democratic views

Rending Justice

Follow the bouncing ball: first, the Bush administration redefines torture practices such as waterboarding so that they are no longer considered torture. This despite the U.S. being a signatory to the 1984 Convention Against Torture. Then the administration says the U.S. doesn't engage in torture, even as it continues using waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Then the administration justifies kidnapping individuals anywhere in the world and using "rendition" turning them over to other countries who have issued assurances that they agree with the U.S. redefinition of torture and therefore will not torture the captives.

No due process. No visits by humanitarian groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. No acknowledgement of how many individuals are in custody or where they are. All in the name of protecting American civil liberties and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now we're arguing whether we should even investigate the circumstances and actions that led to these acts. The Obama administration appears to have successfully pressured the Spanish government to say that it does not support further investigation and possible indictment of U.S. officials by the same court and judge who pursued Chile's Augusto Pinochet. The Spanish judge who launched the investigation, Baltasar Garzon, avoided a confrontation with Spain's attorney general by referring the case to a lottery system in which any of six judges could be assigned the case, and decide whether or not to proceed.

It's likely that the Obama administration pressed Spain through back channels to discourage the investigation. Now they are in the position of having to choose showing respect for legal proceedings in other countries, or launching an investigation of some kind in the U.S. Meanwhile, Judge Garzon has launched a new investigation that is inquiring into the roles of American officials higher up the food chain than the lawyers (known as "The Bush Six" named in the first case. Philippe Sands revealed in an interview with Terry Gross that the United Kingdom is also beginning an investigation into allegations of torture by the United States.

Many Democrats have no appetite for this because it might jeopardize their electoral majorities if there is a public backlash and the possibility of establishing much-needed domestic reforms in health care, education, and energy. Republicans have no appetite for it because it's their own party members who bear the brunt of any such investigations and face the likelihood of prosecution.

We are either a country where rule of law is respected, including our respect for international laws and treaties, many of which, in past decades, we were leaders in formulating, or we are not. We cannot prosecute and imprison "Chuckie" Taylor, a U.S. citizen who is the son of Liberian despot Charles Taylor, for torture, and then claim exemptions for U.S. government officials using the specious and politicized reasoning that corrupted the Bush administration's Justice Department and led to the abasement of the very principles we were fighting to protect.

Swine Flu’s Political Strains

There is no better antidote to the unwelcome arrogance of what John Ikenberry called American "neoimperialism" than the twin plagues of a global economic crisis and Swine flu. In the wake of "winning" the Cold war, neoconservatives emboldened by the election of George W. Bush and the toppling of the World Trade Towers successfully drove home the idea that American could, and should, disregard international law and signed treaties whenever it wished.

Cloaked in the rhetoric of national security and America's unparalleled "unipolar" military might, this unfortunate line of reasoning led to American abrogation of the Geneva Convention and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and in secret CIA prisons around the world, putting America on the list of nations that use torture. The flawed logic of extreme conservatives, abetted by terrified Democrats fearful of losing the "America first" race, created an imperial presidency – a bad idea at any time, and especially troublesome in the hands of a man with swagger but not substance.

With the claim of national security, whether invoked for military, economic, or environmental reasons, the presidency under George W. Bush was able to wring legal rationales from smart but morally culpable lawyers whose opinions disregarded established laws, both international and domestic. Their work-for-hire mentality debased the law, usurped principles of democratic governance and gravely damaged America's reputation as a country where rule of law is supreme. Similar disregard for science, regulations and laws permeated government agencies led by appointees who were no more than political hacks with an ideological agenda.

The economic meltdown reveals both the power of America and its vulnerability. We blew up the world, and even as thousands more Americans are homeless and living in poverty humanitarian agencies are warning of greater loss of life among the poor and dispossessed around the world if aid dries up because even the richest feel too poor to give. The world is looking to America to restart its economy and get global commerce going again, even as we back into nationalizing businesses and banks that would otherwise fail. The economic system, reeling from unjustifiable risk-taking gone bad requires a careful calibration of stimulus and action from governments around the world. Economists worry that countries will implement politically expedient protections in the name of nationalism that will do more harm than good.

Swine flu doesn't respect any of this; nature is remarkably indifferent to the woes we bring upon ourselves. If Swine flu gets loose in any large sense, thousands, perhaps millions, will die. It's already putting yet another choke-hold on economies around the world and on our future, as businesses close down, tourism dries up, museums and schools close. In America, while incumbent politicians dither about damaging the private insurers whose lobbyists funnel campaign contributions to them, who is going to pay the emergency-room bills for millions of Americans without health insurance if they feel ill and fear Swine flu? Who is going to pay if millions without health insurance are diagnosed with Swine flu and require treatment? Why are we worried about the welfare of a private insurance industry whose motive is profit and not public interest when the issue is public health?

If it weren't a disease with pandemic potential and tragic outcomes, Swine flu would have been a good name for the syndrome of greed among Wall Street types and CEOs who continue taking large salaries even when their companies' performance is abysmal. Maybe, if it proves to be a mild strain that doesn't sicken or kill millions we could reserve the right to apply it to Wall Street nevertheless; we could name it the "AIG Swine Flu." When we isolate the mixed strain that infects political appointees and elected officials seeking to protect their power, we can name it the "Federal Triangle Flu." Finally, when we identify a Swine flu variant for lawyers who torture the law so that others can be tortured, we'll call it the "John Yoo Flu."

Unfortunately, disease and death know no borders; we haven't yet cured ourselves of mortality. Getting the news about corruption among governments and elites around the world shows that America doesn't have a monopoly on abuse of the law, political corruption, or greed (read any issue of The Economist and you'll be depressed immediately). In many other countries free speech and the rule of law are weak or nonexistent. In many of those same countries vigilantism, sometimes sanctioned by governments, is too often the form of justice. I hope political Swine flu is not already a pandemic, and that we're on the way to being cured of the viral infection that led to American arrogance and neoimperialism ruining our national health.

Immigration and the American Family

73% of children in families where one or more of the parents is an undocumented immigrant have been born in the U.S.. These children are American citizens by birth. That's what the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says. All the get-tough talk about deporting "illegal aliens" – a demeaning term that diminishes our capacity for finding common ground when discussing such a divisive issue – overlooks the fact that the American-born children of undocumented immigrants can't be deported. Send the parents back, and who will take care of the children when they exercise their rights to remain in the United States?

Surely the message to innocent and blameless children can't be "your parents broke the law, so we're punishing you by breaking up your family, or denying your citizenship rights by making you choose to leave the United States." Surely an immigration policy that upholds American values should not have the effect of ruining families or intentionally depriving American citizens of their rights. So we need to find a way to help parents who are undocumented immigrants but whose children are Americans obtain work permits and legal immigration status. In a nation of immigrants, with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty marking our eastern shore, we cannot allow those who forget their own families' humble origins to dominate immigration policy and run a hard line on deportation. Nor can we allow the privileged to play the proletarian game and pretend to have the best interests of "the American people" at heart.

