Browsing PBH By Articles

Burma’s New Openness & India

The Article: Burmese Days by Shashi Tharoor in Al Jazeera.

The Text: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Myanmar, noted largely for a memorable photo opportunity with a wan but smiling Aung San Suu Kyi, signalled a significant change in the geopolitics surrounding a land that has faced decades of isolation, sanctions and widespread condemnation for its human-rights violations.

Twenty-one years ago, after Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) swept a general election, the results were annulled, the party’s leaders and workers were incarcerated or exiled, and two decades of ruthless – and remarkably opaque – military rule followed. This year has witnessed political opening, the release of several prominent political prisoners, and evidence of self-assertion by the nominally civilian government (headed by a former general, Thien Sein). Suu Kyi’s announcement of her intention to contest a by-election to the new parliament offers a glimmer of hope that democrats could use the fledgling political process to create something resembling genuine representative government.

Myanmar’s military rulers are cynically hoping to use Suu Kyi’s participation in the parliamentary process to bolster the illusion of freedom while continuing to exercise real control. But such exercises in “managed democratisation” – in places as different as Iran, Indonesia and the Soviet Union – have often surprised their would-be manipulators. It is clearly in the interests of both India and the United States to seize this opportunity. While China has always been much more comfortable dealing with a military regime, India’s embrace of the junta has been more reluctant, based on reasons of geography rather than shared ideals.

Guarded optimism for Myanmar reforms

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Remembering Christopher Hitchens

The Article: Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 by Christopher Buckley in Vanity Fair.

The Text: We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that “benison” is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

A few years later, we found ourselves living in the same city, Washington. I had come to work in an Administration; he had come to undo that Administration. Thirty years later, I was voting for Obama and Christopher had become one of the most forceful, and persuasive, advocates for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. How did that happen?

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends? I only once stopped speaking to him, because of a throwaway half-sentence about my father-in-law in one of his Harper’s essays. I missed his company during that six-month froideur (another Christopher mot). It was about this time that he discovered that he was in fact Jewish, which somewhat complicated his fierce anti-Israel stance. When we embraced, at the bar mitzvah of Sidney Blumenthal’s son, the word “Shalom” sprang naturally from my lips.

A few days ago, when I was visiting him at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, for what I knew would be the last time, his wife, Carol, mentioned to me that Sidney had recently written to Christopher. I was surprised but very pleased to hear this. Christopher had caused Sidney great legal and financial grief during the Götterdämmerung of the Clinton impeachment. But now Sidney, a cancer experiencer himself, was reaching out to his old friend with words of tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness. This was the act of a mensch. But then Christopher was like that—it was hard, perhaps impossible, to stay mad at him, though I doubt Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton or any member of the British Royal Family will be among the eulogists at his memorial service.

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Conservatives’ Contradictory Take on Christianity

The Christmas trees are skinny this year.

It’s the end of 2011: laden with recessions, lay offs, and pay cuts, no amount of tinsel or red ribbon can distract Americans from the chilling menace of impending winter or the rocky road to economic recovery that awaits. Nor can Americans be distracted from the fact that they are struggling.

One in every two Americans is either living in poverty or qualifies as low-income status. The middle class is shrinking. Conversely, salaries in Congress have only risen, as have the salaries of CEOs. As a result, in the season of giving the only things the majority of Americans receive are increased economic hardships, disappointment, and all-consuming fear. And with the thin-blanketed proposals made on behalf of so-called Christian conservatives that will hit Americans in the dead of winter, a question remains: is this really what Jesus would do?

The Vanishing Act of the Middle Class

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Managing The Shift Of The US Economy

The Article: The Book of Jobs by Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair.

The Text: It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.

The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.

Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.

The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.

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My Predestined Date With Shamanism

I was lucky enough to score an extra ticket to a modern shamanism class in Los Angeles. What I knew of shamanism prior to the intro course was limited at best and while I like to be spontaneous, I also like to be prepared. I tried to research the event itself but also knew that the lower expectations that I had, the better. Luckily, there wasn’t much information on the event, so I was going rogue. My friend Julie and I talked the night before to discuss our plan of attack and the car situation so that when we walked in wearing yoga pants and leggings compared to everyone else’s Levi’s and boots, we would at least be partner pariahs. And that’s exactly what happened.

Quickly disposing of our corporate Starbucks coffee cups in fear of being judged by hemp-loving, incense-burning, damn-the-Man hippies, we walked into the Manhattan Beach Marriott. The room was markedly less Marriott than anticipated: an ambiance that consisted of a 30-chair circle and a maraca rattling, rain stick thrusting, and indigenous Amazonian drum pounding ditty awaited us.

In the car, Julie joked that it was going to be one of those, “I see your light, and I appreciate you” workshops and it seemed to be the case. For a hot second I thought I’d be a real jackass and use this as an excuse to practice my comedic repertoire on the cheap. I’d play the straight man and ask the shaman questions as if he were a World of Warcraft expert: Do you throw lightning bolts? Can you see into the world of spirits and communicate with creatures invisible to eyes of mere mortals? When did you discover this other realm? On Draenor, now shattered Outland, the orcs were shamanistic; on Azeroth, trolls and tauren were shamanistic. Though shamanism on Azeroth flourished and still continues to, shamanism on Draenor was all but extinct by the time of the great crossing of the Horde into Azeroth via the Dark Portal. Your thoughts, sir?

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