by Laila Lalami
 
 
Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, there’s been much talk in the literary community about the state of the novel. Some, like Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul, simply declared it dead, incapable of addressing our new concerns in the age of terrorism. Others, like critic Jason Cowley, argued that it was as vital now, “in this time of profound political crisis,” as it has ever been. Still others spoke of ways in which novelists could help us make sense of a “new reality.” When Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published earlier this year, it was greeted with great fanfare as the first American novel to deal with this new reality. A few weeks later, Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days was released. It’s a triptych of a novel and it devotes a full section to a twenty-first century forensic psychologist who identifies potential terrorists. No doubt other works of fiction that similarly engage this altered country will follow.
So there is a prevailing sense that there are two kinds of fiction, written before and after 9/11. Four years after the terrorist attacks, we are awakening to a new kind of tragedy: Hurricane Katrina, which so devastated the city of New Orleans. And while the reaction to the attacks was one of unity, both in horror at the act and in sorrow for the victims, Katrina gave rise to surprising reactions. The Bush Administration’s ineffectual response to the disaster is certainly one of them, but the other, more shocking response was the chorus of people who asked of the thousands stranded in New Orleans’ Convention Center: “Why didn’t they leave?” To these armchair inquisitors, it seemed to come as news that there are people in America who do not own cars or cannot afford a tank of gas on the 28th of the month; that a quarter of New Orleans’ residents, and half of its children, live below the poverty line; and that, left with no other choices, the poor had to do as they were told — wait for help.

The reasons for this blame-the-victim mentality are no doubt varied, but among them one must surely acknowledge that American culture has become obsessed with the rich. Tabloids hound celebrity debutantes and teenyboppers as they shop for clothes on Rodeo Drive or Park Avenue. Radio commentators wonder whether a millionaire baseball player will take a competing team’s offer or show loyalty to his fans by staying. Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are gossip blogs that closely track the love life of leading actors, the wives they left, and the girlfriends they’re currently courting. MTV has a new show solely devoted to spoiled teenagers throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars on their “sweet sixteen” parties. (And, Lord help me, why do I even know about this?)

Our government — President, Vice President, House Majority and Minority leaders, and a great many Senators and Representatives — is made up of rich people. Unsurprisingly, one of the Bush administration’s biggest concerns appears to be the repeal of the estate tax, a levy that affects only 1.2% of the richest Americans. The 12% of Americans who live below the poverty line, however, are not so high on the agenda. They can’t afford the right lobbyists.

For those who are not rich, the media offer the option of focusing on becoming rich. Reality TV gives contestants the chance to become millionaires by answering trivia questions, singing songs, dating someone, doing standup, losing weight, or performing acts of increasingly difficult or humiliating physical prowess. Lulled by dreams of fat bank accounts and thirty-foot yachts, the country is falling asleep.

All the while, poverty remains unspoken. That is, until something as horrific as Hurricane Katrina makes it news. But poverty is more than just news — it’s a fact of life. Of the seventeen leading industrial nations, the United States has the largest percentage of its population in poverty. Even more troubling is the fact that the number of poor people in America has risen steadily for the last four years.

Like terror, poverty is a global phenomenon. According to the United Nations, one out of every six human beings lives on less than a dollar per day. Nearly half the world’s population lacks basic sanitation, and malnutrition remains a leading cause of death for six million children every year. In Morocco, where I was born and raised, poverty affects 20% of the population. Unemployment is very high and it disproportionately affects the young, regardless of education level. It is an all too common experience in cities like Casablanca or Rabat or Marrakech to walk down the street and see cafés packed with jobless university graduates. The solution? Increasingly it seems to be immigration. A favorite joke among school kids in Morocco is this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “An immigrant.” Yet for every immigrant, legal or illegal, who makes it, a hundred others stay home, making do with whatever they have.

There can be no doubt that terrorism is a threat to Americans as well as to millions around the world. But, as Hurricane Katrina has shown, poverty is as much, if not a greater threat. And yet, despite the increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots that affects the entire world, where is the talk of the state of fiction in the age of poverty? Where are the novels that address class divides? Why aren’t people wondering whether fiction can truly reflect a reality where the richest monopolize media attention while the poorest are seen only in times of crises?

Poverty has receded from the list of popular themes of the American novel. No longer do we have a John Steinbeck, a Richard Wright, a Theodore Dreiser, or a Zora Neale Hurston writing about the working poor. Who today would write that “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage”? It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the last decade, American fiction has been fixated on the middle and upper classes. The suburban novel dramatized their love affairs, their existential crises, and their boredom with a life of carpools. (The Ice Storm, Little Children.) The chick-lit novel enjoyed tremendous popularity by featuring women who worry about their weight, their shoes, and dating the right man. (The Devil Wears Prada, Bergdorf Blondes.) The campus novel brought us academics’ anxieties over racial discrimination or tenure or old age. (The Human Stain, Wonder Boys.) Meanwhile, the poor were stuck with silent or supporting roles. Something very tangible happened to American protagonists in the last ten years. Unlike a great many of their fellow countrymen, they stopped worrying about making rent.

