal protection of FISA court warrants is clearly unconstitutional and illegal. Executive searches without judicial review violate the unique checks and balances that the nation’s founders created in the U.S. government and are a considerable threat to American liberty. Furthermore, surveillance of Americans by the NSA, an intelligence service rather than a law enforcement agency, is a regression to the practices of the Vietnam-era, when intelligence agencies were misused to spy on anti-war protesters—another impeachable violation of peoples’ constitutional rights by LBJ and Nixon.

President Bush defiantly admits initiating such flagrant domestic spying but contends that the Congress implicitly authorized such activities when it approved the use of force against al Qaeda and that such actions fit within his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief. But the founders never intended core principles of the Constitution to be suspended during wartime. In fact, they realized that it was in times of war and crisis that constitutional protections of the people were most at risk of usurpation by politicians, who purport to defend American freedom while actually undermining it.

The Bush administration’s FBI has also expanded its use of national security letters to examine the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans who are not suspected of being involved in terrorism or even illegal acts.

Apparently the president is also taking us back to the Vietnam era by monitoring anti-war protesters. Information on peaceful anti-war demonstrations has apparently found its way into Pentagon databases on possible threats to U.S. security.

Finally, the president’s policies on detainees in the “war on terror” probably qualify as impeachable offenses. The Bush administration decided that the “war on terror” exempted it from an unambiguous criminal law and international conventions (which are also the law of the land) preventing torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. An American president permitting torture is both disgraceful and ineffective in getting good information from those held. Furthermore, the administration concocted the fictitious category of “enemy combatants” to deprive detainees of the legal protections of either the U.S. courts or “prisoner-of-war” status. The administration then tried to detain these enemy combatants, some of them American citizens, indefinitely without trial, access to counsel, or the right to have courts to review their cases.

In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator. To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

Former President Clinton also used the Echelon program to fight economic espionage. He also used the program to track white supremists following the Oklahoma City bombing. Carnivore anybody? Funny how a Democrat uses this type of power and its OK, but when a Republican uses it, then all hell breaks loose. The hypocricy never ends with you liberals. Unbelievable. I hope the Justice Department finds out who leaked this story and presses charges for TREASON. Playing dirty politics with our national security is disgusting, and I am flabbergasted that even the most reasonable liberal, if one actually exists, doesn’t call this out like it is; dirty politics. You liberals have become a Fifth Column in our country. We’ve got the War Against Terrorism abroad, and the War Against Liberalism at home. We’re winning both wars, and you’re gonna get your butts kicked again at the election polls next year.

Like it or not,we live in a world characterised by scarce resources. All decisions have costs and tradeoffs, and people make decisions about what costs to bear and which tradeoffs to make, and how, in response to incentives. It is here that social science – specifically, economics – can make an important contribution to the climate debate.

The book’s contributors argue that
• The world’s poorest people are most vulnerable to climate – that is to say, they suffer because of the prevailing weather, not changes in the climate per se.
• Global agreements that seek by government fiat to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are costly, ineffective against climate-sensitive problems, and would perpetuate poverty. In short, they are unsustainable.
• A more cost-effective, and more humane, solution is to tackle today’s problems which may be exacerbated by climate change – including malaria, food production, biodiversity loss, water shortages, coastal flooding and other problems.
• A broad adaptive strategy would not only provide insurance against climate sensitive problems, but it would have spill-over benefits for achieving sustainable development. The UK government’s own climate studies support this approach.
• In the 20th century, attempts to plan national economies failed dismally, destroyed the environment and harmed millions of people. Climate control by global and national governments would likely have the same consequences.
• The primary long-term solution to climate vulnerability is for all countries to adopt institutional frameworks, including decentralised government, that encourage innovation, foster enterprise and enable individuals to develop strategies and technologies to cope with changing circumstances.

President Bush reversed course on Thursday and accepted Sen. John McCain’s call for a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror. Bush said the agreement will "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad." "It’s a done deal," said McCain, talking to reporters in a driving rain outside the White House.

It is doubly not very encouraging due to a point made in a paper which Brad Setser points us to. The paper is the U.S. and Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent a Big Bang? by Ricardo Hausmann and Fredrico Sturzenegger. Basically they argue that the net US financial position is not as dire as it seems due to the existance of ’dark matter’ (or in more converntional terms, due to the part of the iceberg which isn’t visible and measured). US assets they argue are conventionally undervalued due to the presence of ’hard to measure’ components. Central to their argument is this point:

"We would say that EuroDisney in reality is not worth 100 million (what BEA would value it) but four times that (the capitalized value at our 5% rate of the 20 million per year that it earns). BEA is missing this and therefore grossly understates net assets. Why can EuroDisney earn such a return? Because the investment comes with a substantial amount of know-how, brand recognition, expertise, research and development and also with our good friends Mickey and Donald. This know-how is a source of dark matter. It explains why the US can earn more on its assets than it pays on its liabilities and why foreigners cannot do the same."

I would say the argument that ’foreigners’ are unable to leverage "know-how, brand recognition, expertise, research and development" is a ridiculously simplistic one, and it almost stretches the bounds of credulity that someone might believe this, but that having been said, if here in Europe we continually fail to maintain our R&D pace it will not be such a silly argument at some stage in the foreseeable future.

Three times as many French farmers receive large subsidies from the EU than those of any other country. In total, France receives almost twice as much direct subsidies for its farmers as any other member state, and they are mostly channelled to large farmers rather than traditional small-scale land holders. Despite the huge discrepancies France steadfastly refuses to countenance any reduction in farm subsidies, bringing the EU budget negotiations in Brussels and the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong, both climaxing this week, to the brink of collapse.

France’s farmers are the parasites of the European Union, subsidy-hungry leeches who do little more than destroy taxpayer value while ruining the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers throughout the rest of the world, yet instead of the British government demanding that they wean themselves off the EU teat, it is the French who have the temerity to insist that Britain and the rest of Europe continue to subsidize this wealthy coterie of rent-seeking layabouts.

Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, is to be a director of a Russian-German pipeline consortium controlled by Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled gas group said on Thursday. Anti-corruption activists said his appointment to the super­visory board of the $5.7bn (€4.8bn) North European Gas Pipeline would rekindle debate in Germany about possible conflicts of interest for retired politicians who move into business. Hansjörg Elshorst, head of the German section of the Transparency International corruption lobby group, said: “Is Schröder giving his elder-statesman backing because he believes in the political significance of the venture? Or is he being rewarded for supporting the deal earlier? The latter would be unacceptable, but either way he has to come forward and explain.” This week Transparency International called for a “cooling period” for holders of political office who switch to business. As chancellor Mr Schröder backed the Baltic pipeline, which he deemed essential for ensuring German energy supplies. It will carry gas directly to Germany via the Baltic seabed from 2010. Mr Schröder, with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, attended the signing of the contract in Berlin on September 7, some 10 days before the election that ended his second term. The opposition criticised Mr Putin’s visit as endorsement of the chancellor’s re-election bid. Mr Schröder, a friend of Mr Putin, whom he once called a “dyed-in-the-wool democrat”, was criticised for failing to consult neighbours that opposed the project. The pipeline, 51 per cent owned by Gazprom, with Eon and Wintershall each owning 24.5 per cent, is the most ambitious Russian-German business project in recent years. The ground-breaking ceremony was held yesterday in Babajewo, 400km from Moscow, with Michael Glos, economics minister, representing the new German government.

So what could we learn from Texas? How about their 10% law, which guarantees a university place to the top 10% of students at any school? This is wonderfully egalitarian. It reduces the disadvantage students suffer if - through not fault of their own - they attend crap schools. Contrast this with the scandalous situation in the UK, where state schools blight the life-chances of brighter students. Texas’s 10% law proves the opposite. it shows that Texas is more committed to genuine equality of opportunity than most Islingtonians, who seem content to ensure that the state perpetuates vicious inequalities.

I recently committed California to lead the worldwide effort to fight global warming. By 2010, we will reduce greenhouse gases to the levels we produced in 2000; by 2020, we will reduce to 1990 levels; and by 2050, California will reduce these pollutants by 80 percent compared to 1990 levels.

The science shows that manmade pollution has added more than 50 percent to the natural level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Even if we terminate our contribution to this pollution tomorrow, it will take decades for our planet to heal. In the meantime, our children will see severe impacts to our snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which reduces our annual water supplies; erosion of our valuable coastline; flooding of valuable farmlands in the Central Valley; and a wide variety of health impacts related to changes in seasonal temperatures.

That’s why I am dedicated to reversing this trend with targets that rely on many programs. We will reduce emissions from vehicles starting in 2009 under our landmark greenhouse gas law; from power plants, by obtaining more of our electricity from clean, renewable resources under our “Renewable Portfolio Standard,” which I have committed to implement many years sooner than currently anticipated; and from energy-efficient buildings and homes as required under my Green Buildings Initiative.

My programs for a million solar roofs, the Hydrogen Highway and obtaining more energy from farm waste and other biomass will also significantly reduce greenhouse gases, while simultaneously making us more energy independent. We will also rapidly make our 70,000 state vehicles the cleanest, greenest in the nation.

Our Climate Action Registry will create market-based emission trading programs in cooperation with other regions and with the numerous California companies that have become members of this visionary project. Companies that reduce emissions invariably save money—a winning strategy for both our economic and environmental well-being.

What is neoconservative foreign policy? The best thumbnail definition is the one given by Paul Berman in his hugely influential Terror and Liberalism (2003) and quoted by Oliver Kamm: "Freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for freedom for others." It is that coupling, of national security with the promotion of freedom, that has given neoconservative foreign policy its potency, and why it is likely to last through a change of power in the United States after George W Bush - certainly if the Republican victor is John McCain, probably if the Democratic victor is Hillary Clinton.

Tony Blair’s distinctively neoconservative foreign policy preceded that of the Bush administration - it did not follow it. His leadership on air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the turning-point interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and the post-9/11 conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq have been - from the point of view of neoconservatism - exemplary . . . What Blair has resuscitated (particularly during Kosovo and Sierra Leone) is the sense that Britain can lead, not follow, global trends in foreign affairs - that, as a global power, Britain’s interests are best served not by selfish isolationism or abnegation of responsibility, but by being a world leader with a humanitarian urge.

That Blair took this position - the first national leader to do so - makes Sir Christopher Meyer’s opportunistic memoirs, in which he accuses Blair of poodling along behind George Bush, even grubbier: Blair led, but had not the power to intervene alone, save in such relatively small-scale conflicts as Sierra Leone. His 1999 Chicago speech remains a high water mark of liberal interventionist - or neoconservative - thinking.

Soft paternalism is an emotional tax on behavior which yields no government revenues.
Soft paternalism can cause bad decisions just as easily as hard paternalism.
Public monitoring of soft paternalism is much more difficult than public monitoring of hard paternalism.
While hard paternalism will be limited by public opposition, soft paternalism is particularly attractive because it builds public support.
Soft paternalism can build dislike or even hatred of subgroups of the population.
Soft paternalism leads to hard paternalism.
Soft paternalism complements other government persuasion.
Soft paternalism requires a government bureaucracy that is skilled in manipulating beliefs. A persuasive government bureaucracy is inherently dangerous because that apparatus can be used in contexts far away from the initial paternalistic domain.

There are two arguments for a Tobin Tax (i.e. a small tax on foreign exchange transactions):

* it would provide a dedicated source of revenue to pay for increases in aid;
* it would benefit the economy by reducing volatility by reducing the amount of trading in currency markets.
Neither of these arguments stands up to scrutiny.

First, we can increase aid without finding a new source of revenue. UK Overseas Development Assistance is expected to be Ł4.9 billion this year, about 0.39% of GDP. We would need about another Ł3.8 billion a year to get up to 0.7% - the internationally agreed aspiration, which Jeff Sachs reckons is more than is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals. UK public spending (measured as Total Managed Expenditure) is expected to increase by Ł28 billion in real terms over the next two years - we’d need about a seventh of the total increase to go to aid to reach the 0.7% target in two years. Alternatively, it would need about 1p on the basic rate of income tax, or a 3p increase in the top rate of tax. Linking aid increases to the introduction of a new tax (and one that is likely to be difficult, if not impossible, to get international agreement on) enables us to hide from the truth, which is that we haven’t increased aid because we don’t want to.

Second, I don’t understand why people think that high turnover in foreign exchange markets makes them more volatile. Deep and liquid markets are more, not less, likely to converge quickly on prices that reflect the economic fundamentals. The trends in currency prices that adversely affect poor countries are the inexorable long term depreciation as the terms of trade move against countries dependent on the export of primary commodities and the income gap between rich and poor countries continues to grow. These long term trends won’t be reversed by a Tobin Tax. If the problem was short term volatility, it would be simpler and cheaper to hedge than to try to reduce the volatility.

The concern of Europeans about hormone-treated meat began in 1980 with horror stories about the irresponsible use leading to abnormal sexual development in humans who ate the meat. Soon European consumer groups seized upon hormone-treated meat as a public health threat and urged the ban of all hormones. West Germany led the opposition to hormone use and its government along with the Belgian, and Italian governments had already banned hormone use with national legislation. In an unusual move, the European Parliament took the initiative to pass a resolution for a Community-wide ban on all hormones. While the European Parliament has no authority over trade policy, the hormone policy related to consumer health and regulation of the Common Market where the Parliament has a larger voice in the institutional process. In December 1985, the Agriculture Council adopted the directive to ban the use of hormones within EC livestock farming and the import of meat produced with such hormones. Agriculture Commissioner Frans Andriessen also advocated the ban as a way to help curb the growing beef surplus problem. In view of the cost of paying for the 800,000 ton “beef mountain” filling EC intervention stocks in 1985, it was easy to advocate a regulation that would in effect limit domestic production and imports. Farmers supported the ban since it would reassure consumers while leveling the playing field so that neither farmers within Europe nor those overseas could gain a competitive advantage by means of growth-promoting hormones.The directive emphasized the need to harmonize policies in order to uphold equal trade conditions within the Common Market. Although different national regulations to protect public health are allowed within the common market, differential regulation of hormones would distort trade because some countries could use hormones to produce more beef at less cost while other countries could use the health standard as a trade barrier to isolate their national market. Creating a single hormones policy for the Common Market was indirectly part of the Single European Act plan to integrate the product standards of member states, including harmonization of sanitary and phytosanitary standards (Vogt, 1989, p.5). Five years after the Directive was first issued in 1985, the European Court of Justice upheld the ban against a legal challenge and stated that the policy was necessary to prevent different rules in member states from forming barriers that distort trade. European officials showed little concern about whether there was scientific evidence of a health risk. A Commission-appointed scientific study finally completed its research after the ban had already been approved. Its conclusion that hormone implants did not pose a health danger was summarily dismissed; the Agriculture Commissioner Frans Andriessen said, “Scientific advice is important, but it is not decisive. In public opinion, this is a very delicate issue that has to be dealt with in political terms".

