There’s growing support for fighting global economic stagnation and global warming simultaneously with a “green New Deal” nationally and globally. Investing to cut greenhouse gasses can create “green jobs” and provide fiscal stimulus while it is protecting the planet. But how is it going to be paid for?
The international financial crisis has shaken the self-confidence of the managers of the international financial system. Their frantic efforts to prop up the global financial system and stimulate national economies are noteworthy, not only for the magnitude of the funds they are throwing at the problem but also for demonstrating they don’t seem to fully understand the system that they created. Their confusion is producing the best opportunity in 60 years to create a more socially and environmentally responsible international financial order.
Since the end to the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, many other wars have been waged, in other parts of the world, in new terrain, villages, and communities. Yet, the wars in Southeast Asia lingers.
Pilot to Bombardier,
are the boulevards burning?
The out-of-Dodge roads? We feel
still heavy with payload,
though smoke whispers
of smoldering — of hamlets
and metropolises aflame.
Pilot to bombardier, I remember
kissing my wife in the hanger,
remember you brushing the bomb
like some mother delivering
her son to his first school day —
gravely aware the guidance
systems of his eyes would come
on-line after the short time
out of your arms, learning.
Pilot to Bombardier (you would never
proffer your child to a burning schoolhouse)
why are we flying, cradling meteoric clusters,
over lands already bursting with war-
heads and small arms fire
and child soldiers and students
of battle and all their constant hopes
that the blast we carry might be
the one to eradicate enemy and enemy
alike? — a shockwave to slow all
air and artillery until they drop
harmless as Mars’ iron tears.
Pilot to Bombardier, we’re losing
altitude. We’re going down. Mayday,
mayday, the earth calls to us.
According to some pundits, U.S. reengagement with the largely unreformed and unrepentant Indonesian military is the best way to promote reform and human rights. The Wall Street Journal Asia, for instance, called on President-elect Barack Obama "to stand down liberal senators and interest groups" for seeking conditions on military assistance to Indonesia. "Indonesia’s military has certainly had human rights problems in the past," the editorial states, but urges the incoming administration to forget about them in the name of building an alliance on the "global war on terror."
The Obama administration and incoming 111th Congress should indeed change course on Indonesia. It should put human rights at the forefront of U.S. policy. This would contribute more to encouraging democratic reform and human rights accountability in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country than any amount of military training or weapons. Indonesians who view the military as a chief roadblock to greater reform will be grateful.
Madeleine Albright once famously asked then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, "What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?" Much the same could be demanded of the European Union’s nascent military formations, strong on paper but chimerical when it comes to actual deployment. These formations — officially called "battle groups" in a warlike impulse at odds with their record thus far — risk being nothing more than accessories for an organization that seeks to assume the trappings, if not always the responsibilities, of a global player. That risk becomes greater if the EU chooses not to use its military to ameliorate the latest increase in bloodshed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
John McCain and his "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" lost the presidential election. George W. Bush and his view of Iran as an "evil" nation will soon leave the White House. Barack Obama could open a new chapter in U.S.-Iranian relations by visiting Iran. He wouldn’t be alone.
The G-20’s “Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy,” held in Washington on November 15, gave world powers a chance to coordinate their responses to the burgeoning international financial crisis and accompanying ills in real economies around the globe but produced a long, vague, and telling declaration, devoid of meaningful commitments to change business as usual.
A recent New York Times editorial gives China broad advice on the economic and financial crises, most of it wrong. Headlined “As Goes China, so Goes…” (an allusion to the old U.S. presidential election bromide, “As goes Maine, so goes the Nation), the editorial distills the essence of the macroeconomists’ conventional wisdom about the proper future direction of the Chinese economy: reduce exports, expand imports, and create a modern consumer economy. The Times implies that China’s government budget surplus, high individual savings rate, and endless consumer and social welfare needs make the task easy, if only Chinese policymakers would catch on. In fact, this transformation would be far more disruptive. Moreover, neither China nor the world can survive the creation of a clone of the 20th-century U.S. economy in the coming era of high-cost energy and low-carbon footprints.