Would ideological opponents of sensible immigration reform really break up families, sending parents back to their home countries without regard for the welfare of the children? Are they prepared to pay the taxes to provide foster-care residences for young American citizens who become homeless when their parents are deported? Many who would take such a hard-hearted view might also hold with conservative views of the nuclear family as the most important family unit. How ironic that those holding the traditional family up as the central social unit would callously advocate policies that run counter to upholding the integrity of the family.

Breaking up families as a social policy flies in the face of crime statistics that show children from broken homes are more likely to exact costs on society in the form of crime and subsequent incarceration, and to be less educated and productive than those from intact families. Even if we relocate a broken family to another country, when will we realize that social problems in those countries end up returning to us in one way or another? The current tempest over Mexican drug wars and its spillover into more than 200 U.S. cities is just one example of the price we pay for short-sighted policy decisions, even when, as in the case of the "war on drugs," they last for decades.

I can hear voices saying "well, then, let's deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. of undocumented immigrants." It's the kind of ugly reactionary voice that reveals the Achilles heel of America – our insularity, a tendency to think that we alone have the power to define what's right and wrong in the world. That's an argument for changing the Constitution; and changing the 14^th Amendment would be a very different battle from the enactment of the 18^th Amendment (Prohibition) and its repeal 14 years later by the 21^st Amendment (we needed our liquor, and the tax revenues, during the Great Depression). The wisdom of the 14^th Amendment lies in its compound nature; it contains clauses covering citizenship rights, representation, and the public debt. It covers ground won with the blood of slaves, and the organic compounds involved in its origins might be volatile enough to provoke another revolution if attempts to change it were to win serious support. We have had this doctrine enshrined in American law since 1868: all who are born on American soil are American citizens.

Immigration policy is a national problem that should not be left to states and local jurisdictions, where the temper of the times and local demographics leads to uneven attempts to wrestle down an issue that belongs to the country as a whole. America must find a way to work with its neighbors to make illegal entry into the U.S. less desirable, to welcome those who are already here, and to recognize that humanitarian concerns must take precedence over narrow nationalism.

Radical Islam: A Product of Government Corruption and Imperialist Doctrine

Reading the headlines one might think that radical Islamists in Afghanistan and Pakistan are resurgent solely because they terrorize local populations. One might think they've won over the population.

One might also look at a neighboring country, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, and come away with a different conclusion. Perhaps the Taliban are winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Pakistan because they offer the promise of a government without corruption.

In Pakistan, Karachi's The Nation just published an article whose headline was "Judicial Policy to Target Corruption." One key element is the separation of the judiciary from the executive branch , which was abused by Pervez Musharraf's arrogant dismissal of 18 high court justices in 2007, and called into question by President Asif Ali Zardari's reluctance, under pressure from the U.S. and Britain, to reappoint chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Zardari, who remains under investigation in Switzerland for financial corruption including money-laundering, may also have had his own reasons for not reappointing a chief justice who could pose problems for him.

A second issue in the call to clean up judicial corruption in Pakistan calls for barring judges from taking certain remunerative posts after they leave the bench, so that they cannot be bribed to make decisions in favor of those who will reward them in the future. So it's no wonder, when the Taliban, promising Sharia law and an end to government corruption, attract the interest of a population tired of a weak, ineffective government that appears to be run by politicians interested only in power and wealth.

In Afghanistan, the wonder boy Hamid Karzai that President Bush trotted out as a staunch U.S. ally during his 2002 State of the Union address has proven to be ineffective in controlling much beyond the four walls in which he lives, protected by U.S. forces. But swirling around the well-known facts of Afghanistan's huge production of illegal drugs are allegations that Karzai and his supporters profit from the drug war, that Karzai's brother also appears to be a key beneficiary of the vast sums of illegal drug money flowing into the Afghan economy, and the fact that billions of dollars from drug trafficking flow directly to the Taliban's coffers.

When these are the allies that the imperial forces of the United States, Britain, and other western democracies support, it's no surprise that radical Islamists calling for jihad against "the infidels" find a place in the heart of local populations. We have our share of fundamentalist crackpots in the United States who advocate and sometimes practice violence against a variety of targets. But none have taken over territory or have been successful in overturning America's commitment to civil rule and the rule of law. However, if we cannot regain the moral high ground and if we continue to support local politicians who do not have the support of their people, the future of our engagement in those countries is not likely to have a happy outcome.

Back to Indonesia, a country with its own problems with insurgents and Islamic fanatics. Norimitsu Onishi writes in today's New York Times that Indonesia's president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appropriated the largest Islamic party's message of fighting corruption in government, thus neutralizing the fundamentalist's appeal to the large mass of Indonesian voters, and limiting their votes to just over 7 percent in recent elections. Without a corrupt government as a cause to strike at, Indonesian voters seem more inclined to seek democratic outcomes and to separate religious and civil affairs even as they hold to their Muslim faith. The situation is not so positive in Afghanistan and Pakistan, countries now mired in proxy wars between U.S.-backed governments of dubious credentials and Islamists who gain great support from corruption in their own governments and the interjection of foreign militaries in their civil affairs. There's no point bemoaning the ill-advised diversion of resources into Bush's go-it-alone Iraq War and its disastrous consequences, which led to our current predicament. Let's hope that that current U.S. campaigns in this volatile region will find ways to build support among the peoples of these two beleaguered countries before we are militarily, politically, and morally bankrupt.

What Good News from Pakistan?

I just finished reading Robert Kaplan's latest piece, (Pakistan's Fatal Shore) in The Atlantic when the news broke that the Pakistani Taliban, having forced the government to cede the Swat Valley to Islamic fundamentalist rule and Sharia law, was pushing in on the capital of Islamabad. The weakness of the Zardari government follows on the failure of the Musharraf government to accomplish anything significant with respect to American interests despite more than $10 billion in aid since 9/11.

So we have a country that, absent Taliban and Al-Qaeda threats, might not have much strategic interest for us, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But leaving aside what they've done with billions in U.S. aid, mostly in cash, we're faced with fighting two wars in three countries, and, in Pakistan, the southwestern region of Baluchistan (where the indigenous peoples actually live across the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) is a place where China has made investments, complicating the picture.