What size and degree of hierarchy are optimal? I don’t pretend to know; I would guess that it varies by industry, and that it also depends on a host of further factors specific to each situation. But in a free market firms would be rewarded for approaching the optimum and penalised for deviating from it.

We don’t have a free market, however; instead we have a highly regulated market. For familiar reasons, such regulations hamper the less affluent more than the more affluent, and so successful firms will tend to become somewhat insulated from competition by less established firms, thus removing one check on their inefficiency. And as Kevin Carson points out, regulatory standardisation also decreases competition among the successful firms – a form of de facto cartelisation. Government regulation thus lowers the costs associated with size and hierarchy more than it lowers the associated benefits; it stands to reason, then, that firms in a genuine free-market context could be expected to be smaller and less hierarchical than they tend to be today. This is doubly true once one takes into account the increased competition for workers that a less regulated economy would presumably see (assuming that workers generally prefer less hierarchical work environments).

So how different would firms be under a genuine free market? To answer that question one would have to be able to sort out which aspects of today’s economy derive primarily from the market and which primarily from regulation, and that’s no easy task. So I feel confident about the direction of difference, but not the degree. And in any case the degree partly depends on what workers are willing to put up with – which is a variable, not a constant (and one of the functions of a labour movement is precisely to influence that variable).

Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as "materialistic"; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.

In fact, Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post-Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling.

Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth’s return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations -- they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can’t stop ’em, join ’em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus’ birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.

Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: "Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"

Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science -- all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market.

For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Puritans called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale.

Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5). In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick’s physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids’ stockings, then goes back to the North Pole.

Of course, the Puritans denounced Santa as the Anti-Christ, because he pushed Jesus to the background. Furthermore, Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice -- Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones.

All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness.

America’s tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

De politie van Brugge heeft tijdens de Champions League-voetbalwedstrijd Club Brugge-Bayern Munchen proces-verbaal opgemaakt tegen een van de supporters van Club Brugge. De man bracht een Hitler-groet uit in de richting van de bezoekende supporters. Hij riskeert een administratieve boete en een stadionverbod in het kader van de voetbalwet.

Progress fuels these views: Despite the country’s continued problems, 85 percent of Afghans say living conditions there are better now than they were under the Taliban. Eighty percent cite improved freedom to express political views. And 75 percent say their security from crime and violence has improved as well. After decades of oppression and war, many Afghans see a better life.

I recently found myself asking a fairly bizarre economic question: Would the disaffected youth torching cars in France be happier if they could get jobs at Wal-Mart? If you think I’m kidding, I’m not. France and the United States have two distinct "flavors" of capitalism. The U.S. has the more "Wild West" version. Our economy is relatively unregulated compared to a place like France. We promise our citizens fewer benefits than the French. We offer our workers and firms less protection. Our government meddles less in how businesses operate and our overall tax burden is significantly lower. The French have the more coddling flavor of capitalism. Citizens receive more benefits from the state, such as guaranteed health care. Workers have far more expansive benefits: Longer maternity leave and vacations, higher minimum pay, and the government has capped the workweek at 35 hours. Perhaps most significant, French workers have extraordinary job protection. Once hired, they’re hard to get rid of.

Fawaz A. Gerges, an expert on the insurgency movement in Iraq and on the jihad movement in the Muslim world, says the bombings at three Amman hotels last month have produced "a turning point in the Middle East." He says the overall disgust with these violent policies has also led to what he calls "the beginning of a civil war within the Sunni community in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world," in which Sunnis are planning to defy Zarqawi and vote in large numbers later this month to have a role in the new Iraqi government.

Gerges, a Lebanese-born professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, says "many Islamists and former jihadists are saying Al-Qaeda is doing a great deal of damage to the ummah, the Muslim community worldwide, but also to the Islamist movement. Public polls, a very important indicator in the Arab world, tell us we are witnessing a shift away from being sympathetic to Al-Qaeda to being inhospitable and even hostile to Al-Qaeda’s global ideology."

Crucial to all this, he says, is a decision by the Bush administration to signal to the new Iraqi government that it is planning some kind of phased withdrawal from Iraq "sooner rather than later." Gerges says, "I think the administration must act on the momentum that exists now in Iraq and try to convince Sunni public opinion that, ’We are planning to leave. We are planning to leave in a year, a year in a half, and allow Iraqis to run their own affairs.’"

Anderlecht maakt op het veld van Betis geen enkele kans. Zeker niet nu Betis onderaan staat in de Primera Division. Het zal zich willen rehabiliteren en de Champions League is daar een ideale gelegenheid voor.

This isn’t really a surprise. As near as anyone can tell, productivity appears to be primarily a result of technology advances, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have very much to say about that. Compensation, on the other hand, is primarily a function of how tight the labor market is, and Republicans have long done the business community’s bidding by pursuing policies that keep the labor market slack. Democrats, by contrast, generally try to pursue full employment policies. So if productivity is skyrocketing, but labor compensation is going down, where’s all that extra money going? Yes, you in the back? Bingo: it’s going to the class of people who are willing to turn around and tithe a portion of it back to the GOP and its allies in election year. Nice racket, isn’t it?

During her visit to London, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was interviewed by Channel 4 News.

She claimed that a well funded lobbying campaign has been set up to discourage western governments and media from discussing subjects such as women’s rights in Islamic societies.

Westerners don’t want to hear anything critical of Islam, she argued, in fact they are so frightened by the "organised emotion" of Muslims, that they shy away from confronting it. She went on to say:

Freedom does not come cheap.

The forces that silenced Theo van Gogh will stop at nothing. They will do anything to silence me and other individual Muslims who are critical of Islam.

So plastic bags are clogging up our drains. How do we solve the problem?

One way is to ban plastic bags. That is the typical solution we come up with for many problems. The thinking that informs such decision making is Bush-style “for us or against us”. The only reason why anyone would be against banning plastic bags is that they hate the environment, or are just evil capitalists concerned about their profits. Unfortunately, such thinking ignores the trade-offs inherent in any decision-making. For example, I usually avoid asking for plastic bags when I shop for little stuff close to my home. If I have to buy a bunch of bananas, I carry them in my hand. But if I have to carry stuff from a long way away, I get a bag. There is no point categorizing my decisions by asking: “Are you in favour of plastic bags or the environment?” Of course I care about the environment. I also care about my convenience and I trade off the two constantly.

Another way is to impose a tax on purchase of plastic bags. This is a good idea, and I might even support it if the money collected from the tax is used in collecting the garbage and disposing of them properly. This is a better idea because it imposes the costs where it belongs. It also puts the decision into my hands. Do I choose convenience or pay the price? It is upto me.

But this too is not my ideal solution.

It is not the use of plastic bags that is causing the problem. It is their disposal. So instead of charging at the point of sale, why not impose a charge at the point of disposal? I realise that this may not be practicable in India. It would be difficult to enforce in India which is why I’d support option 2. But if we could enforce it, this would be the best way to do it. Why?

This is why. They have found a way to use waste plastic bags to pave roads. The linked article refers to Niger, but I remember reading somewhere that Bangalore is also doing the same. This is not a complete solution to the plastic problem, but it suggests what could be done if incentives were aligned properly. If residents are charged to dispose of their plastic bags, it gives an incentive to someone to come up with creative ways to dispose of these bags. Given that it would cost money to dispose of a bag, they would gratefully hand it over to someone who offers to take it on for free. Or perhaps the innovator may actually find it feasible to offer cash for those bags. It would depend on the economics of the thing. The important thing is that if you tax the sale of the bags instead of the disposal, this incentive would not arise.

I am using this example to illustrate a principle that the government should use while dealing with environmental issues - the polluter pays. More precisely, the polluter should pay in proportion to the pollution and at the point of pollution.

For another example of this, take the Delhi Government rule that only CNG buses are allowed. Is that the best way to control pollution? No, because if someone comes up with an engine that pollutes less than CNG, he will have to take a lot of trouble trying to get it introduced in the market. He will have to lobby the government to change the rules (and probably face up to counter-lobbying by makers of CNG engines.) Far better to impose pollution norms, and let the compliance with those norms be the headache of vehicle manufacturers. It is better to control at the point of pollution than at some upstream point.

Some months back, in a discussion with Gaurav Sabnis, he had lamented that environmental policy is one place where we capitalists enter a grey area. In one sense that is true. Even the solutions that I’ve outlined aren’t “elegant” ones. All of them give the government much more policy making power than we would like. But then, no one has managed to come up with a good solution, and I think that the solutions that work with the market are still better than the ones that use the heavy hand of regulation.

Washington’s new position shrewdly mixes a few carrots in along with the big stick. It formally acknowledges that countries have "sovereignty concerns" about their national two-letter address domains -- a mealy-mouthed nod toward granting countries control over them, which is only appropriate. Although this will invite problems, such as with Taiwan’s ".tw," these can be sidestepped -- just as the allocation of telephone "country codes" to territories does not confer diplomatic recognition, neither does the allocation of country domains need to. Washington also supports the continued discussion of broader Internet governance issues in multiple forums, which could restrain the creation of a cumbersome and monolithic Global Internet Policy Council (which was among the UN working group’s proposals). It may also keep politicians from trespassing on ICANN’s more purely technical areas, which could harm the network. Nevertheless, although the new U.S. position may be the least bad alternative in the short term, it will almost certainly be unsustainable over the longer term. For the moment, there is little other governments can do to rebel. Unless they feel their concerns are being addressed, however, they are likely to try to set up a parallel naming and addressing system to compete with ICANN-sanctioned domains. Technology abhors homogeneity; differing technical standards are the norm rather than the exception. The ongoing scuffle over the creation of Galileo, Europe’s challenge to Washington’s Global Positioning System, is one example; the battle over third-generation mobile-phone standards is another. The danger, however, is that two different addressing systems on the Internet may not interoperate perfectly. If it wants to preserve and extend the benefits the Internet currently brings, Washington will have to come up with some way of sharing control with other countries without jeopardizing the network’s stability or discouraging free speech and technical innovation. Ultimately, what is playing out is a clash of perspectives. The U.S. government saw the creation of ICANN as the voluntary relinquishing of a critical source of power in the digital age; others saw it as a clever way for Washington to maintain its hegemony by placing Internet governance in the U.S. private sector. Foreign critics think a shift to multilateral intergovernmental control would mark a step toward enlightened global democracy; Washington thinks it would constitute a step back in time, toward state-regulated telecommunications. Whether and how these perspectives are bridged will determine the future of a global resource that nearly all of us have come to take for granted.

De discriminatie tussen diegenen die toegang hebben tot Internet en diegenen die er geen toegang toe hebben, treft vooral de kwetsbare burgers.

De verschillen tussen mannen en vrouwen hebben diverse oorzaken en gaan verder dan het probleem van de ICT-toegang of -opleiding. Het gaat om een breder maatschappelijk probleem. Het Plan zal er echter toe bijdragen de discriminaties tussen mannen en vrouwen in dit opzicht te verminderen. Het is belangrijk zich zorgen te maken om een situatie waarbij 55% van de Belgische internetgebruikers van het mannelijk geslacht is, tegenover slechts 45% van het vrouwelijk geslacht.

De geconcentreerde stad heeft plaatsgemaakt voor ‘stedelijke netwerken’ waarbinnen stromen van informatie, goederen en mensen zich verplaatsen op een wereldomvattend niveau.

I find her critique of multiculturalism, in the name of Enlightenment liberalism, too sweeping. In my view, her support for the French ban on the hijab in schools and public offices amounts to advocating an unnecessary restriction of individual liberty in the name of individual liberty. But her central claim seems to me vital and irrefutable: if being a free country means anything at all, it must mean that people have the chance to criticise freely, and without fear of reprisal, Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism, as they now in practice have the chance to excoriate Christianity (despite Britain’s ridiculous blasphemy laws), Judaism or, for that matter, Darwinism. To establish that claim, she is determined to go ahead and make Submission 2, which will treat the story from the men’s side, and Submission 3, which will suggest a possible response from Allah. Whatever the merits of the resulting films, we must salute her courage and support her in every way we can. It’s not just the rights of women from Muslim families she is fighting for; it’s a basic right for us all.

The simplest method would be to force all of our politicians to read David Ricardo. If that’s too much for their delicate intellects, Paul Krugman provides a lighter but similarly accurate read on free trade. There aren’t all that many things in economics that are both known to be true and difficult to understand. Free trade happens to be one of them.

The UN Ambassador yesterday:

"Americans are a very practical people, and they don’t view the U.N. through theological lenses. They look at it as a competitor in the marketplace for global problem-solving, and if it’s successful at solving problems, they’ll be inclined to use it. If it’s not successful at solving problems, they’ll say, ’Are there other institutions?’ . . . that’s why making the U.N. stronger and more effective is a reform priority for us: Because if it’s a more agile, effective organization, it is more likely to be a successful competitor as a global problem-solver."

Hate to say it, but that sounds exactly right to me.