I should make it clear that I do not mean to disparage any of these novels, which, for the most part, are fine works of literature. Nor am I suggesting that novels should be turned into political tracts. No one is interested in reading books that are merely didactic pieces of fiction. Rather, I’m simply curious about the kinds of characters novelists use to populate their novels and the kinds of dilemmas with which they are faced, and I wonder why there has been such a shift in fiction over the last decade.

Maybe publishers are so busy churning out biographies and children’s books “written” by celebrities that they have no time for books that address as unpopular a subject as the poor. Or maybe, just as America has undoubtedly changed over the last decade, so have its writers. The much-maligned MFA programs, which graduate many of this country’s writers, can cost as much as $70,000 for a two-year course of study. One wonders how many of the poor can afford to spend that kind of money in writing school. Or maybe the trouble is that America sees itself as a classless society. We enjoy being able to shoot off an email to the President, we like seeing rich people walk around in dirty cutoff jeans, we love seeing millionaires struggling to lose weight. To paraphrase a popular tabloid, we have come to believe that “the rich, they’re just like us!” And yet, with so many people living in poverty, this simply isn’t the case.

This isn’t to say that one can’t find contemporary American novels that openly dramatize the lives of the poor. Writers of color, in particular, have created enduring characters who also happen to live in poverty. (The works of Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, and others are some examples.) But, despite these successes, poverty has curiously disappeared from the literary conversation. Now, after Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the time has come to engage it again.
 
http://www.powells.com/essays/lalami.html

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco.  She earned her B.A. in English from Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, her M.A. from University College, London, and her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern California.  Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship for 2007.  Her debut book of fiction, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published by Algonquin in October 2005.  She is also the founder and editor of Moorishgirl.com, a blog about books and culture

Cairo, May 23, 2009

On the occasion of the 19th anniversary of the Yemen Unity Day, Egyptian human rights organizations urged Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to order the Ministry of Information to stop the siege imposed on Yemeni newspapers and remove the ban on Yemeni blocked websites.

It is to be noted that because of the coverage carried out by a number of newspapers on the treatment of the government forces with the demonstrators in the south; the Yemeni Minister of Information issued a decision to ban publication of several independent newspapers (al-Ayam- al-Share'e – al-Watani – al-Mustaqela – al-Diyar – al-Nida'a – al-Masdar), on the grounds of publishing information "prejudicial to national unity", in this context, the Yemeni authorities banned (Change Net) news website on May 18, 2009.

The Yemeni government, in conjunction with the issuance of this arbitrary decision, has inaugurated a special court for media, which raises concern about the possibility of the government to impose further restrictions on press freedom and ban more newspapers; in the light of the recent decisions, the signatory organizations are afraid of using this court to continue repressive practices towards press freedom and contrary to all international conventions that guarantee freedom of expression.

Noting with alarm the drastic impact of confiscating newspapers and Yemeni news websites, under the social and security conditions prevailing in the country, the signatory organizations confirm that restricting freedom of expression and information and shackling the ability of journalists to gain access to areas of conflict, are not the appropriate methods to overcome the crises.

Expressing their full solidarity with the rights of Yemeni journalists to exercise their profession in an environment that protects the right of expression; signatory organization call on the Yemeni President to abolish the restrictions issued by the Ministry of Information and to urge it to give priority to international standards of press freedom, and to breathe new life into journalism in Yemen.

Signatories on this statement:
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information
Egyptian Child's Rights Centre
The Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid
The Civil Observatory Society for Human Rights
The association of freedom of thought and expression
The Awn Society for Human Rights
The Egyptian Center for Development and Human Rights
Hemaia Center for Protecting Human Rights Defenders
Journalists Without Rights
Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies
The Arab Organization for Supporting the Civil Society and Human Rights
The Dialogue Society for Development and Human Rights
Hoquqi Association for the Rights of the Disabled
The National Center for Human Rights
The Women's Group for Human Rights
Carmel Association for Digital Media
Unity Center for Development and Human Rights
Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence
The Egyptian Center for Human Rights
Habi Centre for Environmental Rights
The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists
Shomoo for Human Rights.

http://www.anhri.net/en/reports/2009/pr0523.shtml

Egypt FM: Obama’s Speech an Opportunity to Tell Muslims “We are Not Your Enemy”

by Saadi Yousef 

God save America
My home sweet home!

The French general who raised his tricolour
Over Nugrat al-Salman where I was a prisoner thirty years ago…
In the middle of that U-turn
That split the back of the Iraqi army,
The general who loved St Emilion wines
Called Nugrat al-Salman a fort…
Of the surface of the earth, generals know only two dimensions:
Whatever rises is a fort
Whatever spreads is a battlefield.
How ignorant the general was!
But Liberation was better versed in topography.
The Iraqi boy who conquered her front page
Sat carbonised behind a steering wheel
On the Kuwait–Safwan highway
While television cameras
(The booty of the defeated and their identity)
Were safe in the truck like a storefront
On Rivoli Street.
The neutron bomb is highly intelligent,
It distinguishes between
An “I” and an “Identity”.