The Taliban argument against the government contains many of the same strains that Al-Qaeda has played across the region. A government allied with the western infidels, and the presence of infidels in the country, is a prime motivator for their brand of religious terrorism. Let's not forget that one leg of Al-Qaeda's strategy is to bankrupt its enemies: so far, leaving aside what Dick Cheney argued at one time was the folly of invading Iraq, they seem to have the upper hand in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We've spent tens of billions; we're increasing troop strength in Afghanistan; and Pakistan seems to be teetering on the brink. Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S. insisted today that the government and the military would prevail "given the means" – a thinly veiled plea for more military aid from the United States, which begs the question of what they've done with the billions they've received over the past eight years.

All this is the legacy of nation-building by the British, who created countries out of administrative districts based on imperial needs without much regard for the peoples and tribes in the lands they had conquered. The restlessness in Pakistan and Afghanistan with their weak central governments obscures the relative calm in Iraq. We may have announced that we are withdrawing U.S. forces from the direct military engagement that toppled Saddam Hussein and took on the largely U.S.-created Al-Qaeda in Iraq. But we'll be there for years trying to help a Shiite-dominated central government hold together a shaky coalition with Sunnis and the Kurds, who have made little secret of their desire to be autonomous, and to take with them into a Kurdish nation part of Turkey.

Kaplan suggests that the Baluchistan "problem" in Pakistan is redolent of Yugoslavia, which broke apart into separate countries largely based on ethnic groups after Tito's death loosened the iron grip of an imposed government. Continued U.S. engagement in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq is a risky business for the Obama administration. I hope they get it right.

Time for a Putsch: Down with Wall Street Czars

It's time for a putsch. Not against the government – against Wall Street. And who should lead this overthrow? We, the people; our government, the government of the United States. There are many people who would say, to put it simply, nationalize the banks, now.

Today's announcement by the government that they may convert their bailout investments into equity shares takes us a step closer. As we watch banks with surprising news of quarterly profits trying to flee from the Treasury's rescue plans as quickly as possible, it's clear that they will do anything to avoid control. Yet there are great concerns about whether the profits reported are just accounting charades and one more example of financiers looking at short-term results while failing to think about long-term consequences.

No one appointed the denizens of Wall Street rulers of the country – they staged a coup and took over. Wall Street's mathematical wizards helped their overlords stage this takeover; as long as investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and other financial service firms threw enough of their ill-gotten gains to politicians right and left, they got their way. We are ruled not by elected officials, but by masters of money, czars of cash, dictators of the dollar. Elected officials for the better part of three decades have been nothing more than the handmaidens of capital in search of free markets, unfettered by ethics or social values.

Unfortunately, when their grand schemes for personal aggrandizement caused a global economic meltdown, these ruling clans proved to have more a sense of entitlement and arrogance than common sense. They still hold the keys to the safe deposit box, and promise that as soon as we let them take whatever they need, they will make more money and give us the rest. Politicians who are beholden to them still believe, or profess to believe this. It's true as Senator Chris Dodd says that we need to think carefully about how to regulate the financial sector. It's also possible that the real effect when money-craving legislators are done will be to capitulate to Wall Street's demands for continued deregulation and autonomy in the hope that they will deliver profits and recover the wealth we have lost.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, calls what Wall Street has done "The Quiet Coup." Johnson is now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Managements; he says that from time to time it is necessary to pick winners and losers among the oligarchs who live believing that ordinary citizens owe them a living because they create jobs, or housing, or weapons for defense of the homeland and as an export product. What is lacking in current fiscal policy is the will to push out some of the oligarchy; the will to winnow the elites and create new conditions for success.

The IMF is currently angling to become the dominant manager of a world economy, free of ideology that promotes its past insistence on free-market solutions to the exclusion of other problem-solving approaches. In the new IMF, sometimes privatization will work; at other times, nationalization may be the answer. What Johnson fears is that a country such as the United States will use its power and dominance to avoid taking good advice and swallowing bitter medicine. Yet when the IMF is poised to give China a larger stake in managing global economics, the irony is rich – the United States, a debtor nation, may need some of the $40 billion in foreign reserves that China would pump into the IMF. We already find our international policy choices constrained by the need to manage relations with our creditors.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist, professor at Princeton, and New York Times columnist, is dancing around the idea of nationalizing banks. We all know that the very word "nationalize" evokes the blistering retort of "socialism" from reactionaries who are part of the very elites that would be overthrown by such an action, or by their comic conservative mouthpieces. Krugman, in an effort to maintain his credibility as a reasonable man, only suggests that by the time we realize that nationalization was the right thing to do it may be too late to do it. He is afraid that we will spend all our money on tepid reform measures and then, when the real crisis hits, have no money or credit left. Johnson and Krugman together in a bar? Last call.

Meanwhile, Harold Meyerson says that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are helping the rise of socialism in the United States. He cites a new Rasmussen Poll that shows support for capitalism dwindling among all Americans; today only 53 percent prefer capitalism (it used to be 70 percent), while 47 percent are undecided or prefer socialism. The numbers among those under 30 are even more striking: supporters of capitalism, socialism and the undecided each make up roughly one-third of the electorate. So when Rush Limbaugh and the Republican elders rant about socialism, Meyerson says that they are first, preaching to the shrinking conservative choir, and second, giving socialism unprecedented publicity. Socialists couldn' t afford to buy the airtime they are getting from right-wing reactionaries. Rush & Co. in concert with greed on Wall Street are building a mass audience for the socialist message more quickly than they have ever been able to do on their own.

Finally, Naomi Klein suggests that in the spirit of "Spring Cleaning" one of the first members of the elite to be banished should be Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic advisor. He's been spectacularly wrong about nearly everything, Klein argues, but because we're intimidated by his intelligence and his overbearing manner, he continues to move ahead like a steamroller pounding down pavement. His arrogance is exemplified by an analogy he made back in the 1990s, when he said that "the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering, one set of laws works everywhere." It's a telling remark that reveals how the brightest among us can bamboozle everyone. Who really understands economics? Who really understands engineering, let alone the laws of physics at the core of making things that work? Not many; so if you put the two mysteries together you've got an unassailable air of authority.

The rub is that there aren't "laws of engineering" no matter what Larry Summers says. Engineering is an applied discipline that relies on fundamental laws of physics – motion, gravity, thermodynamics, among others. Economics is a social science – and once you get people and politics in the mix, all bets are off. For example, one of the primary "laws" of economics states that human beings are rational actors (as long as you assume, as economists always do, that "all else remains equal"). Yet psychological research shows that humans act contrary to their own economic interests much of the time, because, in the real world, nothing always remains equal and people don't understand the math of what is in their best interests. So much for Summers' certitudes – and to put Klein's argument succinctly: why are we still listening to him?