I have to change all the world democide totals that populate my websites, blogs, and publications. The total for the communist democide before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 + 35,226,000 + 38,000,000 = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000 murdered. This is now in line with the 65 million toll estimated for China in the Black Book of Communism, and Chang and Halliday’s estimate of "well over 70 million." This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945. For perspective on Mao’s most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in combat dead 34,021,000 -- including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many as were killed in combat in all these wars. Now, my overall totals for world democide 1900-1999 must also be changed. I have estimated it to be 174,000,000 murdered, of which communist regimes murdered about 148,000,000. Also, compare this to combat dead. Communists overall have murdered four times those killed in combat, while globally the democide toll was over six times that number.

China’s very high and stable growth in the last few years would seem to indicate that the country is a success in all regards, including finance. This optimistic picture, however, may change if we consider the extremely high domestic saving and investment ratios. In fact, for an average 40% domestic investment to GDP (fully financed by domestic savings), an 8 to 10% growth is not such a high return to investment. This is a very rough indicator of potential misallocation of resources, namely domestic savings, which has been a common feature of closed economies, and even more so of planned ones.

Cuba raised heavily subsidised electricity rates by as much as 333 per cent yesterday to save power and deal with chronic energy shortages. A decree signed by President Fidel Castro increased the cost of electricity for small consumers from 20 to 30 cents of a Cuban peso ($0.01) per kilowatt-hour (kwh). Cubans who consume more than 300kwh a month will see their rate rise from 30 cents to 1.30 pesos ($0.06) next month. "The lack of concern about electrical consumption is evident in our country due to the very low rates," the decree published in the ruling Communist Party newspaper Granma said. Power outages are frequent in Cuba whose thermoelectric generators built decades ago are obsolete and do not produce enough electricity to meet demand at peak consumption.

Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons (...)Earlier today I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces, (...) Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors (...) Along with Prime Minister (Tony) Blair of Great Britain, I made it equally clear that if Saddam failed to cooperate fully we would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy or warning (...) Instead of inspectors disarming Saddam, Saddam has disarmed the inspectors (...) In halting our airstrikes in November, I gave Saddam a chance -- not a license. If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed (...) The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people

Saddam is gone. It’s a good thing, but I don’t agree with what was done (...) It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country.

Shouting ‘Yes To Jobs’ - the people themselves of Costa Rica have taken to the streets to demand free trade, in a vast demonstration of support! These are the people we haven’t heard from in the media coverage - until now - and now that they are too numerous to ignore. Too often the only coverage out there was of anti-free trade rentamob demonstrations. This time, things are different. Costa Ricans have stepped forward to demand free trade! As up and comers like El Salvador advance in this world with their free trade strategy, Costa Rica’s highly competitive people are making it clear that they don’t intend to be left behind. The train leaves for the enactment of the pact on Jan. 1, but the Costa Ricans have two years to get the pact passed. Do they want to lose two years? Doesn’t sound like it to me.

We do not need a U.S. trade representative. Our trade policy should be unilateral disarmament, because the weapons in the trade war are all suicide bombs.

the textile industry is frequently the starter industry for industrial takeoff, but it’s the starter industry if the conditions are right, that is, if institutions and cultures are there that are congenial to or consistent with market-based economic activity. Then the textile industry is a fairly simple one and one that can make use of cheap labor and can help to build a dynamic of broader economic development. But that isn’t really what happened with a lot of textile-producing countries that we see in the world today. A lot of their textile industries are pure artifacts of the quota system, where it wasn’t so much that producers were running around looking for cheaper labor costs; it was that they were running around looking for places that weren’t under quota yet. And so producers would set up factories in places that had no competitive advantages whatsoever except that they were not quota-bound yet or quota was doled out to them for foreign policy reasons. And so there are a number of textile producers in the world today—and many of them, unfortunately are concentrated in Africa—that didn’t have those preconditions for takeoff for textiles to provide the spark. They’re just taking advantage of a strange and temporary policy loophole. So when you see countries like Bangladesh—not to pick on Africa all the time—where textiles makes up 80 percent of the country’s exports and they have been under quota protection for decades, you see that this isn’t a country that just needs a little bit more time. It’s a country that has deep institutional problems that just a little bit more time of having textile protectionism isn’t going to help. And so I think if we thought that giving Africa a few more years of preferential access for its textiles would do good, then that would be one thing. I’m very dubious that that is the case. We do, in fact, give some preferential access to African textiles under the AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, so that there is zero tariff treatment on African textiles that Chinese textiles don’t enjoy. It’s just not enough.

There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern... A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

In the largest-ever study of marijuana and depression, to be published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, daily or weekly marijuana users had fewer symptoms of depression than non-users. Marijuana users were also more likely to report positive moods and fewer somatic complaints such as sleeplessness. Noteworthy differences were also found between those using marijuana for medical purposes and non-medical or "recreational" users. The new research appears to contradict statements by some government officials suggesting that marijuana is a cause of depression. For example, in a May 3, 2005, press release from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, ONDCP Director John Walters said, "Marijuana use, particularly during the teen years, can lead to depression, thoughts of suicide and schizophrenia." "Not only does marijuana not cause depression, it looks like it may actually alleviate it," said Mitch Earleywine, co-author of the new study and associate professor of psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. The study is the first to specifically look at depression in medical marijuana users as compared to non-medical users. The most common complaints listed by medical users surveyed were nausea, vomiting, cancer, attention deficit and poor appetite. Medical users generally were more depressed and had more somatic complaints than non-medical users, but still reported fewer such symptoms than non-users. "Those who use marijuana to battle the symptoms of illness may be depressed because of their illness, not because of marijuana," Earleywine said. "Studies that do not identify medical use might falsely implicate marijuana, rather than sickness, as the cause of depressed feelings." Drug Czar John Walters has tried to frighten Americans about marijuana, using exaggerated and incomplete data cherry-picked to support his ideology," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Science should be used to inform policy, not manipulated to scare the public."

An explosion in research (mainly dependent on access to proprietary data) as a result of public interest in these issues means that we are now in a position to provide answers with some degree of certainty. The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing does have a negative impact on traditional sales. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 20 and 40% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 20-40% of the decline in sales not a 20-40% decline in sales). Beyond this basic result several other very interesting facts have emerged. First is the differential impact of file-sharing on an artist depending on their existing popularity. According to Blackburn who investigates this issue the ‘bottom’ 3/4 of artists sell more as a consequence of file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell less. Second is the first tentative estimates (by Waldfogel and Rob) of the welfare consequences of file-sharing. Waldfogel and Rob’s dramatic result is that file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three times the loss to the music industry in lost sales. While, as they emphasize, this result is preliminary and based on limited data it indicates the urgent need for more research on this issue as well as the possibility to have a win-win situation in which both creators and the public get a better deal via a change to alternative compensation system such as a levy.

RF: There are some who have argued that population growth will ultimately lead to severe social and economic problems. I’m thinking of people like Paul Ehrlich, for instance. And then there are others — Julian Simon probably being the most prominent example — who have argued that population growth has unambiguously positive effects. Let us assume that these two positions define the extreme positions of the debate. Which one do you find more consistent with the evidence?

Moffitt: Although I have done work on the economics of fertility, I have not done work on this specific question. However, I have followed the debate fairly closely. As far as I can tell, the best work on that issue can be found in a couple of volumes put out by the National Academy of Sciences that examined how population growth affects a whole host of issues, including the environment, health, per-capita income, and others. And when you look at the data, it’s fairly hard to find major negative consequences of population growth. You can build models where this might be the case, but the empirical evidence seems fairly straightforward, and it is closer to Julian Simon’s view than to Paul Ehrlich’s.

I think that economists have generally been persuaded that population growth, on average, has positive effects — and so, too, have demographers, a group that used to include a pretty large number of population growth opponents. Also, I think most people would agree that we do not face a “population bomb” except, possibly, in Africa, and AIDS has changed things rather dramatically there. Quite the opposite: In many developed countries, population growth is now below the replacement rate.

U.S. policy seems to assume that if the Mexican government can eliminate the top drug lords, their organizations will fall apart, thereby greatly reducing the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. Thus, U.S. officials have rejoiced at the willingness of President Fox’s administration to make the drug war—and especially the capture of major drug-trafficking figures—a high priority. Since Fox took office in 2000, Mexico has arrested more than 36,000 drug traffickers, including top figures from nearly all the cartels. That neutralizing drug kingpins will achieve a lasting reduction in drug trafficking is the same belief that U.S. officials embraced with respect to the crackdown on the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia during the 1990s. Subsequent developments proved the assumption to be erroneous. The elimination of those two cartels merely decentralized the Colombian drug trade. Instead of two large organizations controlling the trade, today some 300 much smaller, loosely organized groups do so. More to the point, the arrests and killings of numerous top drug lords in both Colombia and Mexico over the years have not had a meaningful impact on the quantity of drugs entering the United States. Cutting off one head of the drug-smuggling Hydra merely results in more heads taking its place. Jorge Chabat, a Mexican security and drug policy analyst, notes: “For years, the U.S. told Mexico’s government, ‘The problem is that the narcos are still powerful because you don’t dismantle the gangs.’ Now they’re doing just that . . . and the narcos are more powerful than ever.” Mexico can still avoid going down the same tragic path as Colombia, but time is growing short. Washington had better pay far more attention to the problem than it has to this point, and U.S. officials need to come up with better answers than the ineffectual and discredited policies of the past. If Washington continues to pursue a prohibitionist strategy, the violence and corruption that have convulsed Colombia will become dominant and permanent features of Mexico’s life as well. The illicit drug trade has already penetrated the country’s economy and society to an unhealthy degree.

An experimental project in Canada to inject carbon dioxide into oil fields has proven successful, removing 5 million tons of the heat-trapping "greenhouse" gas, while enhancing oil recovery, the Energy Department said Tuesday. If the methodology could be applied worldwide, from one-third to one-half of the carbon dioxide emissions that go into the atmosphere could be eliminated over the next century and billions of barrels of additional oil could be recovered, the department said.

I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn’t work.

The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The unconfirmed report claimed that the explosions occurred while coalition forces surrounded the house in which al-Zarqawi was hiding. American and Iraqi forces are looking into the report.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to kill a trade program that has paid more than $1 billion to U.S. companies since 2000 and been declared illegal by the World Trade Organization. Congressional investigators released a report in September showing that nearly $500 million in payments under the program went to just five companies, and that two-thirds of total payments went to three industries: bearings, candles and steel.

I learned from watching how Christopher Hitchens approached his topics: with quiet assurance, with wit, and with humanity. Like I said, it wasn’t one of his strongest performances - but all of those traits shone through anyway. When he spoke of the "realist" school of international relations, he didn’t focus on political theory - he focused on stories from his time among the Kurds shortly after Desert Storm. Or a recent dinner at his house with Kurdish, Sunni and Shi’te guests who discussed politics and elections. These people had been real insurgents, people’s warriors who had led resistance to Saddam’s tyranny at great risk - NOT the torturers and lackeys of a fallen fascist regime, aligned with foreign fanatics to practice their trade anew as paramilitary death squads who target children. Calmly, but in a tone that left no doubts of his conviction, Hitchens spoke of the terrible human and moral toll of the "realist" policies that its proponents called (without an ounce of irony or reflection) "peace." Of course, he finished that off by pointing out how many of the dictatorships the realists wish to do business with/ bribe/ be bribed by are unraveling anyway, as the forces of change now afoot pull their socieities apart. Or preparing to implode as fascism’s inherent death wish impulses assert themselves. "Realism" wasn’t only immoral, he noted - it was often profoundly unrealistic.

I have long recognized that that the Republican party has become a less friendly place over the years for a libertarian who nonetheless wants the government to function well in its limited capacity. However, I think over the past few years we’ve gone from "unfriendly" to "pretty damn hostile".

And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft’s best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they’ll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can’t match. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage. Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they’ll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That’s $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart’s. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we’ve thought of as a threatened species, won’t be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren’t worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn’t try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google. Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year. Game over.

India’s Communist-backed government will on Thursday afternoon consider a sweeping liberalisation of foreign direct investment rules that would kick start a long-stalled programme of economic reforms. Kamal Nath, India’s minister for commerce and industry, has proposed allowing 100 per cent foreign direct investment in a range of sectors, including airport construction, oil & gas infrastructure and cash & carry wholesale trading. The cabinet will also debate whether to allow FDI in the exploration and mining of coal, lignite and diamonds, and in the cultivation of important plantation crops such as coffee, tea and rubber. “It’s big news as this is first time that such a specific sector review of foreign direct investment has been undertaken,” said a senior commerce ministry official, who warned that there was no guarantee the cabinet would approve Mr Nath’s proposals. India attracted $5.5bn in FDI in 2004-5, an increase of 18 per cent, but less than a tenth of the inflows into China. The government estimates that $150bn needs to be invested in upgrading the country’s infrastructure over the next 10 years. If the new rules are approved, they will also allow foreign investment to come in by the so-called “automatic route”, circumventing a cumbersome approvals process overseen by the Ministry of Finance’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Allowing 100 per cent foreign direct investment in airport construction would be a big boost to the ongoing privatisation process. High-profile groups such as Singapore’s Changi have withdrawn from bidding because of constraints on foreign operators. Permitting foreign groups to invest freely in India’s oil and gas infrastructure would be aimed at harnessing international capital for complex undertakings such as the laying of a proposed gas pipelines to Iran via Pakistan.

there are also reasons to hope the current round can be finished in time to avoid the danger posed by the expiry of President George W. Bush’s fast track trade-negotiating authority in mid-2007 - a danger that is unusually great as general support erodes in the US for freeing trade.

In agriculture, widespread condemnation of rich-country subsidies as running at "$1bn a day" and "causing overproduction" is a massive exaggeration that makes the task of reducing subsidies seem politically intractable.

In fact, when one omits the subsidies that are "decoupled" from production and trade, the "coupled" subsidies that distort production and trade and that alone should matter to other countries, are less than $100bn (Ł58bn); and here, too, the export subsidies are in the range of $3bn-$5bn annually. Clearly, the export subsidies are small enough to be negotiated away and a dent could surely be made in the "coupled" subsidies. The opposition of France and its allies to further cuts in EU tariffs and quotas (called "market access" in the negotiations) beyond what Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, has offered so far could be a bottleneck. But it is likely that more could be squeezed from the EU in return for more reciprocal concessions in the final deal. The EU knows it has no comparative advantage in agriculture, so the reciprocity it needs has to come in manufactures and services.