God save America
My home sweet home!

(Blues)
How long must I walk to Sacramento
How long will I walk to reach my home
How long will I walk to reach my girl
How long must I walk to Sacramento
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream
Two days, two days, two days
Honey, how can I ride?
I know this stream
But, O but, O but, for two days
No boat has sailed this stream

La L La La L La
La L La La L La
A stranger gets scared
Don’t fear dear horse
Don’t fear the wolves of the wild
Don’t fear for the land is my land
La L La La L La
La L La La L La
A stranger gets scared

God save America
My home sweet home!

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
And John Silver’s parrot and the terraces of New Orleans
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American. Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age!
I need neither oil, nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the donkey.
Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge.
I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.
I need the village not New York.
Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth?
Why did you come all the way to distant Basra where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?
Pigs do not forage here. I only have these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies.
Leave me alone soldier.
Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear.
Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes.
Take your roaring iron birds and your Tomahawk missiles. I am not your foe.
I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies.
Leave me to my curse.
I do not need your day of doom.

God save America
My home sweet home!

America
Let us exchange your gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
And give us potatoes.
Take James Bond’s golden pistol
And give us Marilyn Monroe’s giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
And give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
And give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
And give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
And give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
And give us the stars.

Take the Afghani Mujahideen’s beard
And give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussain
And give us Abraham Lincoln
Or give us no one.

Now as I look across the balcony
Across the summer sky, the summery summer
Damascus spins, dizzied among television aerials
Then it sinks, deeply, in the stories of the forts
and towers
and the arabesques of ivory
and sinks, deeply, from cornerstones of faith
then disappears from the balcony.

And now
I remember trees:
The date palm of our mosque in Basra, at the end of Basra
The bird’s beak
And a child’s secret
A summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it. I become it, when it falls black without fronds
When a dam fell hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry
When it rumbled, butchered with an axe…
To fill the stream with leaves
And birds
And angels
And green blood.
I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks,
The students were leading the workers’ parade…

The trees die
Pummelled
Dizzied,
Not standing
The trees die.

God save America
My home sweet home!

We are not hostages, America
And your soldiers are not God’s soldiers…
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods
The gods of bulls
The gods of fires
The gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song…
We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor
Who emerges out of the farmers’ ribs
Hungry
And bright
And raises heads up high…
America, we are the dead
Let your soldiers come
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him
We are the drowned ones, dear lady

We are the drowned
Let the water come

 ______________________

  Biographies

The Poet’s

Born in Iraq in 1934, Saadi Yousef holds a conspicuous stance among the great poets in the Arab world. He has been writing poetry since the age of seventeen. He was educated in Basra and Baghdad, and worked in teaching and journalism. After his experience as a political prisoner in Iraq, he has spent most of his life in exile working as a literary journalist throughout North Africa and the Middle East. In 1979, he left his country for a second time and has lived in Syria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Yemen, France, Jordan, and Algeria. Now the poet has settled down in London.
Yousef has published more than 30 collections of poetry, a volume of short stories, two novels, some essays, and four volumes of his collected works and has received several literary awards. He has translated major international poets from English into Arabic, including Walt Whitman, C P Cavafy, Yannos Ritsos, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasco Popa and Ungaretti, also novels by Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Nourridine Farah, George Orwell, David Maalouf and V S Naipaul.
Saadi Yousef's poems have been translated into several languages and appeared in numerous journals, including: Banipal (London), Literary Review, River City, Agni Online, Connecticut Review, Poetry International, Indiana Review, Third Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Spoon River, Chattahoochee Review, Jusoor, Commonweal, and in the anthology Modern Arabic Poetry, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Columbia U. Press, 1987.

The Translator’s

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya where he had his primary education. In 1979 he left for the United States. He lived in the South for many years, finishing high school in Louisiana and completing bachelors’ degrees in political science and economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Later he got an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University where he taught creative writing and won the Academy of American Poets award. He is the author of Zodiac of Echoes and Ismailia Eclipse, and the translator of three volumes of Arabic poetry. He was awarded an NEA translation grant and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He teaches at the University of Michigan. 
  Saadi Yousef (England) , Translated by Khaled Mattawa (USA) (18/03/2008)

http://www.aladabia.net/en/article-22-3-2.html

Fareed Zakaria

 From the magazine issue dated Jun 22, 2009 (newsweek)

A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. "Another ideological god has failed," the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will "fundamentally reset" the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. "Capitalism will be different," said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we've had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage—or perhaps the measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course—a topic for another essay—but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown.

There is still a long road ahead. There will be many more bankruptcies. Banks will have to slowly earn their way out of their problems or die. Consumers will save more before they start spending again. Mountains of debt will have to be reduced. American capitalism is being rebalanced, reregulated and thus restored. In doing so it will have to face up to long-neglected problems, if this is to lead to a true recovery, not just a brief reprieve.