Perhaps President Obama's dream team led by Summers and Tim Geithner is too close to Wall Street, a criticism many have made. Obama deserves great credit for seeking out the best and the brightest, for seeking bipartisan solutions, for using his skills as a community organizer and conciliator to find common ground wherever possible as we face problems of global scope with huge risks. But if the young and the racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. find themselves without a future because the mandarins of money prevail, if the financial elites and politicians hold onto their privileged positions but do not deliver results for the folks on "Main Street" and in rural America, a different kind of putsch may occur.

The New YDNA Program

The U.S. Government plans to announce a universal DNA collection program (known as Your DNA, or YDNA) in the near future; officials are quietly working out the details now. Plans are to collect DNA from every person born in a hospital or receiving hospital services including emergency room care, elective surgery, or outpatient care; and to collect DNA from individuals who visit any medical care provider such as a doctor or dentist, and from anyone entering the United States at airports or border crossings. Spokesman Alberto Addington said that the new program would preserve individual liberty and protect citizens against criminal activity. "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear," he said.

The new program is based upon the hugely successful expansion of DNA programs implemented by the FBI and State law enforcement officials as reported in the New York Times. Under that program, DNA databases from all states were merged into a single national database run by the FBI. Some states had been collecting DNA from innocent persons arrested but not convicted of crimes, or convicted of nonviolent misdemeanors such as failure to pay parking tickets.

"We realized that rather than waiting for crimes to occur, and then searching through a database hoping to find a match, it would be easier to simply collect the data first," Addington said. "Under this new program, people who are victimized by crime would have a higher assurance that we would successfully find and prosecute those responsible. Innocent people have nothing to fear; we are very comfortable with the low percentage of errors in DNA matching. We're counting on the tourism industry and medical professionals to do their patriotic part to help law enforcement and civil authorities secure America's future."

When asked about the recent revelations that the National Security Agency may have overstepped its legal grounds for conducting surveillance on American citizens, and how the country could be protected against the possibility of similar misconduct by agencies using the DNA database, Addington averred that "we have put in place stringent protections to be sure that officials do not misuse the data." Pressed for details, he said "saying more about the methods would reveal state secrets vital to our national security, and would put at risk our efforts to protect every citizen in this great country. However, we would be open to discussions about sharing DNA information on foreign nationals entering the U.S. with their home country governments to assist in their efforts to provide safety and security for their own citizens at home."

Addington further contended that with the need for immigration reform growing more urgent, the DNA database would help keep track of which children born to Latino parents in the United States have legal claims to citizenship regardless of whether their parents entered the country illegally or remained illegally after their visas or work permits expired. "We know that Latinos have a high birth rate compared to the rest of the population, and even though they are only 13 percent of the population, they account for 40 percent of federal offenses. But we want to be sure that their children's rights are protected, and having a positive DNA match is one way of doing that."

When asked why some 40 percent of DNA samples currently in the database are from African-Americans, even though blacks make up only 15 percent of the population, Addington smiled as he answered. "Now you're getting at the problem," he said. "When we capture everyone's DNA, the percentage of DNA belonging to any one racial or ethnic group will be consistent with that group's representation in the entire population of the United States. Today's DNA database numbers make it look as though we've singled out African-Americans or selectively prosecuted cases based on racial profiling. We're trying to erase that impression with our new YDNA program. We want to be sure that everyone has equal protection under the law."

Although Addington made some general remarks about the societal benefits to medical research, universal health care, and the insurance industry that might be possible once the YDNA database is up and running, further details of the new program are sketchy at this time. More will be forthcoming as soon as investigative reporters from serious newspapers and media sources track down the appropriate officials and obtain the background information needed to produce feature stories.

Murder Is US

Homicides in the US since 9/11: 120,000. Weapon of choice: guns. That's what Bob Herbert wrote recently in the New York Times. FBI statistics show that each year between 16,000 and 17,000 murders occur, and in a state-by-state analysis, firearms are overwhelmingly the primary method.

Number of weapons seized by Mexico in war on drug cartels since 2006: 35,000. Of more than 13,000 guns given by Mexico to the U.S. for tracing, around 90% are either made in the United States or imported into Mexico from the U.S. These weapons played a large part in the 9,000 drug-related murders in Mexico during the past two years.

The Bush administration's misguided obeisance to the National Rifle Association relaxed controls on the sale of assault weapons, the sole purpose of which is to kill. They're not for hunting or self-protection. If lax policy at the federal level isn't bad enough, today only fifteen states require background checks at gun shows. In some states, such as Virginia, only licensed gun dealers must conduct background checks; if an individual wants to sell a gun at a gun show, no background check is required.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that individuals have the right to bear arms. Whether one agrees or not with their interpretation of the troubled Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, regulation of the conditions under which arms may be purchased is another matter. All manner of laws designed to protect the public interest can be imposed. Let tougher laws regulating the sale of weapons with stiff penalties for violators be written and enforced, and let the opponents of regulation fight them in the legal system.

Most Americans appear to hold beliefs that line up with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment, whose language and intent can only be described as flawed, based on the grief it continues to cause. We go along believing that we or our loved ones are unlikely to be victims of gun violence, and so are opposed to restrictions on the free market for firearms. If the numbers were otherwise, politicians would be quick to enact gun-control laws and regulations in the thirty-five states not requiring background checks at gun shows. They could enact policies requiring that individuals who wish to sell guns process the sale through a licensed gun dealer, so that background checks would be required. Licensed gun dealers would be consignment shops for individuals who want to sell guns from their private collection. No more selling guns from the trunk of a car to anyone who walks up with the cash.

There are plenty of smart people and organizations such as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence with great ideas that would balance the rights of hunters and those who want weapons for self-protection with sound public policy programs that would protect public safety in national parks, in public areas, on college campuses. There are also plenty of ideologues who believe that simplistic and unhelpful slogans such as "guns don't kill people, people kill people" are sound contributions to a civil dialogue about how to balance questions of rights and the public interest.

Perhaps one day a different Supreme Court will re-interpret the Constitution and find that its present decision was flawed and should be thrown in the dustbin along with other less-than-stellar decisions from the high bench such as Dred Scott. That future Supreme Court might find that the Constitution provides only that the right to own weapons applies only to those who belong to a well-regulated militia (which I hope would not include members of some 926 active hate groups). Such a finding would not preclude granting individuals permission to own firearms, and the Court might also have some guidance for lawmakers on crafting laws regulating the possession of guns for hunting and self-defense. Until then, we can look forward to reading about tens of thousands of murders annually in the U.S. and Mexico where guns are the method of choice in a culture where violence too often prevails.

In Memoriam: Black Ink

The news is rife with stories about the death of newspapers – survivors write obituaries for their fallen compatriots even as their own circulation and revenues continue to decline. Publishers make brutal demands for concessions from unions, publishers whose leadership and management collectively didn't and still don't understand the Internet. What they do understand is that Google can afford to give its employees a free lunch (and dinner and a plate full of benefits that shames most of corporate America) because they are eating the lunch of the newsprint crowd.

