Mon - April 23, 2007

Asia Times Online


The Asia Time Online from Hong Kong has some excellent articles about the war in Iraq and world politics. The radical journalist Pepe Escobar is one of my favourites. He even looks like a radical journalist should look like.


Part Che, part Peter Fonda. Or how about the film "If.." by Lindsay Anderson.
In the latest issue you can read Pepe on how the US is borrowing from the Israeli playbook by building walls of Apartheid in Baghdad; Chan Akya compares the killings at Virginia Tech and the sex scandal at the world bank in a way the mainstream US press would not; and Leo Hadar from the Cato Institute looks at the long-standing rivalry between the "political man" and the "economic man". A key passage is:
"Nationalism and imperialism, two political forces that are so inimical to the values of classical liberalism, the preferred ideology of the Economic Man, seemed now to be the driving forces propelling American foreign policy, helping centralize more power in the hands of the imperial presidency and the national security state - following a path set by the American Civil War, the two World Wars and the Cold War in the last century, and producing countervailing anti-American forces around the world, that have served as a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Hey, they all out there hate us anyhow; so we need to isolate, punish and bomb these guys, and show them who the real boss here is." "

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Tue - February 14, 2006

The voice of moderate Islam


An interview with Tariq Ramadan , a Swiss academic who was denied entry to the US to teach at Notre Dame University in Indiana, voices the moderate and reasonable Mulsim position. He describes a civil war going on in the Muslim world for the hearts and minds of ordinary believers. The war in Iraq only pushes the radical and irrational Islamists to the fore. Cartoons are only a trigger for a deeper resentment about the war and west's treatment of the Islamic world over the past 100 years.

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Sun - February 12, 2006

The French riots in the banlieues


http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/immigration_3252.jsp">origins of the recent riots in the banlieues. He concludes that the problem is one of a "blocked escalator" which prevents upward mobility for many youths. This is an economic problem rather than a racial problem:
"Brouard & Tiberj – whose report on the wider issue of immigration and French politics is accessible here (pdf format) – portray a country very different from the image given of a navel-gazing, soul-searching people worried about anything coming from abroad. Indeed, France probably has the largest immigrant population of any European nation. In 1999, 23% (13.5 million out of 59 million) of the population were of immigrant origin – 4.3 million were migrants themselves, 5.5 million were children of immigrants, and 3.6 million were grandchildren. Of these, 22% were connected to north Africa, 5% to sub-Saharan Africa, and 53% to other European countries (mostly Italian, Spaniards, Portuguese and Poles, who also took decades to integrate). To understand the complexity of this situation, a reader might try to imagine what such percentages could mean for his or her own society."

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Sat - February 4, 2006

BBC World Service poll of most positively influential countries - Russia, US, and Iran last


The BBC World Service commissioned a poll of 40,000 people around the world to rank other countries according to their positive and negative influences on world affairs. The detailed results are interesting and show the rising "soft power" of Indian and China. A summary is below, showing the parlous state of world opinion of the US:

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Thu - April 7, 2005

The Culture of Life


Michael Blanding has a "top ten" of what he calls the culture of life. There are some good things here such as stopping the Iraq war, ending prisoner "abuse" (torture), encouraging the use of contraception in countries devastated by AIDs; but also some nonsense such as state-funded health care and sate-funded research into "alternative" energy sources. So I thought I might list my own top ten measures which I think would most promote "the culture of life": [more]

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Sat - March 26, 2005

Cultural vandalism in Iraq: Part II


Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, brings to our attention a report released in January by the British Museum and written by Dr. John Curtis – one of the world's leading archeologists – which documents the destruction of a major archeological site by Kellog, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which was contracted to build a military base, cynically called "Camp Babylon". Contractor's bulldozers apparently "turned over" relics of ancient Babylon dating back 2,000-3,000 years. This is on top of the cultural vandalism Part I which took place when US soldiers allowed parties unknown to loot the Iraqi Museum in the wake of the initial occupation of Baghdad. They were undermanned because army details were busy defending the Ministry of Oil. We know that all army camps have their camp followers of whores and contractors and mercenaries, but this gives a new meaning to the phrase "the whores of Babylon".

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Fri - March 25, 2005

The New Mercantilism


Peter F. Drucker argues that the German 19thC mercantilists Friedrich List and Prince Otto von Bismarck have won the war of ideas over the free trader Adam Smith. Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) made a series of devastating arguments against the policy of mercantilism and it was his followers in the 19thC who succeeded in introducing in Britain and her colonies the closest approximation to the ideal of free trade the world had ever seen. Smith's followers in France came a close second. Under the influence of Hamilton and his followers the U.S. has always leaned towards protectionism and mercantilism, notwithstanding official protestations to the contrary. The ideal of Hamilton in the US and List in Germany was to create vast "national" blocks of territory (the expanded US and Germany which came about through wars in the 1860s) within which there would be nearly free trade and outside of which would be heavy protection and mercantilism. Drucker convincingly argues that the world is moving towards the Listian-Bismarckian model with vast national trade blocks like NAFTA, Euroland, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, India, and China, with semi-free trade within and tightly managed, mercantilist trade outside.

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