Many experts are convinced that the situation cannot improve yet because their own sweeping solutions to the problem have not been implemented. Most of us want to see more punishment inflicted, particularly on America's bankers. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.

Consider our track record over the past 20 years, starting with the stock-market crash of 1987, when on Oct. 19 the Dow Jones lost 23 percent, the largest one-day loss in its history. The legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he just hoped that the coming recession wouldn't prove as painful as the Great Depression. It turned out to be a blip on the way to an even bigger, longer boom. Then there was the 1997 East Asian crisis, during the depths of which Paul Krugman wrote in a Fortune cover essay, "Never in the course of economic events—not even in the early years of the Depression—has so large a part of the world economy experienced so devastating a fall from grace." He went on to argue that if Asian countries did not adopt his radical strategy—currency controls—"we could be looking at?.?.?.?the kind of slump that 60 years ago devastated societies, destabilized governments, and eventually led to war." Only one Asian country instituted currency controls, and partial ones at that. All rebounded within two years.

Each crisis convinced observers that it signaled the end of some new, dangerous feature of the economic landscape. But often that novelty accelerated in the years that followed. The 1987 crash was said to be the product of computer trading, which has, of course, expanded dramatically since then. The East Asian crisis was meant to end the happy talk about "emerging markets," which are now at the center of world growth. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998—which then–Treasury secretary Robert Rubin described as "the worst financial crisis in 50 years"—was meant to be the end of hedge funds, which then massively expanded. The technology bubble's bursting in 2000 was supposed to put an end to the dreams of oddball Internet startups. Goodbye, Pets.com; hello, Twitter. Now we hear that this crisis is the end of derivatives. Let's see. Robert Shiller, one of the few who predicted this crash almost exactly—and the dotcom bust as well—argues that in fact we need more derivatives to make markets more stable.

A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn has been in America—we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill's line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.

Capitalism means growth, but also instability. The system is dynamic and inherently prone to crashes that cause great damage along the way. For about 90 years, we have been trying to regulate the system to stabilize it while still preserving its energy. We are at the start of another set of these efforts. In undertaking them, it is important to keep in mind what exactly went wrong. What we are experiencing is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of finance, of democracy, of globalization and ultimately of ethics.

"Capitalism messed up," the British tycoon Martin Sorrell wrote recently, "or, to be more precise, capitalists did." Actually, that's not true. Finance screwed up, or to be more precise, financiers did. In June 2007, when the financial crisis began, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, IBM, Nike, Wal-Mart and Microsoft were all running their companies with strong balance sheets and sensible business models. Major American corporations were highly profitable, and they were spending prudently, holding on to cash to build a cushion for a downturn. For that reason, many of them have been able to weather the storm remarkably well. Finance and anything finance-related—like real estate—is another story.

Finance has a history of messing up, from the Dutch tulip bubble in 1637 to now. The proximate causes of these busts have been varied, but follow a strikingly similar path. In calm times, political stability, economic growth and technological innovation all encourage an atmosphere of easy money and new forms of credit. Cheap credit causes greed, miscalculation and eventually ruin. President Martin Van Buren described the economic crisis of 1837 in Britain and America thusly: "Two nations, the most commercial in the world, enjoying but recently the highest degree of apparent prosperity and maintaining with each other the closest relations, are suddenly?.?.?.?plunged into a state of embarrassment and distress. In both countries we have witnessed the same [expansion] of paper money and other facilities of credit; the same spirit of speculation?.?.?.?the same overwhelming catastrophe." Obama could put that on his teleprompter today.

Many of the regulatory reforms that people in government are talking about now seem sensible and smart. Banks that are too large to fail should also be too large be leveraged at 30 to 1. The incentives for executives within banks are skewed toward reckless risk-taking with other people's money. ("Heads they win, tails they break even," is how Barney Frank describes the current setup.) Derivatives need to be better controlled. To call banks casinos, as is often done, is actually unfair to casinos, which are required to hold certain levels of capital because they must be able to cash in a customer's chips. Banks have not been required to do that for their key derivatives contract, credit default swaps.

Yet at the same time, we should proceed cautiously on massive new regulations. Many rules put in place in the 1930s still look smart; the problem is that over the past 15 years they were dismantled, or conscious decisions were made not to update them. Keep in mind that the one advanced industrial country where the banking system has weathered the storm superbly is Canada, which just kept the old rules in place, requiring banks to hold higher amounts of capital to offset their liabilities and to maintain lower levels of leverage. A few simple safeguards, and the whole system survived a massive storm.

The simplest safeguard American regulators have had, of course, is the interest rate on credit. In responding to almost every crisis in the past 15 years, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan always had the same solution: cut rates and ease up on money. In 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management collapsed, he suddenly and dramatically slashed rates, even though the economy was roaring along at 6 percent growth. In late 1999, buying into fears about Y2K, he swamped the markets with liquidity. (One effect: between November 1998 and February 2000, when rates finally rose, the NASDAQ jumped almost 250 percent, increasing in value by more than $3 trillion.) And finally, when the technology bubble burst and 9/11 hit, Greenspan again lowered rates and kept them low, this time inflating a massive housing bubble.