The Wall Street Journal figured it out a few years ago, even before they became a Murdoch enterprise. Little is free other than the first paragraph of most articles – if you want the Journal's news, the online version runs two bucks a week (that's too much for a mass audience, but the WSJ base of business subscribers and affluent readers evidently will pay). The Associated Press has a licensing agreement with Google News. Book publishers, alarmed by Google's drive to digitize all books, took action and came away with a deal that provides them something for the content that Google reproduces. But newspaper publishers, stymied by antitrust laws, tradition, and fear of being left behind even as they're being left behind, continue to put free content on the web and then wonder how to preserve their revenue stream.

When the New York Times put its opinion columnists behind a subscription wall and charged $50 a year for access, they had the right concept but didn't apply it properly. Eventually the Times backed down and made everything free again. The Wall Street Journal simply said "pay up or get your news elsewhere." Just yesterday News Corp, parent of the Wall Street Journal and several other major newspapers worldwide, announced that it would begin sharing content across those properties. The Washington Post is busily trimming and repositioning its print coverage, and trying, along with many of its hidebound competitors - to get its online edition right.

It isn't easy to get the online version in a form easy to read, to navigate, to archive, and to share. Following the lead of some magazines that some years ago started delivering their online versions in a format that reproduced the print version (many using Zinio), the Times experimented with having readers turn the pages onscreen just as though the print version were in their hands. If there's anything worse than having to turn several pages of newsprint while ignoring the ads, it would be doing so online. Magazines, especially those that run all pages of an article consecutively, can do that. Magazines, where in most cases advertising is placed in a block at the back of the publication, can do that.

The New York Times deserves credit for trying to figure out what will work online, and for making substantial efforts to introduce new online formats and services. But until they decide to give up the prestige of being visited by "millions and millions of cats" and start charging, they continue to face the problems of multimillion-dollar losses in their print operations, as is the case with the Boston Glove.

Maybe newspapers could run section A with all the ads, and then have section B contain the news supplement, ad-free (just kidding). The only thing worse for newspapers than shrinking ad revenues is shrinking news coverage; a dilemma they haven't solved. As papers continue to reduce coverage in response to shrinking revenues, they risk losing readership because they won't be providing content. Once they stop providing content of value to readers, they won't be able to go to a pay-to-read model.

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, gave them newspapers an end-game a strategy when he pointed out recently that all any newspaper has to do to keep Google from poaching content is add a single line of code to their web site that tells the Google News software to skip the site. Newspapers collectively, driven by fear in each newsroom that if they take their content out of Google News their competitors will get more coverage, haven't taken such a bold step. But they should. If nobody is paying for content, so there's no revenue, and advertisers are abandoning the ship, exactly what would a publication give up if they decided not to be one of the 25,000 news sources Google claims it continuously updates? If Google's AdSense program was delivering substantial revenues to newspapers, they would have a revenue crisis. So let them pull out. What would be the value of Google News if suddenly its aggregation strategy had no content?

There are moves afoot to create nonprofit newspapers, experiments in taking papers completely online, and attempts to create local-content online media to replace the small-town and metro coverage that has been decimated by the rise of online media. Today there is an article in the New York Times about an effort to create a single payment clearing house for news providers. The big issue is the survival of the fourth estate as a check on government. Who will mind the store? Who will have the deep pockets to fund investigative journalism, to spend time researching material and developing sources to provide deeper coverage of the public interest? Will independent news survive, and where will it originate? With all its warts and failures, print journalism's high-value reporting provides a valuable service even as it has failed to adapt to the rise of new media. Those who appreciate the value of news bureaus, reporters and columnists who can dig into matters of public importance from city hall to foreign affairs should pay. But the papers have to set prices for a global market and take the lead in changing the terms of news readership.

The Hotheads of Faction

It is common for Democrats these days to accuse the Republicans of madness, and recent electoral results suggest that much of the country is inclined to agree. Which serves no one well; for thus marginalized, Republicans cling more fiercely than ever to the very attitudes that led to their current minority status. An unfortunate side effect of being diminished in capacity is that they increasingly turn to the voices that bray most loudly about their complaints, further demonstrating that reason and civil discourse is not part of their lexicon when the subject goes against their ideology.

Democrats are a more fractious group, lacking the honed if shrinking coherence of the Republican base. It is no surprise that those most partisan on the left, having been so thoroughly disenfranchised during years of Republican control of the Congress and the White House, would be bitter and seek revenge. But in the face of the country’s many crises even moderate Democrats who would otherwise welcome a civil dialogue have become exasperated with Republican obliviousness to the fact that the policies they continue to recommend – lower taxes, less government spending, and a perverse insistence that self-reliance is sufficient to overcome all obstacles – are the very policies that are the root cause of our current predicament.

Jonathan Swift, writing about another war, observed that “the issue or events of this war are not so easy to conjecture at; for the present quarrel is so inflamed by the warm heads of either faction, and the pretensions somewhere or other so exorbitant, as not to admit the least overtures of accommodation.” This is where we find ourselves, and it is an unhappy situation for everyone. Republicans, having set the country on the road to ruin with failed domestic policies, unfettered deregulation, and a foreign policy that assumed an arrogant air of global dominance after the fall of the Soviet Union, now complain that Democrats are going to spend away our future. They refuse to see what is necessary to redeem the moment is to spend that which should have been taxed and spent in years past – and that “raising taxes” to levels comparable to what they were under Reagan is hardly an onerous burden on the wealthy. The phrase “raising taxes” is simply code for “let me keep mine” – it is the sign of the privileged and those they dupe into thinking there is some comradeship between country club members and their minimum-wage groundskeepers.

We are in hard times, and hard attitudes are the result. The way forward lies in Republican acceptance of defeat, and Democratic generosity in seeking reconciliation of divergent values and views. But when Republicans continue to crank up the rhetoric of disenfranchisement as though the Democratic Party caused their downfall, and not the voters in the population at large or their own party platform, they invite even those who seek bipartisan solutions to harden their hearts, and their tactics.

The War Crimes Hot Potato

In November, 2008 Philippe Sands, author of “The Torture Team” gave an interview on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where John Yoo, a key lawyer in the Bush administration, now teaches. I doubt that Mr. Yoo was in the audience. The tenor of the interview is dignified and erudite – befitting the qualities that we believe the law demands of its practitioners, leading us to give law the exalted position it rightly deserves when used to further human rights and human dignity, and to adjudicate fairly among competing interests.