It has to be said, however, that the Group of 20 countries, which includes the bigger developing countries such as India and Brazil, have tariffs on manufactures that are significantly higher than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, cuts in which can be put on the table. Brazil has already indicated willingness to do so and India is also likely to play.

But then, the US has comparative advantage in agriculture, so it cannot ignore the demands of US farmers for "sectoral reciprocity" within agriculture itself from the Cairns group countries of agricultural producers such as Brazil and Mexico, which also have high tariff barriers on agriculture. The Cairns group should be willing to support a deal that cuts its members’ agricultural trade barriers in return for long-desired market access to the US.

What about services? The main drivers in the US and the EU are insurance companies and the banks. Their services, however, actually lubricate trade and the developing countries can surely be persuaded to take more quantitative commitments here, providing the EU and the US with additional quid pro quo for their agricultural concessions. The poorest countries must also be brought on board, although some hesitate to liberalise trade for fear they may lose tariff revenues on which they rely for public spending.

Others are afraid to liberalise because they lack adjustment assistance programmes to assist workers who may be laid off due to import competition. Then again, many enjoy preferences and fear "most favoured nation" tariff liberalisation under the Doha round because that would erode the value of their preferences. For all these problems, an "aid for trade" programme could be devised to provide aid funds systematically to respond to these tasks. Mr Lamy has endorsed the idea. It should bring many of the least-developed countries on board for Doha and must be acted upon forthwith. The outlines of such a deal that would close the Doha round are therefore clear. It remains for Mr Lamy to present them forcefully (in the tradition of the "Dunkel draft" that rescued the Uruguay round of talks) in Hong Kong, and to get the member states to follow with an extraordinary meeting within six months, in a pro-globalisation country such as Denmark, where the penultimate steps to finalising a deal by the end of 2006 and its approval by early 2007 would be taken. It can be done. It is up to us all to do it.

Daarnet was er in Terzake een reportage over vrouwelijke zelfmoordterroristen wiens aanslag mislukte. Aan het begin van de reportage zie je een vrouw in haar cel de koran lezen. Bij dit beeld hoor je de commentaarstem zeggen dat ze haar koran nog vaak kan lezen, maar dat ze er nooit een passage in zal vinden die zelfmoordaanslagen goedkeurt. De koran verbiedt inderdaad zelfmoord, maar is dit verbod wel van toepassing op zelfmoordterroristen? "Onder de schaduw van het zwaard is het Paradijs" zei Mohammed (Bukhari, vol. 4, boek 56, nr. 2818). Allah belooft het paradijs aan allen die doden en gedood worden voor de islam (koran 9:111). Omdat zelfmoordterroristen zich niet opblazen om zelf te sterven, maar om zoveel mogelijk ongelovigen te doden, zien ze zichzelf niet als zelfmoordenaars maar als martelaars. Ze geven gevolg aan Allah’s oproep: "doodt de ongelovigen waar ge hen maar vindt, neemt hen gevangen en belegert hen en bereidt hun alle soorten hinderlaag" (koran 9:5) Dit soort martelarendom is niet eens een nieuw verschijnsel. Aan het einde van de elfde eeuw was er een Islamitische sekte: de Assassijnen, die op grote schaal politieke tegenstanders vermoordden. Zo goed als altijd gaven de moordenaars zich rustig over nadat ze de moord hadden uitgevoerd zodat ze terechtgesteld konden worden en in het paradijs konden gaan genieten van "jeugdige gezellen, gelijk in leeftijd" (koran 78:33) "van bescheiden blik met mooie ogen" (koran 37:48). Want Allah zegt: "Zo zal het zijn. En Wij zullen hen met schone meisjes die grote, mooie ogen hebben, verenigen." (koran 44:54) Misschien worden de vrouwelijke terroristen meer aangetrokken door de armbanden van goud en parels en de zijden gewaden (koran 22:23), maar ze zijn er rotsvast van overtuigd dat ze na hun dood recht naar het paradijs gaan en de betuttelende woorden van een VRT-journalist zullen daar niets aan veranderen.

President George W.Bush on Wednesday offered a direct rebuke to China by holding up Japan and Taiwan as examples of free and open societies and warning that the people of China had "legitimate" demands for more freedom of speech and religion. Opening his four-nation Asian tour with a speech in Kyoto on US-Asia relations, Mr Bush said: "As China reforms its economy, its leaders are finding that once the door to freedom is opened, even a crack, it cannot be closed: [they want] more freedom to express themselves, to worship without state control and to print Bibles and other sacred texts without fear of punishment."

It’s unusual to see the numbers laid out so concisely:

· The UK’s estimated annual supply of heroin and cocaine is worth Ł4bn.

· There are 749 deaths annually from heroin and methadone use.

· Seizure rates of 60%-80% are needed to have a serious impact on the flow of drugs into Britain, but 20% has been achieved.

· Annual cost of crimes committed by drug users to support cocaine and heroin habits has reached Ł16bn a year, Ł24bn if health and social services costs are included.

4 billion of drugs cause 16 billion in crime. Yup, the illegality is the problem. Even leaving aside the fact that that very illegality boosts the 4 billion figure.

Let me say it plainly: I not only concede, but I am convinced that President Bush believes genuinely in the course he urges upon us.

The administration might take some PR comfort in the WaPo’s assertion that, "The targeting of Jordan can hardly be blamed on the Iraq war," but it must accept the fact that the success of this attack (as opposed to a botched 1999 attempt) is directly attributable to the administration’s pre-invasion failure to take out Zarqawi and post0invasion failure to ensure basic security in Iraq.

For opponents, however, the irony is even more bitter. The Bush administration might have been full of it when it claimed a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the invasion. However, as frustrating as it may be, Bush is correct to say that Iraq is now one of the focal points in the war against Al Qaeda -- the Jordan attacks are merely the latest evidence of this. As long as Zarqawi has a base of operations and a playground to train zealots, he will continue to be a potent source of trouble.

So, a question to those who advocate a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq -- how would a U.S. withdrawal help in any way towards removing Iraq as a base of operations for Al Qaeda?

Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa will step down this week, complying with his
At the same time that Mkapa hands over power as required by the law, he is urging his colleagues to discard the political system and warning other African leaders to be wary of the present competitive global political and economic order because globalization threatens to “exploit, denigrate, and humiliate Africa.” But one might ask whether Africa’s problems are really caused by globalization.

This message particularly smacks of a return to the pre-independence rhetoric that made the creation of political kingdoms a greater priority than development and fed the overwhelming urge of many leaders to remain in power long after the colonialists were gone. No wonder President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has cunningly severed all ties with his country’s constitution since he managed to give himself a de facto third term.

These ideas are as dangerous today as ever. At a time when the continent strives to liberate itself from the expansive powers of postcolonial governments and the politicization of society brought about by them, the real need of the day is economic freedom. Alas, the economic situation is so bad in so many African countries that young men are fleeing their own governments, trekking through the vast and dangerous Sahara desert and struggling over heavily guarded barbed wires to look for better opportunities in Europe. Unfortunately, many die on this pilgrimage of freedom.

African countries greatly increased exports to the U.S. in 2004, generating revenues of over $26 billion in that year. Jeans made in Lesotho are sold in U.S. stores. Flowers from Kenya and vegetables from Senegal are regularly available in European shops. The use of mobile phones and the Internet is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world, according to the United Nations.

Globalization can hardly be blamed for the fact that only 10 percent of Africa’s trade takes place among African countries themselves. With 750 million people living on the continent, the potential for the expansion of trade must be enormous. Very little trade has been allowed in this poorest of continents where tariffs are almost as high as 50 percent and where highway robbers dressed as customs officials block free exchange.

What is it that motivates Nigeria, which calls itself the giant of Africa, to ban the importation of ninety-six different products from Ghana when both countries have duty-free and quota-free access to the U.S. markets for 6,500 of their products? So what sort of globalization does Benjamin Mkapa want Africans to be wary of?

But the West is also guilty here as there is little incentive to encourage trade because foreign aid is piled on the leaders who make these economic policies.

It is widely reported that an African child dies of hunger and malnutrition every three seconds while in the same period African leaders steal $14,000 from their people and put it in foreign bank accounts. In the words of Milovan Djilas, they squander the nation’s wealth as though it was someone else’s and dip into it as if it were their own.

Isn’t it strange that exactly two weeks after the G8 deal that wrote off 80 percent of my country’s debt, all our parliamentarians, who earn $300 per month, are to receive $25,000 each in free car loans and $60 a day in rent allowance? I call it free car loans because five years ago they each received $20,000 but have yet to pay it back.

It is insulting that the bill for this lavish behavior is passed on to the disrespected poor as they struggle to pay a 40 percent tax on fuel that is used to support, among other things, government entities that consume almost one-third of the country’s fuel.

One would have thought that African leaders would be better advised to use resources to build the infrastructure that will increase the volume of trade within the continent and thereby improve economic activity. But President Benjamin Mkapa’s men are too busy harvesting where they have not sown.

You might ask why those in Niger go hungry when Nigeria, its next door neighbor, has abundant food. And how it is that Zimbabwe, a country that used to be the food basket of Southern Africa, now has thousands of starving citizens?

Does President Benjamin Mkapa know that African farmers use less than one-twentieth as much fertilizer as those in the West in part because import duties and red tape make fertilizer eight times as expensive as in Europe? For the same reasons, ordinary Africans pay ten times more for air travel than those on other continents.

Every ordinary African faces innumerable government-created bottlenecks in any enterprise they attempt. As the government has become the majority employer in these countries, the range of employment opportunities has been reduced and the government’s limitless public borrowing has crowded out the private sector’s access to capital.

Even the World Bank, one of the few remaining organizations still doling out free money to governments, now confirms that of the twenty countries in the world where it is most difficult to do business, seventeen are African.

Capital is a cowardly bird. It flies to safer places where it expects to earn better returns. 40 percent of Africa’s private investment takes place outside of the continent, while only 3 percent of Asia’s investment takes place overseas.

If there is to be any hope for long term prosperity in Africa, Africans must be given the predictability that comes with the rule of law, the protection of private property and free markets, and decentralized management of resources. This will harness local knowledge along with the creativity, diligence, and thrift that is natural to Africans.

When a company shows signs of weakness - poor financial results or drift in the boardroom, its competitors start to pay much closer attention to it. Might they they be able to take advantage of its recent bad luck or management incompetence and seize market share from the stumbling enterprise? Perhaps some staff can be poached? Plans are hatched in boardrooms with the same degree of sentimentality a butcher with a steel cleaver has for the side of beef before him on the table.

That’s how capitalism works, but what about socialism? Surely things are completely different and comradely solidarity is the watchword?

Don’t bet the farm on it.

Everyone who reads a newspaper is aware that George Galloway is in more political, financial and legal trouble than he’s ever been in before. We know also that the extent of that trouble is slowly filtering through to his comrades and underlings in the Respect Coalition and has recently started manifesting itself as a reluctance to commit too much time or energy to a political party so closely linked to its leaders personal fortunes.

That the party leadership allowed, in an amazing act of hubris, Galloway’s name to be so intimately associated with Respect that it appeared as part of the official name of the organisation during the May General election is now looking more and more like a fundamental tactical mistake as each new accusation, legal action or investigation surfaces against Galloway.

Well what would you do if you were a competing leftwing organisation and fi-fi-fo-fum you could smell the blood of a wounded Scotsman?

the Guardian Newsblog has the answer:

Sunday will see the Socialist party - which shot to prominence in the 1980s as Militant, the Trotskyist group of socialist infiltrators into the Labour party who took control of Liverpool city council - call for a new mass party "to represent working people".

The signing of the declaration will take place, with deliberate irony (or possibly not), in Room 101 of the University of London Union

Anyone who has watched nature programmes on television and stared fascinated as packs of opportunistic hyenas start to nip the skin of wounded but still-kicking wildebeest might want to keep an eye on the respective fortunes of Respect and the newly resurrected Militant Tendency.

Oh sure, the Millies talk about ’left unity’ and ’federal structures’ but then in the business world ruthless corporate takeovers are dressed up with talk of ’synergies’ and ’new paradigms’. And we all know what happens after these words start to fly.

Nearly all of the suicide bombers who have carried out attacks in Iraq have been Arabs who crossed into the country from Syria, Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said on Sunday. Most of the suicide bombers were Saudi citizens, Rubaie added. U.S, British and Iraqi officials have demanded Syria do more to stem the flow of foreign fighters crossing its border into Iraq and close training camps on its soil. "We do not have the least doubt that nine out of 10 of the suicide bombers who carry out suicide bombing operations among Iraqi citizens ... are Arabs who have crossed the border with Syria," Rubaie told journalists in Cairo. "Most of those that blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals," he added. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said that Syria wants a stable Iraq and does not support insurgents. He has also said he asked the U.S. for help in sealing the border but received none. Saudi Arabia last week rejected criticisms that it had not done enough to fight terrorism and said the U.S. should do more to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, which gave "lifeblood to the evil cult of hate". Rubaie said the fighters, who he said included Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, Algerians and Saudis came to Iraq through Syria, and received logistical assistance and training inside the country. "We want a political decision by the Syrian security agencies to stop the penetration of suicide bombers from Syria to Iraq ... It is very important that this decision is taken on the highest political level in Syria," he added. U.S.-led forces last week concluded Operation Steel Curtain in western Iraq near the border with Syria, their latest offensive aimed at stopping the flow of foreign fighters along the Euphrates Valley stretching from the border to Baghdad. U.S. and British officials have also accused Iran, Iraq’s eastern neighbor, of interfering in events in Iraq and not doing enough to stop militants from entering Iraq to take up arms in the insurgency. Jordanian officials said on Sunday that suicide bombers who killed more than 50 people in attacks on luxury hotels in Amman on Wednesday were all Iraqis. The Jordanians said they have a woman suicide bomber in custody whose explosives-laden belt failed to detonate. She has been identified as Iraqi and related to a former lieutenant of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

4. Trade does increase productivity just as surely as technological progress does, and has exactly the same effects. An improvement in productivity means that a worker (or more generally, the economy) can produce the same amount of output using fewer resources. Better technology does that. And so does international trade. To continue with AB’s example: Just as tax software makes one accounting firm able to do many more tax returns in a given period of time, thus making each tax return cheaper, farming out tax returns to Indian accountants makes each accounting firm able to do many more tax returns in a given period of time, thus making each tax return cheaper. Trade is just another way to allow the economy to produce more using fewer resources. It is no different from technological progress.