Greenspan behaved like most American political leaders over the past two decades—he chose the easy way out of a hard situation. William McChesney Martin, the great Fed chairman of the 1950s and 1960s, once said that his job was to take the punch bowl away just as the party had begun. No one wants to do that in America anymore—not the Fed chairman, not the regulators, not Congress and not the president.

Government actions should be "countercyclical"—that is, they should work to slow down growth. So, in boom times, the Fed would raise rates and require banks to have higher capital and lower leverage. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would start worrying about too much easy credit, raise standards for loans and disqualify buyers unlikely to be able to afford houses. Banks would be urged to slow down the supply of credit cards and other credit instruments. In fact, this is exactly how the governments of China and India behaved in 2007, when their economies were booming. At the peak, consumption in India actually declined as a percentage of GDP.

In the United States, the opposite happened: consumption surged from 67 percent to 73 percent of GDP. Presidents and congressmen extolled the virtues of homeownership for everyone. Congress pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to extend more loans. Regulators eased up on banks, and the Fed kept rates low. And the public cheered this pandering at every step.

Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, Americans have consumed more than we produced and have made up the difference by borrowing. This is true of individuals but, far more dangerously, of governments at every level. Government debt in America, especially when entitlements and state pension commitments are included, is terrifying. And yet no one has tried seriously to close the gap, which can be done only by (1) raising taxes or (2) cutting expenditures. Any sensible proposal will have to feature both prominently.

This is the disease of modern democracy: the system cannot impose any short-term pain for long-term gain. For 20 years, most serious structural problems—Social Security, health care, immigration—have been kicked down the road. And while the problem is acute in America, Europe and Japan face many of the same difficulties. Right now, the U.S. government's boldness is laudable, but it is being bold in spending money. In a few years, when the bills come due, and Congress must enact major spending cuts as well as raise taxes (and not just on the rich), that's when we will see if things have changed.

In reality, the problem goes well beyond Washington. It also goes beyond bad bankers, lax regulators and pandering politicians. The global financial system has been crashing more frequently over the past 30 years than in any comparable period in history. On the face of it, this suggests that we're screwing up, when in fact what is happening is more complex. The problems that have developed over the past decades are not simply the products of failures. They could as easily be described as the products of success.

Here's why we got to where we are. Since the late 1980s, the world has been moving toward a extraordinary degree of political stability. The end of the Cold War has ushered in a period with no major military competition among the world's great powers—something virtually unprecedented in modern history. It has meant the winding down of most of the proxy and civil wars, insurgencies and guerrilla actions that dotted the Cold War landscape. Even given the bloodshed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the number of people dying as a result of political violence of any kind has dropped steeply over the past three decades.

Then there is the end of inflation. In the 1970s, dozens of countries suffered hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class, destabilized societies and led to political upheaval. Since then, central banks have become very good at taming the monster, and by 2007 the number of countries with high inflation had dwindled to a handful. Only one, Zimbabwe, had hyperinflation.

Add to this the information and Internet revolutions, and you have a series of historical changes that have produced a single global system, far more integrated and faster-moving than ever before. The results speak for themselves. Over the past quarter century, the global economy has doubled every 10 years, going from $31 trillion in 1999 to $62 trillion in 2008. Recessions have become tamer than ever before, averaging eight months rather than two years. More than 400 million people across Asia have been lifted out of poverty. Between 2003 and 2007, average income worldwide grew at a faster rate (3.1 percent) than in any previous period in recorded human history. In 2006 and 2007—the peak years of the boom—124 countries around the world grew at 4 percent a year or more, about four times as many as 25 years earlier.

Many of these countries had more cash than they knew what to do with. China sits on a war chest of more than $2 trillion, while eight other emerging-market nations have reserves of more than $100 billion. They've all looked to the safest investment they could imagine—U.S. government debt. In buying so much debt, they drove down the interest rate Washington had to offer, which in turn made credit in America cheap. So the effect of all this money sloshing around the world was to subsidize Americans in their favorite activity: shopping. But it affected other Western countries as well, from Spain to Ireland, where consumers and governments loaded themselves up with debt.

Good times always make people complacent. As the cost of capital sank over the past few years, people became increasingly foolish. The world economy had become the equivalent of a race car—faster and more complex than any vehicle anyone had ever seen. But it turned out that no one had driven a car like this before, and no one really knew how. So it crashed.

The real problem is that we're still driving this car. The global economy remains highly complex, interconnected and im-balanced. The Chinese still pile up surpluses and need to put them somewhere. Washington and Beijing will have to work hard to slowly stabilize their mutual dependence so that the system is not being set up for another crash.