The subject of the interview is another matter. Jane Mayer’s “The Bush Six” in the April 13 New Yorker profiles Philippe Sands and his careful discovery of the torturous legal reasoning by which John Yoo, David Addington, and Alberto Gonzales among others concocted legal arguments to meet the aims of senior Bush administration officials. Sands concludes that torture was committed and that the administration’s lawyers are accountable for mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

This might be a tempest in a teapot and fit material only for political partisans in the United States, were it not for recent developments in Spain, where Spanish courts successfully asserted jurisdiction over human rights abuses committed in Chile by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Though Spain was unsuccessful in winning extradition of Pinochet from London to stand trial in Madrid, the Spanish indictment was enough cause for Great Britain to put Pinochet under house arrest in London for 17 months. Later the Chilean Supreme Court stripped Pinochet of immunity and pressed the charges against him. Although courts in London and Chile found him too ill to stand trial, the case, Mayers writes, “became a turning point in international law, establishing the principle that there is no immunity even for the highest-ranking former government officials when they are accused of torture.”

There’s a big difference between charging a former head of state with civil and criminal crimes committed under his direct orders, and holding lawyers and senior aides liable for advice they gave to their political superiors. But Sands argues that when lawyers do not give sound legal advice and the result is a crime, the lawyers may be liable for the criminal acts themselves. They are complicit. The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee found that “. . . senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” In other words, officials sought advice on how to twist the law to their own ends, showing disregard or disrespect for the law itself. This is what Sands finds objectionable in the behavior of the Bush Six.

Though President Obama has said that he wants to go forward and not look back, if the Spanish inquiry results in warrants or indictments the Obama administration will be put in a delicate position. It will face the choice to continue the Bush administration’s claim of a unitary executive power and to disregard international law, or to recognize international law and either place those named in the warrants under house arrest or to extradite them. Or the Obama Justice Department may launch its own internal investigation to forestall the need to respond to international events. If Baltasar Garzon (the Spanish judge who pressed the case against Pinochet) finds cause to proceed against former U.S. government officials, it may give the Obama administration cover for something it would like to do, but does not want to pursue now at the expense of so large a domestic agenda with an economy in turmoil and drives to reform finance, energy, health care, and education.

There are partisans on both sides of this issue, with temperatures raised to the point where an egg would fry on the hood of one of the vintage Chevrolets that General Motors auctioned off this week. But when the general in charge of investigating abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison uses the words “war crimes” and when the CIA conveniently destroys nearly one hundred videotapes of aggressive interrogation that might document torture conducted by the United States, it looks like a cover-up. Perhaps an inquiry by an ally who has also suffered from terrorism might help us uncover what is behind all this. However noble the goals of protecting the United States may have been, the means used during the Bush “war on terror” have damaged our moral standing, undercut the principles of international law upon which all countries rely, and provided our enemies with better recruiting tools than they could themselves have created.

Celebrity Culture and Conflicted Values

Star athletes get millions or tens of millions of dollars a year and we pay hundreds of dollars for game tickets and five dollars for a ten-cent soft drink, seven dollars for a one-dollar beer. Billionaire owners bring us sports entertainment and swear that they’ll relocate their teams if they can’t extort public monies to help them build fancy new stadium facilities.

Movie stars get millions of dollars for each film they make, and we pay ten dollars to see the movie and another ten or twenty dollars for fifty cents worth of soda, popcorn, and candy. Then the DVD comes out and it’s another ten to twenty dollars to own.

Rock stars, rappers, the elites of the arts (no matter how struggling the artist who is not a celebrity): let’s not even go there.

In these cases, we have only ourselves to blame for high costs. We make celebrities with our discretionary dollars, and their triumph is a sign that labor can sometimes win in battles with management, even if the result for the consumer is a pyrrhic victory, because owners and financiers pass along their costs in higher tickets prices and concessions. But its money we choose to spend. No one forces us to go to the movies, the ball game, or the concert. And with so many movies, sporting events, so much music, we have plenty of choice in where we spend our money.

So where did the misguided notion that those who manage our non-discretionary dollars – our pensions, our retirement funds, our insurance premiums (which in the case of homes and cars we are required to pay) – should be rewarded as though they were entertainers? We need those dollars to be as safe and reliable as the water supply, the electricity, telephones, roads and traffic signals, and social security. Managing our financial future is a utility function – not a high-risk short-term fling with bling.

The concentration of wealth in the financial system runs counter to the accumulation of wealth in entertainment. Entertainers face tremendous competition for our discretionary expenditures. Athletes have some negotiating power but are still owned – and traded – by the team franchise. There is (aside from the fanaticism of home-town teams and tribal loyalties) choice, which can be fickle.

Deregulation of financial services, choice disappeared and our risk increased. Instead of healthy competition among many competitors across different sectors, we got intensified competition among giants, and greed replaced need. Sure, said the free-market forces, let the banks become stockbrokers, the brokers become banks; let them become insurers not only of our property and lives but of their own obligations. After all, we’ll all make money.

We now know what happens when King Kong and Godzilla fight on Wall Street. We know the caliber of individual that lust for wealth pulls to our financial centers, and we see in our own greed for outsize gains in our investment portfolios the results of putting too much trust in too few competitors, of not having strict and transparent regulatory regimes.

Paul Krugman suggests that “banking should be boring,” by which he means we should stop glorifying and approving celebrity-size salaries and bonuses for those whose job it is to manage our money and be custodians of the financial system. He’s pessimistic about the possibility of substantial regulatory reform because oligarchs of both parties kowtow to the mystique of inscrutable numbers in the investment game. Let’s hope that the Congress gets it right when they legislate a new set of regulations to curb the excesses – if not the appetites – of the financial sector.

Immigration Is a Humanitarian Issue

We complain about illegal workers in the United States, and the chorus is swelling now that millions of Americans are out of work. But we also drive down to the corner where undocumented immigrants hang out, and hire them at bargain rates to do the yard work that we don’t want to pay the landscaping firm to do; to clean up the trash we don’t want to pay licensed haulers to do; to paint, wash, scrub and do whatever we ask that we don’t want to pay legitimate small businesses to do.

We don’t give these workers benefits, insurance, or living wages. And often we abuse them – not paying as promised, not returning them to where we picked them up. The Department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano recently dealt immigrants and employers a new hand when dealing with illegal workers such as these. She released the workers arrested in a raid and gave them work permits, and said that DHS would focus not on workers but on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The news is breaking that President Obama is considering adding immigration reform to the list of important issues to address sooner rather than later. 

If employers faced sanctions for sloppy or willfully criminal hiring practices, undocumented immigrants would not get work. Then the magnitude and scope of the problem would land in the appropriate place: it would be seen as a humanitarian crisis. They would be people bereft of opportunity to feed their families in their home countries, or fleeing drug or political violence, seeking shelter and opportunity, as they have for more than two centuries, in the United States.