5. Trade, and the threat of competition from foreign workers, may indeed alter the balance of power between workers and firms. And that may be a legitimate source of concern. But if one follows that line of reasoning, one must also acknowledge that trade, and the threat of competition from foreign firms, may indeed alter the balance of power between firms and consumers. Note that consumers and workers are the same people.

One of the things I’m down in everyone’s rolodex for is as a leading critic of the Fairtrade scheme. It’s brought me a lot of good media hits - like Channel Four News and BBC Breakfast (interviewed by the superb Natasha Kaplinski). But I’ve increasingly found being a critic of Fairtrade somewhat uncomfortable. After all, if the Globalisation Institute is about anything, it’s about enterprise-based solutions to poverty. And that is, surely, what Fairtrade attempts to be. Fairtrade fits in nicely with the GI’s meme that it’s better to help developing countries by putting the money in at the bottom, rather than at the top through governments.

Let’s face it, the Fairtrade scheme - despite its provocative name - is not the opposite of free trade. It can go hand in hand with free trade - after all, it’s about consumers being free to choose to be altruistic when buying coffee. Sure, some of Fairtrade’s supporters have argued that it should become compulsory, through the World Trade Organization, but the scheme in its current form is entirely compatible with free trade. I’m worried when people like Harriet Lamb, the director of the Fairtrade Foundation, calls for the Fairtrade scheme to somehow be the model for the WTO Doha round, as though mandating prices in the world economy (i.e. Sovietising the world economy) would be good. But I think the Fairtrade Foundation has itself been moderating some of its positions, and the Foundation’s Ian Bretman tells me that he was employed as deputy director in order to bring a business perspective to the organisation.

And yet I retain deep reservations about the scheme in its current form. When you examine a scheme like microcredit, it has built-in mechanisms for helping people climb up the economic ladder - mechanisms missing in Fairtrade. The Fairtrade scheme needs to be made less bureaucratic and better at getting the most worthy farmers onboard, there needs to be work to ensure that there are incentives for mechanization and investment, and there needs to be a way of helping people to move onto bigger and better things once they reach a certain living standard. We are practical people here at the GI, so next year we will be releasing a report, Fairtrade 2.0, with a blueprint for how to reform the scheme. Watch this space.

1. Ensure that further liberalisation gives priority to changes that will benefit poor countries (eg removing agricultural subsidies, removing tariff escalation, unconditionally ending all quotas and tariffs on exports of LDCs, simplifying phyto-sanitary standards) rather than those which are primarily designed to benefit rich countries.
2. Give priority to extending the logic and practice of globalisation to the market for labour, to complement liberalistion of the markets for goods and for capital. Even small increases in migration would be of huge benefit to poor countries. The asymmetry of our policy rhetoric on free trade for goods but growing anxiety about the movement of people verges on hypocrisy. We can’t expect others to accept our arguments on the benefits of globalisation if we remain adamantly opposed to those parts of it that we are uncomfortable about.
3. Massively increase investment in global public goods, such as R&D into scientific innovation that would help the poor (a green revolution in Africa, new vaccines, solar power etc), conflict prevention and reductions in environmental degradation. By definition, the costs of these public goods should be paid by the world community as a whole, and not by individual countries; and rich countries should be investing much more of their wealth on them.
4. Give more aid. We know that aid works, on average. There is remarkable consensus about how much aid is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and it isn’t very much. A doubling of aid would have a huge impact on developing countries, and the cost to rich countries would be negligible within the context of public spending.
5. Increase knowledge sharing. I am concerned that the gradual extenson of copyright and patents into more and more of commercial life makes it hard for poor countries to appropriate technology from rich countries and close the gap. This has been a mechanism through the ages by which the poorest have been able to catch up with the richest: my sense is that we are making it harder than ever for this to happen. I think we have to find ways to ensure that poor countries have access to knowledge itself, and to knowledge-intensive products (eg computer software, pharmaceuticals, complex machinery) at tiered prices - the R&D costs should be paid by rich consumers, and poor countries should get access to these products at marginal cost (ie almost nothing). It harms us not in the slightest for them to do so.

When Flemming Rose heard last month that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children’s biography of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, he decided to put his nation’s famous tolerance to the test. The cultural editor of Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, then recruited cartoonists to depict Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and published them in the paper.

Since then, thousands of Danish Muslims, whose religion strictly prohibits depictions of the prophet, have demonstrated in protest, though some have rallied in support of the paper, too. Ambassadors from 11 Islamic countries including Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (!) signed a letter demanding that the Danish prime minister "punish" the newspaper. In contrast, a young Iranian woman started a petition in favor of the move.

"Some Muslims are asking for an apology pointing to a lack of respect," (Rose) says. "They’re not asking for respect; they’re asking for subordination - for us as non-Muslims to follow Muslim taboos in the public domain."

Although Rose expected some complaints, he was unprepared for the deluge of criticism.

Among those who attacked the newspaper’s lack of sensitivity was prominent Copenhagen imam Raed Hlayhel, saying "I will not tolerate this. If this is democracy, we disagree with democracy."

(John Stuart) Mill’s prevention-of-harm principle is not without its philosophical difficulties: it requires a definition of what constitutes ’harm’. But one thing that is clear is that the notion of harm cannot be drawn so widely as to accommodate merely the giving of offence, or else you can kiss individual liberty goodbye. The things that offend different people are just too many and too various, so that including ’offence’ within ’harm’ would make the latter into a uselessly wide category. Liberal societies today need to reaffirm Mill’s principle in the most forthright terms.

I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures and plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are tramping underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence. I saw the owner of the herd come to them, and when he saw their pitiful condition he was filled with compassion for them and thought of all he could do to improve their condition. So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And that they called Charity. Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing up into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should each have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast. Because they were dying off in the cold nights, he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cowsheds for the cattle. Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence, he put corks on the horns of the cattle, so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and cows over 70 years of age. In fact, he did everything he could think of to improve the condition of the cattle, and when I asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing, break down the fence, and let the cattle out, he answered: “ If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them.”

Mijnheer de voorzitter, mijnheer de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, in 2000 hebben 191 staatsen regeringsleiders de Millenniumdoelstellingen goedgekeurd. De ganse internationale gemeenschap heeft zich tot doel gesteld om de honger en de extreme armoede met de helft te verminderen, alle kinderen recht op basisonderwijs te geven, de kindersterfte met twee derde terug te dringen en de sterfte van moeders in het kinderbed met drie vierde terug te dringen. Niet langer dan september 2005 heeft in New York de VN de stand van zaken geëvalueerd en zijn we tot de vaststelling gekomen dat we ver van deze doelstelling af blijven en dat we dreigen ze niet te halen. Er was absolute eensgezindheid onder alle staats- en regeringsleiders dat er een voorwaarde is om die doelstellingen te kunnen halen, meer bepaald dat alle landen 0,7% van hun bnp aan ontwikkelingshulp zouden besteden. Mijnheer de minister, gisteren heb ik tot mijn spijt moeten vaststellen – u hebt dat in een artikel gezegd – dat 0,7% van het bnp voor ontwikkelingshulp voor u geen fetisj mag worden. Ik betreur dit, zeker op een moment dat duizenden Vlamingen en Belgen zich klaarmaken om morgen van deur tot deur te gaan en hulp te vragen voor de realisatie van die Millenniumdoelstellingen.

Mijnheer de voorzitter, mijnheer Van der Maelen, hoewel mij niet duidelijk is wat de vragen zijn die mij gesteld worden maar het veeleer een vaststelling is, zal ik er toch op antwoorden. Wat staat in het artikel? De regering onderschrijft het engagement om tegen 2010 de 0,7% te halen en terzake inspanningen zal leveren. In het artikel zeg ik duidelijk dat we verdere stappen op die weg zetten, ook in de begroting 2006. Wat ik zeg en waar ik eveneens van overtuigd ben is dat 0,7% geen fetisj mag worden maar soms wel als een fetisj behandeld wordt. Het bereiken van de 0,7% betekent geenszins dat de problemen dan zijn opgelost. Er is een kwantitatief element en een kwalitatief element. Men moet zich de vraag stellen, ook u mijnheer Van der Maelen, waarom in Zuid-Amerika en Azië nogal wat resultaten bereikt worden en de Millenniumdoelstellingen grotendeels bereikt zijn of zeker in 2015 zullen bereikt worden maar dat deze doelstellingen in Afrika niet bereikt worden. Men moet zich de vraag stellen waarom dit het geval is. Dat heeft niet te maken met een percentage van 0,7 of 0,6 maar met het behoorlijk bestuur in de eerstgenoemde landen. Landen die uit een conflict komen en niet behoorlijk bestuurd worden en waar de staat niet instaat voor een aantal elementaire behoeften, is ontwikkelingssamenwerking dikwijls – of ze groot of klein is – een druppel op een hete plaat. Dat is de realiteit. Dus de eerste noodzaak waaraan men iets moet doen, met name in Afrika, is inderdaad dat daar behoorlijk bestuur komt. Trouwens, Afrika is het continent waar men het meeste geld heeft ingestopt in het verleden en waar men het minste resultaat heeft. Wel, ook daar zou men zich eens moeten afvragen hoe dat komt. Ten tweede zegt u dat er absolute unanimiteit was in New York over het halen van de 07%- doelstelling. Dat is niet moeilijk, de meesten hebben dat niet. Als men maar 0,1% geeft is het geen probleem om te zeggen dat dit 0,7% zou moeten zijn. Als men er van jaar tot jaar meer geld aan geeft, dan moet men het er effectief ook aan geven. Meer dan honderd landen die daar zaten doen veel, veel minder dan 0,7% en velen doen minder dan de helft van 0,7%. Ik krijg ook kritiek van de heer Bourgeois die zegt dat dit toch dringend geregionaliseerd zou moeten worden omdat het dan beter zou functioneren. Dat de heer Bourgeois eens in zijn rijke begroting gaat putten om dat geld op tafel te leggen voor de ontwikkelingssamenwerking. Dan zullen we veel verder raken denk ik.

My guess would be that the same underlying cause that leads to the popularity of Islamic extremism is causing the social problems. Tribal mentality, lack of westerns ideals of enlightenment ideals, pure nationalism are some guesses. Islam is at the least a contributing factor, but not the only one.

The economical environment plays a crucial role, interacting with misdirected social politics of “tolerance”. In the US the same immigrants respond to the economic incentives and opportunities. They get jobs, work hard and often succeed. This has two results: they automatically absorb the language and cultural rules, and they do not confuse the results of bad labor market policies with discrimination.

One question I heard Americans ask about France is why the immigrants are so ungrateful. After all, they are getting billions of euros in subsidies from the French taxpayers, and enjow a higher standard of living than in their country of origin? I have a simple theory of this. It is the same mechanism that explains why Frenchmen, Germans, South Koreans and other countries that have objectively received most help from the US are also most anti-American.

Many people do not like to feel gratitude against others. Now imagine that you know that you should be grateful to someone that you hate or dislike! If given a coherent set of beliefs that reduced the need to feel gratitude you might prefer this to the rational explanation. Frenchmen choice Chomskyite history revisionism, attributing selfishness and malice to the US role during WWII. Swedish (and French) immigrants readily accept progressive theories of society which make them victims and give them claim to entitlement. By not having any demands society reinforced bad beliefs and bad behaviour.

In retailing, Google has no interest in stocking and selling merchandise. Its potential impact is more subtle, yet still significant. Every store is a collection of goods, some items more profitable than others. But the less-profitable items may bring people into stores, where they also buy the high-margin offerings - one shelf, in effect, subsidizes another. Search engines, combined with other technologies, have the potential to drive comparison shopping down to the shelf-by-shelf level. Cellphone makers, for example, are looking at the concept of a "shopping phone" with a camera that can read product bar codes. The phone could connect to databases and search services and, aided by satellite technology, reveal that the flat-screen TV model in front of you is $200 cheaper at a store five miles away. "We see this huge power moving to the edge - to consumers - in this Google environment," said Lou Steinberg, chief technology officer of Symbol Technologies, which supplies bar-code scanners to retailers. Such services could lead to lower prices for consumers, but also relentless competition that threatens to break up existing businesses. A newspaper or a magazine can be seen as a media store - a collection of news, entertainment and advertising delivered in a package. A tool like Google News allows a reader or an advertiser to pick and choose, breaking up the package by splitting the articles from the ads. And Google’s ads, tucked to the side of its search-engine results, are often a more efficient sales generator than print ads. "Google represents a challenge to newspapers, to be sure," said Gary B. Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy Company, a chain of 12 newspapers including The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. "Google is attacking the advertising base of newspapers." At the same time, Google and search technology are becoming crucial to the health of newspapers as more readers migrate to the Web. As one path to the future, Mr. Pruitt speaks of his newspapers prospering by tailoring search for local businesses, but also partnering with search engines to attract readers. Within industries, the influence of Internet search is often uneven. For example, search engines are being embraced by car companies, yet they pose a challenge to car dealers. George E. Murphy, senior vice president of global marketing for Chrysler, said Chrysler buys ads on 3,000 keywords a day on the big search sites: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and AOL, whose search is supplied by Google. If a person types in one of those keywords, the search results are accompanied by a sponsored link to a Chrysler site. Chrysler refines its approach based on what search words attract clicks, and studies its site traffic for clues on converting browsers to buyers. "We’ve got Ph.D.’s working on this," Mr. Murphy said. "The great thing about search is that you can do the math and follow the trail." After following a link to a Chrysler Web site, a prospective buyer can configure a model, find a dealer and get a preliminary price. Only dealers can make final price quotes. Yet with more information on the Web, the direction of things is clear, in Mr. Murphy’s view. "It will fundamentally change what the dealer does, because telling people about the vehicle won’t add value for the customer anymore," he said. "If dealers don’t change, they’ll be dinosaurs." Mr. Breyer, the Wal-Mart board member, watches Google closely in his job as managing partner of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. These days, he advises startups to avoid a "collision course" with Google, just as he has long counseled fledgling companies to steer clear of Microsoft’s stronghold in desktop software. Internet search, like personal computing in its heyday, is a disruptive technology, he said, threatening traditional industries and opening the door to new ones. "We think there is plenty of opportunity for innovation in the Google economy," Mr. Breyer said.

in 2002, virtually everybody believed Iraq had an active WMD program. The CIA believed it (...)(t)he British believed the same thing. The Germans and French believed it. Former Clinton administration officials believed it. Lots of Democratic members of congress believed it. They were all wrong, it turned out, but they weren’t lying. The simple fact is that virtually everyone who had access to the full range of classified intelligence at that point in time thought Iraq had an active WMD program.