More broadly, the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself. We have globalized the economies of nations. Trade, travel and tourism are bringing people together. Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies and customers. But our politics remains resolutely national. This tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era—a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions. Without better international coordination, there will be more crashes, and eventually there may be a retreat from globalization toward the safety—and slow growth—of protected national economies.

Throughout this essay, I have avoided treating this economic crisis as a grand morality play—a war between good and evil in which demon bankers destroyed all that is good and true about our socie-ties. Complex historical events can rarely be reduced to something so simple. But we are suffering from a moral crisis, too, one that may lie at the heart of our problems.

Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.

One of the great shifts taking place in American society has been away from the old guild system of self-regulation. Once upon a time, law, medicine and accounting viewed themselves as private-sector participants with public responsibilities. Lawyers are still called "officers of the court." And historically they acted with that sense of stewardship in mind, thinking of what was appropriate for the whole system and not simply for their firm. That meant advising their clients against time-consuming litigation or mindless mergers. Elihu Root, a leader of the New York bar in the late 19th century, once said, "About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."

It's not just the law that has changed; so have all the professions. Ever since the 1930s, accountants have been given a unique trust. "Who audits you?" asked Sen. Alben Barkley during a 1933 committee hearing. "Our conscience," replied Arthur Carter, the head of a large accounting firm. But by 2002 The Wall Street Journal was describing a different world, in which accountants had gone from "watchdogs to lapdogs," telling clients whatever they wanted to hear. Bankers similarly once saw themselves as being stewards of capital, responsible to their many constituents and embodying trust. But over the past few decades, they too became obsessed with profits and the short term, uncertain about their own future and that of their company. The most recent example of this phenomenon has been at the rating agencies, which were generating fees that were too lucrative to be exacting in their judgments about their clients' products.

None of this has happened because businesspeople have suddenly become more immoral. It is part of the opening up and growing competitiveness of the business world. Many of the old banks and law firms operated as monopolies or cartels. They could afford to take the long view. They were also run by a WASP elite secure in its privilege. The members of today's meritocratic elite are more anxious and insecure. They know that they are being judged quarter by quarter.

The failure of self-regulation over the past 20 years—in investment banking, accounting, rating agencies—has led inevitably to the rise of greater government regulation. This marks an important change in the Anglo-American world, away from informal rules often enforced by private actors toward the more formal bureaucratic system common in continental Europe. Perhaps the state should not set the pay of the private sector. But surely CEOs should exercise some judgment about their own compensation, and tie it far more closely to the long-term health of the company. It will still be possible to get very rich—Warren Buffett, after all, draws a salary of only $100,000.

There's a need for greater self-regulation not simply on Wall Street but also on Pennsylvania Avenue. We get exercised about the immorality of politicians when they're caught in sex scandals. Meanwhile they triple the national debt, enrich their lobbyist friends and write tax loopholes for specific corporations—all perfectly legal—and we regard this as normal. The revolving door between Washington government offices and lobbying firms is so lucrative and so established that anyone pointing out that it is—at base—institutionalized corruption is seen as baying at the moon. Not everything is written down, and not everything that is legally permissible is ethical. Who was the last ex-president to refuse to take a vast donation for his library from a foreign government that he had helped when in office?

We are in the midst of a vast crisis, and there is enough blame to go around and many fixes to make, from the international system to national governments to private firms. But at heart, there needs to be a deeper fix within all of us, a simple gut check. If it doesn't feel right, we shouldn't be doing it. That's not going to restore growth or mend globalization or save capitalism, but it might be a small start to sanity.

   
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935/output/print

Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century

By Cristina Nehring

For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, “A Vindication of Love,” puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is “Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,” though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.

“We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” she writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring’s literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections. Her heroes and heroines tend to die, like Young Werther, who shoots himself; or try to die, like Mary Wollstonecraft, who throws herself off a bridge; or suffer, like Abelard and Heloise, one of whom is castrated and one of whom ends up in a nunnery. And yet Nehring admires these flamboyant men and women for the creative force of their affairs, for their ability to live outside the lines, for the ferocity of their feelings. She sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad, and quotes approvingly Heloise’s statement to Abelard: “ ‘I looked for no marriage bond,’ she flashed. ‘I never sought anything in you but yourself.’ ”

In her most provocative and interesting chapters, Nehring argues for the value of suffering, for the importance of failure. Our idea of a contented married ending is too cozy and tame for her. We yearn for what she calls “strenuously exhibitionistic happiness” — think of family photos on Facebook — but instead we should focus on the fullness and intensity of emotion. She writes of Margaret Fuller: “Fuller’s failures are several times more sumptuous than other folks’ successes. And perhaps that is something we need to admit about failure: It can well be more sumptuous than success. . . . Somewhere in our collective unconscious we know — even now — that to have failed is to have lived.”

Cristina Nehring

Nehring sees in the grandeur of feeling a kind of heroism, even if the relationship doesn’t take conventional form or endure in the conventional way. For Nehring, one senses, true failure is to drift comfortably along in a dull relationship, to spend precious years of life in a marriage that is not exciting or satisfying, to live cautiously, responsibly. Is the strength of feeling redeemed in the blaze of passion even if it does not end happily? she asks. Is contentment too soft and modest a goal?