Our choice is to help those in need, or deny them food, shelter and medical care at a time when they are most destitute. There are millions around the world in refugee status, fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Indonesia, repressive states of all colors and stripes. It is time to acknowledge that we have refugees that for various reasons have landed in American without benefit of State Department approval.

Yes, we have tent cities growing up in Sacramento and around other urban areas, where American citizens who have lost their homes, jobs, incomes, health insurance and more are now living on the edge, swelling the ranks of the homeless. And if we had decent unemployment insurance – and states with humane politicians instead of churls who turn down federal stimulus aid because it extends unemployment benefits ; if we had universal health care; if we had decent social safety nets for our own citizens, the false competition between undocumented residents and American citizens would not create such wildfires across the political landscape.

Failure to address immigration reform because of cries that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from jobless Americans is a failure to treat all human beings on American soil with dignity and respect. The selfish cry to kick out illegal workers because they take jobs from displaced American workers blames the victim – twice.

When we don’t enact health coverage for everyone, when we don’t provide unemployment and other benefits to displaced workers, we blame our own neighbors and friends for the misfortune that has befallen them. That is a humanitarian problem, a problem that calls into question the religious principles of so many denominations across this country, and the intersection between religion and politics.

If we provided for the less fortunate among our own citizenry, and delivered appropriate enforcement and penalties to individuals and employers who hired undocumented, illegal workers, perhaps out-of-work Americans would be happy to have work spreading mulch, washing houses, painting, doing the odd jobs that provide basic income in times of distress. If displaced American workers took on these jobs, which in better times they looked down upon, the illegal workers would be displaced – they would become refugees on our shores.

We would then see clearly – rather than politically – the moral choices before us. Feed, shelter, and care for the needy – or turn our backs on them and let them starve, let them grow sick and not have medical care, let their children grow up uneducated and doomed to a life of poverty, crime, and possibly, susceptible to the ideologies of terrorism. Sending them all home is neither practical nor humane. Learning how to care and share is the American way.

The Running of the Bulls

The Republican Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, has turned the halls of the Pentagon's procurement program into the streets of Pamplona in spring. Every defense contractor and member of Congress with jobs at stake in their district or state (read: all) will be out to gore someone as they run from the paddock to the ring. Some will seek to gore political targets such as Mr. Gates and President Obama; they will all be out to draw blood from their competitors.

Mr. Gates has brought sanity to a madcap race that saw defense spending double in the eight years since 9/11. U.S. military spending is more than the next 25 nations combined, many of whom are allies. In 1953 the noted historian Arnold Toynbee published a slim book called "The World and the West." He argued that for the past several hundred years Western civilization has been on a nationalistic and militaristic rampage that has provoked opposition among other cultures as they sought self-preservation. This is a legacy that the United States now dominates. Now that we are not only the largest spender on military weapons and defense systems, but the largest vendor of the same, his small volume speaks loudly and affirms President Eisenhower's admonition that we are in thrall to the military-industrial complex.

The 14% budget increase proposed by armed forces leaders working with their defense contractor cronies that flies in the face of common sense and the economic straits in which we find ourselves. Its priorities emphasized weapons systems at the expense of what our fighting forces say they needed on the ground, in the air, and at sea. The soldier, sailor, and pilot got lost in the din of lobbyists selling fancy systems and politicians trying to bring jobs home at the expense of what we could do in the fighting theaters around the globe. The proposed budget was not about defending America, it was about defending revenues and profit streams for defense contractors. Thank goodness Secretary Gates took a stand against procurement programs with inertia and politics behind them.

He didn't shrink defense expenditures; they will stay at current levels with adjustments for inflation. But he put an emphasis on personnel, including increases in special forces; on communications; and on theater-specific systems such as the drones that allow surveillance and strike capabilities without the need to engage on the ground. He's capping next-generation fighters (the F-22) for a generation of F-35 fighters that still will dominate airspace and with nearly 2,500 planes will have greater numbers to project American force around the world.

A measure of sanity for those of us who are spectators as the running of the bulls begins.

Civility and Marriage

Iowa has just created a new industry, and for at least the next two years will be a destination for same-sex couples wishing to marry. This is a good thing – good for Iowa, and good for the rest of the country. Iowa has demonstrated that fundamental acceptance of human rights is not limited to residents of just two coastal states, but reaches into the American heartland. The Iowa Supreme Court found that the state could not demonstrate a compelling reason why gay and lesbian couples should not have the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples.

Kathryn Seelye points out that Iowa has a long history of being first on issues of social importance. Iowa abolished slavery more than a decade before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; it was desegregating schools nearly 90 years before Brown vs. Board of Education reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1954 managed to reclaim some dignity after the shameful Dred Scott decision of 1857. Iowa often gets it right before the rest of the country catches up.

The issue of civil unions and gay marriage reveals the trap into which we have fallen. There can be no happy outcome when secular and religious forces line up at the barricades of the culture wars. But throughout history, while religions have often been instrumental in advancing civil liberties, they have also often obstructed the progress of human rights when doctrinal orthodoxy prevails. There can be no happy outcome when religious values clash, as they have recently in Fairfax, Virginia over a request by the Islamic Saudi Academy for permits to add new buildings to its campus. The state has a compelling interest in reducing religious conflicts in order to maintain civil order, and in asserting the primacy of civil law.

Switzerland found a solution to religious wars hundreds of years ago. Faced with continuing clashes between Catholic and Protestant partisans, the Swiss enshrined freedom of religion in their constitution. Marriage in Switzerland has long been a civil function, not a religious one. All marriages are performed by the civil authorities. Church ceremonies are just that, ceremonies without any binding legal power. Those who wish to have a church ceremony and have their union blessed by members of their faith are free to do so – but it is the civil marriage that conveys rights and responsibilities. Same-sex unions are recognized in Switzerland and same-sex partners have the same legal rights as heterosexual partners.

The state puts itself in an untenable situation when trying to adjudicate among the doctrinal teachings of various religions, and on such an important matter as marriage, everyone loses. Taking marriage out of the culture wars and making it a matter of civil affairs by removing all religions from obtaining any binding legal status for their marriage ceremonies – including Christian, Muslim, and Mormon faiths – is a solution more respectful of individual rights and one that promises a more equal footing for competing religious sects than our current social order delivers.

Groupthink and Beautiful Minds

In search of solutions to an intractable problem – how will the fluttering of a butterfly in China affect global credit markets? – the elite financiers of Wall Street, envied by their Federal Reserve colleagues who worked for fixed salaries, turned to mathematical wizards. Nearly everyone turned out to be as befuddled as the members of King Arthur’s court when a Connecticut Yankee showed up. In Mark Twain’s novel, science wins the day; in our economic and deregulatory fiasco, voodoo was ascendant. As David Brooks points out, there are competing narratives of greed and stupidity that try to explain what happened. He comes down on the side of stupidity, linked closely to hubris.