GOOGLE THURSDAY LAUNCHED ITS BOOK search, Google Print, which lets users search for and access the full texts of books that have entered the public domain. The search utilizes the collections of the libraries at the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University to index and search the public domain works. "The world’s libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online," wrote Adam Mathes, an associate product manager with the Google Print team on the search giant’s blog. "One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we’ve taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired." Although the search giant is touting the public domain works available for search, copyrighted works can nonetheless also be searched and read, albeit only small snippets--five pages or so at a time--by users with a Google ID. The searching of copyrighted works has been a point of contention between Google and publishers and authors. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed separate suits alleging copyright infringement, and Google stopped scanning and indexing texts until the beginning of November. Now, however, Google has resumed scanning books, despite the legal troubles. Rivals MSN and Yahoo! have also set up their own book-scanning initiative, albeit with a softer touch toward authors and publishers. Yahoo!’s Open Content Alliance, which MSN joined last week, is scanning only public-domain works and the works of authors and publishers who opt-in to the service.

Microsoft is trying to adapt to the on-demand software model. Users will subscribe (or be subsidized by advertisers for low-end, low-functionality versions of the software) to online versions of Office, which would either add functionality to existing copies of Office that the users own, or might replace the desktop software altogether. For Microsoft, which has long owned the desktop-software market, this move may be seen as a preemptive strike because it has the most to lose in this arena. By going after its open source competitors, Microsoft is essentially attempting to turn a portion of its product-based business into a services- or advertising-based business. In the open source era, this kind of business model prevails because no one company has a lock on the program. Microsoft’s Windows operating system has always worked well “out of the box,” and that has helped it keep users of open source rival Linux operating system users in low numbers. But by Bill Gate’s own admission, times are changing. Startup Zimbra has already developed an impressive and full-featured substitute for Microsoft’s collaborative enterprise software. This software gives users all kinds of AJAX “mash-ups,” meaning that different AJAX applications with different features are mixed together making "Frankenstein-type" programs--only they work surprisingly well. For instance, mousing over an address in an e-mail received with Zimbra causes a small Google Maps map of the address to display next to the address. Mousing over a time or date brings up your calendar of that time. Zimbra has created a lot of buzz in the tech industry, but it doesn’t have the clout of Google. Yet for big incumbents, open source startups like Zimbra are now seen as a significant threat.

Bulgaria denied the existence of secret US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) jails on its soil, local media reported on Friday. Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev was quoted as saying there exist no foreign bases on the soil of Bulgaria, including the so-called CIA jails. The clarification came as a response to a Washington Post newspaper story on Wednesday, which said that the CIA set up a covert prison network spanning eight countries as part of the US-declared war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. "The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba," the Washington Post said, citing current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. The US administration however has declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the story. Meanwhile, a European Commission spokesman said on Friday that the European Union (EU) would look into the report and try to find out the truth on a technical basis. The spokesman stressed that if the so-called facilities were found in Bulgaria or Romania -- EU candidates -- their accession process could be delayed, for such illegal facilities would be against standards set for EU membership. So far, Romania, Poland, Hungry, Lithuania and Thailand have also denied the presence of secret CIA prisons on their territory.

Because taxes distort economic decisions and lead to inefficient use of resources, they cause reductions in economic welfare that exceed the amount of tax collected. These costs above and beyond the revenues collected are called the “excess burden” of the tax system. Higher marginal tax rates lead to more distortion in behavior, and therefore to greater excess burden. In addition, the more responsive taxpayers are to higher marginal tax rates, the greater the excess burden will be. A recent study estimated that the excess burden associated with increasing the individual income tax by one dollar is 30 to 50 cents. In other words, the total burden of collecting $1.00 in additional income taxes is between $1.30 and $1.50, not counting compliance costs.

Recently I was musing on the fact that there were probably lots of people in rich countries who would like to lend small amounts of money to businesses in poor countries, and lots of businesses in poor countries who would like them to too. If only there was some way of connecting one to the other! Fortunately somebody was way ahead of me. They’re called Kiva, and they let people loan money in increments of $25 to businesses in Africa that need a few hundred dollars to, say, buy a truck or some new equipment. You get your money back, but without interest, so you could call it charitable lending. There’s always the chance that the business won’t work out and you don’t get anything back, in which case it’s just charity, but Kiva’s viability rests on that not happening very much. I’ve just lent 50 bucks to Lweny Gichandi Fish, so we’ll see how that goes.

The claims embedded within that idea of “cultural imperialism” are far less obviously true than most of those (including UNESCO delegates) who reference the concept think. It’s not at all clear that increasing globalization of the circulation or dissemination of popular culture produces homogeneity or for that matter, Americanization. The same mechanisms that allow American television to travel to local markets around the world facilitate the movement of popular music throughout the African diaspora, from Africa to the Americas and back again, and from the diaspora out to other national cultures. You can find something rather like hip-hop everywhere you care to look these days, but when it gets to a new place, it’s never the same. It doesn’t homogenize: it re-localizes.

What the UNESCO convention is really about is not cultural imperialism, or homogeneity. It’s about whether the state or the market is the patron and source of popular culture. Many of the backers of the UNESCO convention in the developed world are speaking from a perspective in which it is taken for granted that the nation-state has a stake in promoting a sense of national identity and language usage through underwriting cultural work, and equally taken for granted that the role of the state is to extensively support but also control the arts. The two propositions walk side by side: promote national culture while also censoring, manipulating or controlling it. At its best, this tends to float a lot of mediocre crap into the public sphere that local publics have at best tepid loyalty to, hence the desperate desire to somehow fend off or keep out cultural work from market sources (American and otherwise) that entertains or engages those audiences to a far greater degree. At its worst, it allows the extensive bureaucratic management of cultural production.

Which is of course the source of the appeal of the new convention to many developing nations: it legitimizes their autocratic impulses in the domain of global culture, it authorizes regimes of control designed to keep threatening or subversive ideas out and stifle such ideas that might emerge from local contexts.

In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone’s "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

You could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it. "Well, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the economy. I’m certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system; does that mean that I shouldn’t try to make it a better society?" OK, let’s look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a share portfolio? He looks cross. "You’d have to ask my wife about that. I’m sure she does. I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t. Would it help people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It’s only rich, privileged westerners - who are well educated and therefore deeply irrational - in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit peasants in southern Colombia, they don’t ask me these questions." I suggest that people don’t like being told off about their lives by someone they consider a hypocrite. "There’s no element of hypocrisy." He suddenly smiles at me, benign again, and we end it there.

Taxing capital income does two things: (i) it taxes thrift--moving wealth and purchasing power forward in time--and thus causes us collectively to miss opportunities for productive investment; and (ii) it taxes luck--those who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and wound up with large piles of money. Looking forward in time at my great-great-great grandchildren, I don’t want their thrift taxed: I do want them to take advantage of all the opportunities for productive investment there are. But I do want their luck taxed: some of them will be lucky and some will not, and I will be happier if some of the fruits of the good luck of the some are redistributed to the others via the tax system.

Ik was tegen de oorlog in Irak, maar als mensen dan zeggen dat je anti-Amerikaans bent kan ik altijd boos worden. Amerika is een fantastisch land! Het land waar we als jongeren al naar opkeken. Het land van Dylan en andere helden. Ik was de hele afgelopen week in Amerika, heb er veel vrienden, die trouwens allemaal tegen Bush en tegen die oorlog zijn, en ik laat me door niemand zeggen dat ik anti-Amerikaans ben.

The real benefit of growth, Friedman argues, is that it encourages a wide range of social virtues, including dedication to democracy, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, and commitment to fairness. By contrast, he writes, "when living standards stagnate or decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress."

But in this book Friedman has scored a dead-center hit on the critical question: Why do we value economic growth? The usual argument is that a bigger GDP -- more goods and services -- leads to happier, more satisfied citizens. But that apparently simple proposition turns out to be far more complicated. As Friedman notes, there is plenty of evidence that people judge their well-being by comparing themselves to others. As the average income in a country goes up, so do expectations. As a result, the level of GDP per person in a country, taken alone, doesn’t necessarily say much about the level of happiness.

The lack of a direct link between personal satisfaction and the level of GDP per person seems to undercut the purely economic arguments in favor of growth. After all, why should we undergo all the turmoil of technological change and economic restructuring if more gadgets and bigger homes aren’t going to make us happier in the end?

Friedman argues that economic growth has a key additional benefit: As long as people see their own income rising, they worry less about doing better than others. And that in turn creates a more favorable environment for political and social advances. To demonstrate this point, he draws on economic studies and historical examples, both American and global. In the 1700s, he points out, it became accepted that the rise of commercial and trading activity was a force for positive legal and institutional change. Adam Smith, for one, believed that moral progress went hand in hand with economic progress, as voluntary exchange replaced the use of force.

Friedman points to the the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. and the Nazis in Germany as examples of what can happen when growth vanishes. And he worries that "rising intolerance and incivility and the eroding generosity and openness...have been, in significant part, a consequence of the stagnation of American middle class living standards during much of the last quarter of the twentieth century."

Friedman is forthright about admitting that the New Deal doesn’t fit his argument. He says the hard times of the Great Depression brought forth a virtue: a generous public response. But the New Deal was "exceptional," says Friedman, arguing that rising incomes in general make people more willing to help others.

The link between economic growth and democracy also works on a global level. The movement toward civil liberties and open societies, says Friedman, has been most successful in countries with rising incomes: He predicts China will take this same path.

This is not a politically biased book -- you would have a hard time telling from it whether Friedman is a Republican or a Democrat. But it does provide a new framework and language for discussing economic growth, one that’s useful for economists, politicians, and business leaders alike. The goal is not simply more, but more moral.

The Athens Declaration underlined that the European Union is in crisis because of the neoliberal choices that "are made in Brussels and which are also the policies of national governments." It appeals for a "convergence of movements and leftist political forces fighting to reverse these priorities and the policies adopted up to this time." It also pledges to fight against unemployment, social exclusion and job insecurity and calls for an immediate reassessment of the EU budget and fiscal policies, stressing that the ECB should be at the service of employment and growth that targets the less development EU nations.

I live in a horrible world or protectionism, high taxes, useless regulation, CAP and rampant statism.

a little-known Social Security case in 2002 which may be instructive when it comes to comparing Alito to Scalia. In that case, Alito argued passionately with other members of the 3rd Circuit Appeals Court that a disabled woman, Pauline Thomas, should be granted benefits because she had been laid off from her job as an elevator operator and could not find a new job since the position of "elevator operator" had virtually disappeared from the economy. A lower court had ruled that a narrow and technical reading of the Social Security statute did not entitle Thomas to benefits. Alito called this result "absurd" and overrode the objections of several of his colleagues and convinced the full 3rd Circuit to overturn the lower court decision.

Now comes a book that brings together 24 journalists, scholars, writers, and politicians on the left. Collected under the editorship of Wellesley College sociologist Thomas Cushman, the book offers what he calls the "voices of a Third Force of liberal internationalism." They reject a status quo that allows tyrannies free rein, while grounding their support for intervention in human rights -- in idealism, not realism. The book provides intellectual ammunition for those on the left who still believe that toppling Saddam Hussein -- and staying the course for the democratization of Iraq despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction -- was and is the right thing to do. It will buttress embattled war supporters on the left who find themselves isolated and outshouted by the anti-warriors.

While criticizing the Bush administration’s poor handling of the post-war occupation, the writers nonetheless take on the issues that most often separate the anti-war left from the interventionist center. These include abandoning liberals’ historic solidarity with the oppressed; the left’s drift to a position of conservative realism on international affairs; the question of a just war versus an unjust peace; and the famously absent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Quite apart from the WMD issue, most of these writers argue from a liberal- humanitarian point of view that a tyranny as homicidal as Saddam’s -- with 300,000 murdered over 30 years -- should not be tolerated by the international community. Leaving Saddam in place in the name of preserving peace over war, writes Dissent magazine editor Mitchell Cohen, is to endorse an "unjust peace" -- the precise flip side of a just war -- that would only have led, in any case, to war at a later date. Likewise, Danish journalist Anders Jerichow notes that "the so-called peace in Iraq ... has rested on the toleration of a brutal dictatorship and bloody suppression ... peace, that is, for governments but certainly not for people."

British journalist and playwright Johann Hari devotes his entire essay to examining public opinion in Iraq in the months before and right after the invasion. The verdict was clear: Iraqis, while deathly afraid of war, nonetheless overwhelmingly wanted the invasion to proceed. "It is now beyond dispute that, on the day of the huge anti-war rallies around the world in February 2003, a majority of the Iraqis would have been marching in precisely the opposite direction if they had been free to do so." Hari was struck by "how marginal actual Iraqi people seemed to many people participating in the anti-war protests."