Elsewhere, Nehring interrogates our steadfast insistence on balanced, healthy relationships, our readiness to condemn doomed, impossible entanglements. She argues that it may in fact be a sign of health to enter into a relationship that is turbulent, demanding or unorthodox. She praises long-distance relationships, arduous relationships, relationships with men who are elusive, relationships the therapeutic culture adamantly opposes. She asks, “Could it be that the choice of a challenging love object signals strength and resourcefulness rather than insecurity and psychological damage, as we so often hear?”

If there is anything unsatisfying about this fierce and lively book, it is a slight evasiveness at its core. Nehring does not quite take on the vast continent of quietly married people who must be her target. She attacks the blandness of our current forms of love without directly describing or explaining that blandness. Instead she spends too much time on self-help books like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and not enough on the specifics of the way we live now. Yet in spite of this tactfulness, this polite vagueness at the heart of the book, she brings to life riveting stories and offers creative interpretations that, taken together, challenge current convention.

At various points, Nehring allows her rhetoric to outrun common sense. “To be respected as a thinker in our world, a woman must cease to be a lover,” she writes. This is a nice flourish, but is it true? When one glances back at the women intellectuals of the last century, it seems not. Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West and Susan Sontag, for instance, all had colorful and irregular romantic lives and nonetheless managed to be taken quite seriously.

In her unapologetically subjective readings of literature and culture, Nehring goes in for a certain amount of melodrama and overstatement — “I embrace generalization,” as she puts it — but in many ways this is the appeal, the freshness of the book. “A Vindication of Love” takes itself more seriously than does its distant cousin, Laura Kipnis’s clever but coy manifesto “Against Love.” Nehring is writing in a previous mold, in the lost tradition of the Simone de Beauvoirs and Mary Wollstonecrafts that existed before the clotted irony, the obligatory, cool self-mockery, the endlessly indulgent self-deflation so popular today.

The book raises practical questions. Can one actually live according to the rich and exhausting principles Nehring sets out? In the final pages, she offers this glimpse of her own life: “As I write these words, I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.” Here is the essence of her vision: brutal, vivid, demanding, deranged. It is perhaps a little easier to fulfill this vision, to love fully, to surrender practical daily concerns to the whims and ardors of strong feeling, if you are not responsible for anyone else. Nehring also mentions that she has a newborn baby girl, and one wonders if this will temper her freedom and the storminess of her view. She does, however, give the example of Wollstonecraft, who took her illegitimate baby on a boat to Scandinavia, on a dangerous adventure unheard of for a woman alone, in the service of a difficult man she loved, and managed to write an excellent and popular book about it.

“With our cult of success,” Nehring writes, “we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur.” There is a romanticism here that could look, depending on where you stand, either pure or puerile, either bracing or silly, but it is, either way, an original view, one not generally taken and defended, one most of us could probably use a little more of. Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration.

Even if one doesn’t take her outlandish romantic arguments literally, this is one of those rare books that could make people think about their intimate lives in a new way. We do suffer, after all, from a certain lack of imagination when it comes to personal relationships. A solid, freckled 5-year-old from my daughter’s class recently came up to me on seeing that I was pregnant. “Are you going to get married?” she demanded, hands on hips. “Not now,” I said. Which either is or is not a vindication of love.

Katie Roiphe teaches in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University and is the author of “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages.”

328 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99
June 21, 2009
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Roiphe-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

'We Cannot Accept To Have In Our Country Women Who Are Prisoners Behind Netting'

Oh my. Nicolas Sarkozy better watch out or someone will call him a right-wing extremist.
In comments which will reignite the debate about religious clothing in the country, he said the full-body garment was "not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience".

Mr Sarkozy used the first presidential address to a joint session of France's two houses of parliament in 136 years to declare his support for a ban, even before hearing from a parliamentary commission set up to study the issue.

"We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity," Mr Sarkozy told the special session in Versailles.

"That is not the idea that the French republic has of women's dignity.

"The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic," the French president said.

A group of 58 MPs from the Left and Right has called on Parliament to take action against women adopting what they called oppressive head-to-toe Islamic dress that "breaches individual freedoms".

André Gerin, a Communist MP, led the motion for the latest inquiry, calling the burqa and niqab "a moving prison" for women.

Women's rights campaigners, including some Islamic groups, have backed the calls for measures to curb the small but growing trend of wearing burqas among France's five million Muslims.

Fadela Amara, a rights campaigner of Algerian background, who is the Housing Minister, said that was alarmed by the number of women "who are being put in this kind of tomb".