I share his view that (leaving ideology aside) stupidity provides a more accessible plot line – that the brightest minds on Wall Street and in Washington proved to be “overeducated beyond their intelligence,” as a friend of mine used to say. But I think Brooks too quickly dismisses greed; does it have to be and either-or choice?  He argues that manifest greed is like a form of oligarchic behavior, in which small groups conspire to be self-serving, and as has been shown in the bailout of financial institutions, self-preserving. But the syllogism doesn’t work; he’s arguing that “if greed is like oligarchy, and Wall Street bankers are not oligarchs, then Wall Street bankers are not greedy.”

It seems to me greed is simpler than that, and that if a group as a whole acts greedy, it is still a fundamental problem of the selfish individual. Aggregating greedy individuals doesn’t remove greed, it just compounds it, and the selfish do not become oligarchs merely by possessing the common attribute of being greedy.

Now, greed as one of the seven deadly sins may be genetically encoded – a meme simply seeking its own destiny – but we create social structures in the hope that with nurture we can mitigate the worst of nature and amplify the best. It is clear that two dominant social structures, religion and education, have failed us. Let’s leave the details of that argument for another time. But neither the importance of religion in American life, or of education, have served us well as social structures designed to increase one’s compassion and concern for the well-being of others, and to work for the common good.

The real problem is that no one on Wall Street or at the Fed wanted to do hard work; easy money was too near at hand. A close reading of Felix Salmon’s article “Recipe for Disaster” reveals that rather than doing the hard, if not impossible, work of calculating risk factors and hoping to get all the significant measures into the equation, David X. Li chose to simplify the problem. He took the prices that the market created – prices presumably created by numerous investors and risk managers who had used their own imperfect formulae – and then, using those prices, claimed to derive the underlying risk. The problem with this is that it created a positive feedback loop. The more everyone agreed, the less risk was perceived. Li used secondary data – the emerging group opinion – rather than economic fundamentals and something that would account for external influences, such as massive job losses and defaults, the economic equivalent of a tsunami. So when everyone turned out to be wrong, the result was catastrophic.

I’m reminded of the great film scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence conceives of a campaign to attack the port city of Aqaba from the desert rather than by sea. Aqaba’s Ottoman occupiers held the conventional wisdom that the desert was sufficient protection against attack, and so were not prepared when Lawrence and Sharif Hussein brought their forces against the town from the desert. The Wall Street elites, in concert with their Federal Reserve overseers, fell victim to the same kind of error. Desperate to increase their market share, and their outsize compensation, Wall Street hired brilliant mathematicians to work the risk problem, and Li’s algorithm won the day. In the economic boom that proved to be a bubble, high finance and unbridled capitalism became the credo of American success. But all the wizardry in Li’s “Gaussian copula function” said was “if you all agree, then it must be good,” and the more the traders and financial products arbitrageurs convinced investors that their magic potion was the best, the better it got.

That was then; and we’re now living through the disastrous results of greed combined with stupidity and pride. Tim Geithner helped deregulate the financial markets while at the New York Fed, and now he’s supposed to fix the very problems for which he shares responsibility. I hope he succeeds. He’s acknowledged his failure while at the Fed, which is more than we’ve heard from most on Wall Street. Perhaps he has the smarts, the political acumen, and will win from the Congress the reforms necessary to prevent greed and stupidity from continuing to savage our economy and the lives of so many now without jobs or health care. At least he’s not on the schedule for a multimillion-dollar retention bonus.

Leadership Lacunae? Not With Reconciliation.

The Economist led this week with two articles on Barack Obama's assumption of the presidency, "Learning the Hard Way" and "Coming Down to Earth." The world is looking for leadership from the United States even as they send a message that says "you could learn from us, too." President Obama seems off to a good start at the G20 meeting in London where he said he had come "not to lecture, but to listen."

Perhaps it was America's "voracious economy" and outsized capitalist egos that provoked the global economic meltdown. Nevertheless, banks and investors the world over went along with the derivatives and credit-default swap scams – so none of them, if they truly have people with the smarts on which they stake their reputations, is free of guilt or free to blame the fall or push the responsibility for redemption solely onto the United States. Do we need reform of the regulatory regime worldwide, to see that finance is more equitably managed and wealth more equitably distributed? Absolutely. Does the United States need to provide a social structure more helpful to wage-earners and the less fortunate so that their living conditions and health are not threatened by risks the wealthy take to further enrich themselves? Absolutely.

Absent the social traditions of Europe, America's responsibility is to move quickly to redress the grievances of those whose livelihoods and wellbeing have been upended by job losses attributable to the economic crisis. Globalization should not be stopped; its effects, however, can be mitigated with policy revisions at the country level, and through international regimes. Jobs will continue to move around the globe as companies seek lower production costs and higher returns for investors, and there's not much that can or should be done about that. Opposing globalization for protection of local interests ignores the realities and benefits of providing work and economic opportunity for all.

One can't fight narco-terrorists in Mexico or Afghanistan as long as they provide a better standard of living than civil governments or aid programs that rely on agricultural production that gets the local population caught in the endless farm subsidies and subsistence crop wars in which nearly every government is involved.

On the labor-management front, it will take significant reform of tax policies to eliminate safe havens and ensure that corporations pay taxes in all jurisdictions in which they conduct business to mitigate the situation. In global finance and banking, the Swiss resist calls for more transparency in their banking system by pointing out that the U.S. allows corporations to hide ownership in plain sight by registering in Delaware.

Where is leadership lacking? The Economist suggests that President Obama has been slow to take up the mantle. They also acknowledge that Republicans are rudderless. The budget battle now underway is the leading front in the leadership war. It is time for the president and the Democrats to stop seeking bipartisan solutions; it is clear that the Republicans are holding to the failed policies and the failed rhetoric of the past. President Obama's proposed budget should be passed, and the results judged as they come in. We cannot both ask for leadership and change, and then, when a bold proposal comes forth, say "Oh, but we didn't mean that much leadership or change."

John McCain reminded his Republican colleagues that they used their majority powers and the budget reconciliation procedure to force President Bush's tax cuts down the throat of minority Democrats. McCain said: "Republicans began this, and it was the wrong thing to do. It was a wrong thing to do, and sometimes you reap what you sow." If Republicans continue to be the party of "No" and to offer only quixotic proposals such as repealing the economic stimulus package, or their tired old tropes of "lower taxes, smaller government" it's difficult to believe that they are sincerely interested in bipartisan governance. Absent constructive proposals, made in public so they are open to public scrutiny and debate, it's time to put the Republicans out of the room, close the doors and pass the legislation needed to move the country forward on health care, education, energy and other issues.