Throughout the book, the essayists decry the conformist rejectionism of their liberal friends, caught up as they are in what Cushman calls "the current tide of intellectual orthodoxy on the left in relation to the Iraq war." He adds: "What has been so striking from a sociological point of view is the resistance to even hearing the humanitarian case for the war." At least one of the writers, Dutch professor Mient Jan Faber, lost his post with the Interchurch Peace Council of the Netherlands because of his views.

Apropos the novelist Julian Barnes’s comment that the war wasn’t worth the loss of a single life, Norman Geras, a British political theorist, mordantly observes, "Not one, eh? So much for the victims of the rape rooms and the industrial shredders." But of course to admit otherwise would be to credit the Americans, and even the Bush administration, with moral insight and the capacity for good. How much more satisfying to revel in the administration’s richly deserved comeuppance!

Do we truly know what is required in order to defend democratic principles in the face of attack from those who consider themselves divinely inspired? (I am referring, of course, to Islamic fundamentalists, not the Bush administration.) "A Matter of Principle" includes a backbone-stiffening contribution from Adam Michnik, a political philosopher, a founder of Solidarity in Poland and an authentic hero of the democratic left. Asked whether it isn’t "paradoxical" to advocate violence as a means to advance human rights, Michnik snaps, "I can’t remember any text of mine where I said one should fight Hitler without violence; I’m not an idiot. . . . In the state of Saddam, the opposition could find a place only in cemeteries."

It’s even hard to imagine him doing what Mr. Greenspan did: throwing his prestige... behind... tax cuts.... Has President Bush been so damaged by scandals and public disapproval that he has no choice but to appoint qualified, principled people to important positions? O.K., seriously, many economists and investors feared that Mr. Bush would try to place a highly partisan figure in charge of the Fed. And ... there was widespread concern that Mr. Bush would try to select a John Snow type - a businessman whose only qualification is loyalty....

The Iranian population, on the other hand, is by all accounts much less hostile to Israel than any other in the Middle East. This has never had much effect on the hard-liners who control the unelective part of the government--the part with all the actual power. Since Ahmadinejad became President of Iran earlier this year, in a rather crudely manipulated election, the two parts of the Iranian government now speak with one voice.

It’s no surprise that progressives at the turn of the twentieth century supported minimum wages and restrictions on working hours and conditions. Isn’t this what it means to be a progressive? Indeed, but what is more surprising is why the progressives advocated these laws. A first clue is that many advocated labor legislation "for women and for women only."

Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.

Unlike today’s progressives, the originals understood that minimum wages for women would put women out of work - that was the point and the more unemployment of women the better!

Dear Professor Cole:

. . . You quoted today the Brattleboro Reformer’s account of my remarks last night to the Windham World Affairs Council. You noted a transcription error in my description of the sorry state of Iraqi military and said you would seek clarification. I am happy to provide it.

I described the Iraqi Army as consisting of nine Kurdish battalions, sixty Shiite battalions, and 45 Sunni Arab battalions. There is exactly one mixed battalion. The Kurdish battalions have no Arab officers, while there are a few Kurdish and Sunni Arab officers with Shiite battalions. Being a Kurdish or Shiite officer of the Sunni Arab battalions is risky, so there are not many at all. This is hardly the picture of a national institution. I also noted that up to half the nominal troop strength consists of ghost soldiers. As there is no direct deposit in Iraq, the battalion command can pocket the salaries of soldiers that don’t exist, so there is an incentive to maintain full strength on paper. More of this can be found in my October 6 article in the New York Review of Books, “Iraq’s Last Chance”, which also analyzes the new Constitution.

You also describe me as advocating the break up of Iraq. My position is slightly different. I argue that Iraq has already broken up, and that it will be much more costly—in terms of lives and money—to put it back together than to accept the new reality. One reason I like the new Constitution is that I believe it is realistic.

You argue that partition could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but you ignore the fact that holding Iraq together has already cost well more than 100,000 lives in the various Kurdistan wars.

I also think you draw the wrong lessons from the break-up of Yugoslavia, about which I have a certain experience.* The US and Europeans focused on trying to hold Yugoslavia together when there was no way to do so. Instead, US and European diplomacy should have focused on the issues that caused the war. The war was preventable; the break up was not.

I do not believe it is possible to keep people in a state they hate, and the Kurds clearly want out of Iraq. I do not think the break up of the rest of Iraq is inevitable, but it is possible.

Saddam murdered over 100,000 Kurds, used poison gas, and destroyed more than 4000 villages in Kurdistan as part of his effort to keep Iraq united. Mismanaged divorce can be costly, but so is an unwanted marriage. The human cost of holding Iraq together may be much higher than that of a negotiated separation.

All the best.

Peter Galbraith ’

Confounding conventional wisdom, a major new report reveals that all forms of political violence, except international terrorism, have declined worldwide since the early 1990s. Supported by five governments, published by Oxford University Press and released today, the Human Security Report is the most comprehensive annual survey of trends in warfare, genocide, and human rights abuses. The Report, which was produced by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, shows how, after nearly five decades of inexorable increase, the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly in the wake of the Cold War. It also reveals that wars are not only far less frequent today, but are also far less deadly.

1. David Cameron (probably the new leader of the Conservatives, IJ) thinks it a private matter whether he took cocaine before becoming an MP. But he does not, apparently, think charlie should be legalized.
2. The policemen who shot Harry Stanley (crime - possession of chair leg) will not be prosecuted. In the last 12 years, 30 people have been shot dead by the police. There have been no convinctions for manslaughter or murder.
3. The government is threatening benefit claimants with the slogan: "If you’re not completely honest, we’ll find out." This is the government that gave us Byers, Blunkett, Campbell and Mandelson.

Thought for the week: If the intelligent design crowd are right, why are we so badly designed? They could have at least included a cup-holder.

Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund, or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it. When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio he reverted to a "what else can I do" defense: "Should I live in a cabin in Montana?" he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in "green" or "socially responsible" enterprises. They just don’t yield the maximum available return.

Dear Google,

Your search engine is the primary way that people find their way to my website, and subsequently, my book.

I asked my publisher, Simon and Schuster, for my book to be included in Google Print. I was told they did not do that.

Lack of exposure is the primary reason that a book like mine would fail in the marketplace. I spend most of my day trying to get attention for my book. Not for the money, but because I believe that it is well written and funny. Very few authors will become rich writing books. We do it because we have something to say. If we wanted to be rich, we’d have invented a search engine!

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help. After all, it’s perfectly free to check out a book from the library. I have no problem with my book being indexed by your site. In fact, I wish it was!

Someone asked me recently, "Meghann, how can you say you don’t mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?"

I replied, "Well, it seems to be working for Jesus."

All my best,

Meghann Marco author, ’Field Guide to the Apocalypse’

The politically correct view is that critics of capitalism were good guys. This is why early critics of capitalism like historian/biographer Thomas Carlyle and novelist Charles Dickens are treated in textbooks as enlightened thinkers. George Mason University intellectual historian Levy reveals, however, how Carlyle defended slavery. Carlyle offered racial explanations for many problems, such as the persistence of poverty in Ireland (the Irish were like that). Carlyle thought that since blacks weren’t human, they could be legitimately exterminated. Levy notes that Carlyle’s vicious writings brought tears to the eyes of Hitler. Levy doesn’t spare Charles Dickens, who admired Carlyle (Hard Times was inscribed to Carlyle), and implicitly embraced Carlyle’s views about blacks and slavery. Levy goes on to talk about Karl Marx’s racism and how Friedrich Engels thought blacks were incapable of learning mathematics. Levy delights in pointing out that champions of capitalism opposed slavery. He discusses Adam Smith, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Stuart Mill and others. It was because of their ardent antislavery views that Carlyle denounced classical economics as the "dismal science." Levy’s solid scholarship illuminates the overlooked links between capitalism and emancipation.

The practice of poor countries selling their exports to rich countries got a bad name during the interwar period and was widely viewed as exploitation of these countries by imperial powers. The later view, looking at the Canadian and American experiences, was quite the contrary (North, 1966; and Kravis, 1970). Selling raw materials and other labor-intensive products to the rest of the world is a way to get developed countries to provide capital to the less developed countries and foster entrepreneurship. Thus, at the outbreak of World War I, foreign capital owned one-third of the bonds of American railroads (Ripley, 1915). One of the great discoveries of economic historians during the 1960s, which was confirmed in the 1980s and 1990s, was that the Hobsen-Hilferding-Lenin thesis that English coupon-clippers got rich from investments in poor countries such as India, and then withdrew large sums of annual earnings, was wrong. After the computer revolution it was possible to put the whole late-nineteenth-century portfolio of British overseas investments into machine-readable form (Simon, 1970; Davis and Huttenback, 1986; and Stone, 1999). It turned out that there was a strong correlation between a country’s per capita income and the share of the British overseas portfolio invested in it. The United States received the largest share, followed by Canada and Argentina (which at the turn of the twentieth century had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world). Of course, that discovery did not stop diehard critics of Western imperialism, who then denounced Britain for failing to have invested in underdeveloped nations.

the left-right dichotomy itself is misleading. Only the left is defined, even approximately. All those who oppose the left, for whatever reason, are lumped together as ‘the right’, however radically they may differ among themselves. Opponents of the left include monarchists and democrats, libertarians and fascists. They share no common assumptions or values. Therefore the dichotomy that lumps them together as ‘the right’ is a false dichotomy.

Europarlementslid Bart Staes van Groen! eist van Vlaams minister-president Yves Leterme (CD&V) en federaal Landbouwminister Sabine Laruelle (MR) openbaarheid van betoelaging. Staes wil weten wie er geld van Europa krijgt. Hij wil zo verhinderen dat subsidies niet bij de boeren, maar bij internationale concerns terechtkomen. België krijgt 1 miljard euro aan Europese landbouwsubsidies, waarvan er een kwart naar Vlaanderen gaan. In Nederland zijn de bedragen onlangs bekendgemaakt en daaruit blijkt dat biergigant Heineken 9 miljoen euro heeft gekregen en de cateringdienst van luchtvaartmaatschappij KLM 664.000 euro. De Europese landbouwsubsidies zijn onder meer bedoeld om de landbouwers een redelijk inkomen te geven en niet om de multinationals te subsidiëren, aldus Staes.

De regering verlaagt het inschrijvingsrecht voor startende bedrijven van 130 euro naar 70 euro. De 0,5% belasting op het startkapitaal van starters valt vanaf 1 januari 2006 ook weg. Zo wil de regering het starten van een bedrijf goedkoper maken. De voorbije twee jaar is het aantal startende ondernemingen met twintig procent gestegen en is het aantal faillissementen met vijf procent gestegen.

Hoelang nog zullen de werkgevers allochtone jongeren en ongeschoolde jongeren blijven discrimineren?

In unexpected calm, millions of Iraqis voted on Saturday in a referendum on a new constitution that is designed to reshape the country after Saddam Hussein but which many fear may tear it further apart. Insurgents fought gunbattles with Iraqi and U.S. forces in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, but throughout the capital and much of the rest of the country, voting appeared to go smoothly and securely, with polls set to close at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT). More than 15.5 million Iraqis were eligible to vote in the referendum, which asked them to say "Yes" or "No" to a new draft constitution proposed by parliament, a body dominated by Shi’ite Muslims and ethnic Kurds. Most Sunni Arabs shunned the ballot in January that elected the assembly. Many Sunnis were turning out this time, however. Sunni insurgents threatened to attack the vote, but while mortars landed near a polling station in Baghdad, and several roadside bombs went off around the city and elsewhere, there was much less violence than the U.S. military said might be possible.

A story from the Times News network published in the Economics Times of India suggests that the US and the EU have pledged to resolve outstanding differences about reducing agriculture subsides - the issue that is holding up the world trade talks - but are still laying down stiff conditions. They want developing countries, especially stronger wants such as India and Brazil, to share the burden.

After the fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s, the country experienced severe macroeconomic imbalances and negative output growth. These shocks took place just as the country’s youth population was reaching its peak after growing rapidly in the 1980s by about 3.8 percent a year. Large numbers of young cohorts were entering the labor force, putting labor markets under tremendous stress. Unemployment rose from 16 percent in 1980 to 24 percent in 1992, and for youth, unemployment reached close to 40 percent. The Algerian government was in the middle of implementing moderate political reforms. In 1992, the country was poised to initiate open parliamentary elections. The Islamists, buoyed by the political support of a frustrated young population, seized the day, and the government reacted by canceling the election results. The state’s reserved application of democratic reforms backfired, setting the spark to a conflict that has yet to come to an end

France on Thursday night called for an emergency meeting of European Union ministers to discuss growing concerns in Paris that Europe will concede too much ground in the Doha round of trade talks. The move is expected to force Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, to cancel his planned trip to Washington next week. Mr Mandelson told the Financial Times he was instead thinking of remaining in Europe to shore up support among EU member states to push the Doha round forward. France’s concerns, backed by 12 other member states, revolve around maintaining the EU’s farm tariffs and subsidies.

happiness hasn’t stopped increasing. According to the World Database of Happiness, directed by the leading Dutch researcher Ruut Veenhoven, satisfaction has increased in most Western countries where we have surveys since 1975. There are diminishing returns , but even at our standard of living people do get happier when societies grow richer. And the happiest places are the most individualist – North America , Northern Europe and Australasia . Another reason for this happiness is that a liberal and market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. If we get used to it we will get increasingly better at choosing to live and work in ways we like. And if you don’t think you get happier by hard work and mobility, just skip it. A survey showed that 48 percent of Americans had, in the last five years, reduced their working hours, declined promotion, lowered their material expectations or moved to a quieter place. Fast-food or slow-food, no logo or pro logo? In a liberal society, you decide. That is, as long as we are free to make the decisions ourselves. Those who use happiness studies to put forth an anti-market agenda would deny us that freedom. They would tell us how to live our lives, and therefore they would reduce our ability to make such decisions in the future. Despite Layard’s criticism against individualism and materialism even he admits that “we in the West are probably happier than any previous society”. Well, in that case, please, please, please, don’t undermine that society. happiness hasn’t stopped increasing. According to the World Database of Happiness, directed by the leading Dutch researcher Ruut Veenhoven, satisfaction has increased in most Western countries where we have surveys since 1975. There are diminishing returns , but even at our standard of living people do get happier when societies grow richer. And the happiest places are the most individualist – North America , Northern Europe and Australasia . Another reason for this happiness is that a liberal and market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. If we get used to it we will get increasingly better at choosing to live and work in ways we like. And if you don’t think you get happier by hard work and mobility, just skip it. A survey showed that 48 percent of Americans had, in the last five years, reduced their working hours, declined promotion, lowered their material expectations or moved to a quieter place. Fast-food or slow-food, no logo or pro logo? In a liberal society, you decide. That is, as long as we are free to make the decisions ourselves. Those who use happiness studies to put forth an anti-market agenda would deny us that freedom. They would tell us how to live our lives, and therefore they would reduce our ability to make such decisions in the future. Despite Layard’s criticism against individualism and materialism even he admits that “we in the West are probably happier than any previous society”. Well, in that case, please, please, please, don’t undermine that society.