She added: "We must do everything to stop burqas from spreading."

http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-cannot-accept-to-have-in-our-country.html

Chicago

http://www.banipal.co.uk/book_reviews/review.php?reviewid=49

http://www.ahewar.org/ - Modern Discussion

Health Discrimination
The Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA)

2009 / 5 / 14

Health Discrimination

The Right to Health of the Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel: A Status Report

"It is now apparent that the Ienactment of the Israeli Health law, has not succeeded in narrowing gaps in health between the Arab and Jewish populations. Indeed, in some parameters the gaps have widened still further " Mohammad Zeidan - HRA Director
Report Introduction
The Right to Health is a Human Right
Since 2003, the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA) has periodically published reports examining different aspects of the discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. In 2009, HRA has decided to focus on the right to health – an important factor that influences other human rights and shapes human dignity.
Economic and social rights form an important component of universal human rights. These rights, including the right to health, have not been well received by many governments with a capitalist orientation, which tend to see these issues as a manifestation of human needs rather than human rights. This reflects a tendency to avoid granting these rights an obligatory character and to free the state from the need to invest the resources required for their realization.
The right to health is enshrined in numerous international conventions and declarations. The first reference comes in Article 25(1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
The commitment to this right was defined more substantively in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (Article 12(1)). The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights established by the United Nations to monitor the implementation of this covenant later adopted a comment (General Comment 14) extending the meaning of the right to health beyond medical treatment for the sick. This comment specifies the conditions in which this right is maintained: availability, sufficiency, quality, and accessibility – in terms of the absence of discrimination and in terms of physical and economic access for all:
“With respect to the right to health, equality of access to health care and health services has to be emphasized. States have a special obligation to provide those who do not have sufficient means with the necessary health insurance and health-care facilities, and to prevent any discrimination on internationally prohibited grounds in the provision of health care and health services, especially with respect to the core obligations of the right to health.” (Para. 19)
The opening sentence of the National Health Insurance Law, enacted in Israel in 1994, states: “National health insurance in accordance with this law shall be founded on the principles of justice, equality and mutual assistance.” It is now apparent that the enactment of this law has not succeeded in narrowing gaps in health between the Arab and Jewish populations. Indeed, in some parameters the gaps have widened still further (examples include infant mortality rate, life expectancy, morbidity and mortality, chronic diseases, cancer, etc.) Moreover, the subsequent legislative development of the law has eroded the social principles on which founded, such as the need to remove economic and cultural barriers that prevent optimum access to health services.
In the current report HRA presents several principles and findings that emphasize the scale and scope of the discrimination faced by the Palestinian Arab population in Israel. The following are some examples:
- There is a proven and close correlation between individual and collective health and socioeconomic status. Poverty, limited education, overcrowding, and unemployment all lead to an increase in rates of morbidity and mortality. The Arab population continues to be poorer than the Jewish population, with higher unemployment and lower education levels. Gaps in health remain.
- The Arab population is young – 42 percent of Arabs are under the age of fifteen. Accordingly, this population has a heightened need for health services intended for young people, such as family health centers.
- Arabs have lower levels of education: 35.3 percent did not attend high school. The proportion of Arabs in the workforce is low (54.9 percent in the 25-54 age range).
- Arabs are poorer than Jews: 61.3 percent of Arab families are below the poverty line. Government support rescues just ten percent of these families from poverty.
- Overcrowding is more prevalent in the Arab population – the average number of persons per room is 1.43 among Arab citizens and 0.84 among their Jewish peers.
- Life expectancy is lower among Arabs and the gap between Arabs and Jews has widened since 1996.
- Infant mortality rates among Arabs are twice those among Jews. The gap has existed since the establishment of the state and has grown over the years.
- The general mortality rate is higher among Arabs than among Jews.
- The main causes of death among Arabs are heart diseases, cancer, external injury, diabetes, and cerebrovascular diseases.
- A very rapid increase has been seen in the incidence of lung cancer and breast cancer among Arabs. Cancer is detected at an advanced stage and the disease appears at a younger age -both factors that reduce survival rates.
- The incidence of diabetes is higher among Arabs and the disease is less balanced, leading to complications.
- Arabs report more physical problems that cause them significant or very significant difficulties in everyday functioning. Arabs suffer more from chronic back pain, sleep disorders, psychological disorders, and arthritis.
These findings, and others presented in the report, illustrate the failure of Israeli governments to realize their obligations toward the Palestinian Arab population in Israel. This failure constitutes a gross violation of Israel’s undertaking to implement international conventions regarding social, economic and cultural rights – documents that Israel ratified in 1966. These failings also violate official undertakings Israel assumed as part of its agreements with the European Union, in particular the association agreement and agreements in the European – Mediterranean Partnership.
Accordingly, the Arab Association for Human Rights urges Israel’s international partners (and particularly the institutions of the European Union) to respect their obligation in accordance with these agreements and to act immediately in order to oblige the Israeli government to meet its part in these agreements, and to condition the development of political and economic relations on the full and egalitarian implementation of the existing agreements.
Mohammad Zeidan
Director, Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA)

http://arabhra.org/HRA/SecondaryArticles/SecondaryArticlePage.aspx?SecondaryArticle=1743

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http://www.ahewar.org/ - Modern Discussion