A few weeks ago, the first story in the leading news shows on television was that there is a “growing environmental threat” in Europe . The problem was shipping, which is rapidly becoming the biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide in Europe . However, if you listened closely to the report, you understood that this was not because of growth of emissions from shipping – it did grow but very modestly – but because of a rapid reduction in emission from other sources. Total sulphur dioxide emissions in Europe (including shipping) have been reduced by about 60 percent in 15 years. So the real story was one about a dramatic improvement in environmental conditions – but shipping was now the thing we have to deal with, and so it was news.

In September the United Nations Development Program, UNDP, released its annual report on human development. The press statement talks about the places with growing problems and about the 18 countries that have lagged behind. The report summarises the worldwide situation with statements like ”the overall report card on progress makes for depressing reading” and ”the world is heading for a heavily sign-posted human development disaster”. But how has the poor countries developed as a whole? Hidden away in another place of the report, with much less dramatic wording, the UNDP concludes: ”Looking back over the past decade the long-run trend towards progress in human development has continued. On average, people born in a developing country today can anticipate being wealthier, healthier and better educated than their parent’s generation.” It goes on to say that the last 15 years in poor countries have seen less poverty, reduced infant mortality, better access to clean water, less illiteracy, fewer conflicts and more democracies. This is what they summarise as a “human development disaster”!

The film, produced by the Public Broadcasting Service, was about the fact that Wal-Mart buys most of its goods from China . This was portrayed as a disaster for America , and for almost an hour it interviewed workers and factory owners who lost their jobs and businesses because of cheap Chinese imports. 1-0 to the anti-globalists. It is true that an American manufacturing worker might lose his job because of this, but there are other effects that the film didn’t show. A Chinese worker gets a job, of course, and if he does he will spend his new income somehow, which means more jobs for export companies and/or Chinese companies. American consumers get cheaper prices, and when they do they can spend their extra purchasing power on new goods and services, and so an unemployed American can get a new job in a new sector. Chinese worker – export company –consumers – new sectors develop: Four good results, in other words 4-1 to the globalists and free-traders.

Controversial British playwright and campaigner Harold Pinter has won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature. Pinter, widely regarded as the UK’s greatest living playwright, is well-known for his left-wing political views. A critic of US and UK foreign policy, he has voiced opposition on a number of issues including the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it ’bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’," he said in a speech in March.

There is a common theme (...). It’s that Thatcher was a class warrior, not an economic libertarian. Where market reforms benefited the rich (exchange controls) or bribed floating voters (council house sales), she supported them. Where market reforms could have helped the poor (school vouchers, macro markets), she did nothing. And there remains the suspicion that the 1980-81 recession was welcomed as a means of destroying the traditional working class. And this is where her influence was wholly pernicious. She has given a generation of non-economists the impression that support for free markets is equivalent to support for the vested interests of the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The European Union has moved to match a US offer to cut controversial agricultural subsidies and tariffs. In an effort to revive stalled World Trade Organization (WTO) talks, US Trade Representative Rob Portman said the US would cut farm subsidies by 60%. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson responded by indicating that the EU was willing to at least halve it highest tariffs on farm imports.

There are competing interpretations of Smith on just about everything, including self interest and selfishness. Though mine may still be a minority view of the earthquake passage, I’d like to revisit it. First, here is an example of an interpretation that runs counter to mine. In The Blank State, Steven Pinker quotes the passage from TMS, ending with the famous sentence: "If he were to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren." (Pinker, p. 288). Pinker concludes that Smith’s view is one in which our "moral sentiments" "overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness." Nothing to do about it; we’re hard-wired to be selfish and we keep our fingers. If Smith had stopped there, this would all be fine. But he doesn’t. In fact, Smith goes on to make the opposite case. While our first impulses are "sordid and selfish", we’re compelled to overcome our initial sentiments, our high opinion of ourselves and disregard for others, and to sacrifice our interests to theirs. We’re led, not by sentiment or benevolence but by "reason, principle, conscience", to give up the finger.

reforms. Some studies suggest that product market reforms should come first as, by lowering barriers to entry and fostering competition, they tend to increase real wages and reduce unemployment. Higher real wages would buy goodwill from unions and ease implementation of labor market reforms. Thus, adequately sequencing product and labor market reforms can make some reforms more politically acceptable. This paper provides empirical evidence for a direct link between the effectiveness of labor market reforms and the degree of product market competition, which reinforces the political economy message: product market reforms increase the economic benefits of labor market reforms, thus making them more acceptable for workers.

what al-Qaida apparently hates most about “the west” are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment. These values stand in counterpoint to the tyrannical social code idealised by al-Qaida and by related political groupings such as Afghanistan’s Taliban.

In that sense, “the west” denotes less a geographical space than a mindset: a cultural presence or a sphere of anti-absolutist ideas that the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper termed the “open society.” In his day, when fascists and Stalinists held vast parts of the globe, the concept of “the west” prevailed over a smaller territory than today. But with the rise of bin Ladenism, the prevalence of this concept again is shrinking.

It is because bin Ladenism is waging war against the liberal ideal that much of the activist left’s response to 11 September 2001 and the London attacks is woefully, catastrophically inadequate. For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women’s rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.

President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq – and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals. In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.’”

People always resist change, yet sustained growth relies on a continuous shift in resources to more efficient use. In 1820, for example, 70% of American workers were in agriculture; today 2% are. If all those workers had remained tilling the land, America would now be a lot poorer.

The greater part of those proprietors seldom pretend to understand anything of the business of the company, and…give themselves no trouble about it, but receive contentedly such half-yearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to make to them. This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies, who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private copartnery. Such companies, therefore, commonly draw to themselves much greater stocks than any private copartnery can boast of.

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

In the public’s mind, the storm was only the first of two disasters; government’s poor performance was the second. The public took note that Wal-Mart responded in hours while Washington seemed to take days, and that insurance adjusters seemed to arrive before the National Guard. In a September poll by Zogby International, 86 percent of the public rated private charities’ response to the hurricane as good or excellent; only a third said the same of the government.

The author is an ardent exponent of the virtues of free trade. Adam Smith, he notes, published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, America’s founding year. An Empire of Wealth is a bravura account of the energy and creativity that led the pioneers to cut a swathe across the prairies, navvies to build the Erie canal in record time, opening the mid-west to trade and industry, and prospectors lured by gold to populate California.

We don’t learn much about their suffering, although there was plenty. When I am in my most combative defend-America mode, I feel inclined to say you don’t often hear Americans complain about the life they and their forefathers left behind in old Europe, which was usually grimmer. But hurricane Katrina was a reminder that you can’t write the poor out of the picture permanently and that not all Americans arrived voluntarily.

Gordon is less interested in the condition of the masses than the achievements of the innovators, who became the great tycoons and bankers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Carnegie was the son of an unemployed handloom weaver from Scotland who worked his way up from bobbin boy to steel magnate. On a visit to Sheffield, he grasped the importance of the newly-invented Bessemer converter and by the end of the 19th century his company was outproducing the entire British steel industry.

Carnegie was not the only industrialist to profit from British inventions, which were frequently spied on and imitated. In fact Gordon ascribes much of America’s success from the arrival of the Pilgrim fathers onwards to the influence of Britain - a useful corrective to the view that Americans built something out of nothing in the wilderness.

The great tycoons, Gordon argues, were nonetheless heroic. Often derided as robber barons, many disbursed their wealth to charitable and educational foundations, whose effects are still felt. I’ve just been watching the BBC World Service on American public television, which is paid for out of the small change of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Carnegie, who established 2,500 free libraries, thought it shameful for rich men to die wealthy. Even the worst barons usually ended up lowering the prices of goods, bringing consumer choice to the poorest homes.

In the south, where aristocrats sponsored the first settlements, a landowning elite held sway over an impoverished population. The result was a pattern of development much more like the third world with a vicious twist: slavery. When its agricultural economy encountered the industrial revolution there was a ’terrible synergy’ť. The invention of the cotton gin made the slaves more productive and their owners more determined to cling on to their labour.

The least free part of America was also the poorest: not a coincidence. Gordon argues that the United States would be more like Argentina - another large, abundant country - had it been colonized by the Spanish. It left me wondering about the peculiar legacy of the French influence on the elegantly decayed and venal city of la nouvelle-Orleans. Once New Orleans lost its trading prosperity (the Erie canal stripped it of its position as the mid-west’s premier port), it seems clear that the city went on to suffer from too little capitalism, rather than too much.

Samuel Johnson remains firmly established as a archetypal Tory figure of the Right. Yet Adam Smith, who would equally have been seen as left-wing, if the term had been in use in the 1770s, is now a more important influence on conservative thought than Samuel Johnson himself.

The Wealth of Nations is a subtle and well-considered book, nothing like the crude laissez-faire tract it is imagined to be by bishops and other people who have never read it. Yet it is not only the foundation of classical liberal economics, but of modern conservatism. So far as I know, Adam Smith has not yet been mentioned by name in the current Conservative leadership contest, but David Davis has introduced an argument that is clearly derived from Smith’s thought.

Mr Davis argues that free-market systems can deliver better social services than state bureaucracies. Free-market systems are more productive and respond better to the needs of customers. Whether one is dealing with hospitals or schools, an element of choice creates competitive pressures that can be expected to improve outcomes. Market systems do not provide less welfare than state socialist systems, but more and better welfare at lower cost, and therefore at lower taxes. I think this argument is correct, but in modern terms it is unquestionably regarded as right-wing. Why was it left-wing in the 18th century and why has it become right-wing now?

It is not just Adam Smith or economic theory that have moved from left to right. Apart from Gordon Brown, most of us who have been influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment are now perceived as holding right-of-centre views on liberty itself. Even the American Declaration of Independence is now quoted far more often by conservatives than by socialists.

In 1786, three years before the French Revolution, another hero of mine, John Millar, the Glasgow professor of law, a friend both of Hume and Smith, dedicated his Historical View of the English Government to the radical Whig leader Charles James Fox.

Millar’s view is the classic statement of that liberal view of English history that has become the conservative view: “The British government is the only one in the annals of mankind that has aimed at the diffusion of liberty through a multitude of people, spread over a wide extent of territory.” There is still truth in that, even after the end of Empire. Yet nowadays the whole trend of government is moving in the opposite direction.

In a strange way, 200 years of history has moved the political ideal of liberty decisively across the spectrum from the Centre Left to the Centre Right. At least that gives people such as myself, who put liberty first, in the satisfactory position of being progressive thinkers, if only in 18th-century terms.

Sierra Leone is the world’s second poorest country, after Niger. Only 28 per cent of Sierra Leone’s population has access to safe water and sanitation. Yet it is next in line for the UK Government’s perilous water privatisation package. The system is in urgent need of reform and investment. But, rather than assess a number of reform options, the UK Government is targeting Sierra Leone for a water privatisation contract.

The principle of comparative advantage teaches us that two traders don’t compete for shares of a fixed pie -- their trade enlarges the pie. Likewise, trading nations don’t compete for shares of a fixed world pie -- they trade, and thereby enlarge the world pie. Even the country with the least absolute advantage (poorest at turning inputs into outputs) has a comparative advantage (low opportunity cost in foregone outputs) in producing something, and thus can successfully export that something (can “compete” in some world markets). Even the richest country can’t successfully export everything (cannot "compete" in some world markets). Nonetheless the World Economic Forum (the folks who annually hold a confab for movers and shakers in Davos, Switzerland) has released a ranking of the overall “competitiveness” of 117 of the world’s economies. (...)(I)t ranks how well a country’s economic policies and institutions match the set of policies and institutions desired by the World Economic Forum. Which is all very interesting – but it isn’t really a measure of competitiveness. The notion of overall competitiveness is simply nonsense. Finland, which was ranked first, can’t compete in producing bananas or wine.

Conspiracists have touted the fact that John Kennedy approved a 1,000 man troop withdrawal from Vietnam, and further that plans were in place at the time of his death to end U.S. involvement by the end of 1965. Thus his death supposedly brought on a radical change of policy that resulted in a half-million American troops in Vietnam, and a war that did not end for another decade. Sometimes Kennedy’s supposed dovishness is claimed to have been secret. Loyal aide Kenny O’Donnell, for example, reported that JFK (in O’Donnell’s words) ". . . had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of uppopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam" (Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston, 1972, p. 13). Letting Vietnam fall to the Communists before then would, supposedly, have had unfortunate political consequences. This seems an odd argument from Kennedy’s friends and supporters, since it implies he was willing to squander many lives to avoid the political consequences of withdrawal, and that his hawkish rhetoric was intentionally misleading. Given that all of Kennedy’s key advisors remained in Washington and served the Johnson Administration, Kennedy has to be seen as rather the lone dove — a man with more restraint and better judgement than the advisors who surrounded him. But in fact neither the "1,000 man withdrawal" nor the intention to be out of Vietnam by 1965 were secret Kennedy plans, nor did they pit Kennedy against his advisors. Both were announced in a White House statement on October 2, 1963. But there was a terribly important proviso attached: the South Vietnamese were expected to be able to defend themselves against Communist agression.