Browsing PBH By Articles

The Beautiful Banality Of Tunisian Politics

The Article: The Beauty of Tunisia’s New Political Banality by Hussein Ibish in Now Lebanon.

The Text: I’ve been appearing on television talk shows for more than 12 years and I’ve never found them to be an emotional experience, until last Sunday, that is.

During a routine program on Al-Hurra reviewing recent events in Tunisia, I was suddenly overwhelmed by an astonishing realization: For the first time in my life, I was having a conversation about politics in an Arab state that was entirely normal, modern and healthy.

For the first half-hour or so, I found myself in the middle of an argument with Al-Nahda MP Abd al-Lateeh al-Makki and another representative of his party on one side, and Democratic National Movement MP Tawfic Ayashi on the other. Naturally, they were quarreling about the new 26-clause temporary constitution passed by the Constitutional Assembly that now serves as the parliament.

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The Cannibalism Of The One Percent

The Article: The View From The 1 Percent by Tom Ehrich in the Washington Post.

The Text: Now that the financial industry and major corporations have successfully lobbied Congress to make more people poor and to keep them that way, they are discovering the downside of unbridled greed: people are too broke to buy their products.

Heavy discounts were necessary to stimulate sales on Black Friday — a stimulus that lost steam as the big shopping weekend proceeded. Now further discounts will be required. That bodes ill for retailers, as well as for their suppliers.

It’s one thing to own Congress, but it’s something else when consumers refuse to buy. They’re staying home, maybe shopping online; they’re not investing, not saving, not selling their houses, not feeling confident about their own jobs.

In a freer free-market economy, competitors would emerge to resolve these problems. But corporate giants do everything possible to stifle competition. Consider Verizon’s bid to buy $3.6 billion of unused wireless spectrum to prevent anyone else from having it.

Thus we see the demise of modern capitalism, brought down not by socialists or fringe elements, but by the capitalists themselves.

Their self-defeating behavior — like that of any addict — has led them into the delusional belief that they can have it all. They can kill prosperity, stifle competition, rig capital creation into an insider game, undermine countervailing forces — and yet somehow the great market will continue to shower wealth on them.

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Why The SEC Hasn’t Moved Against Financial Institutions

The Article: In defense of the SEC– no, really by Finance Addict.

The Text: “’We do not admit the allegations,’ Karp said, to laughter in the standing-room-only courtroom. ‘But if it’s any consolation, we don’t deny them.’”

Some consolation. This statement was made last week by a lawyer that Citigroup hired to defend itself against SEC allegations of fraud. The SEC maintains that Citi stuffed a CDO with mortgages that it knew would go bad, sold the CDO to investors without revealing the extent of its role and then set up a $500 million trade for itself that would pay off once the expected losses occurred. The CDO investors eventually lost $700 million. But rather than taking Citi to trial, the SEC would prefer to settle the case for $285 million and assurances that Citi won’t do it again.

The SEC is being forced by New York federal judge Jed Rakoff to defend this approach. While judges typically rubberstamp these settlements, Rakoff has a reputation for putting the SEC on the hot seat. His pointed questions highlight the abysmal job that the SEC has done in holding serial offenders to account. Why doesn’t the SEC ever go to trial to get to the bottom of its claims? How can justice be done if the offenders never admit wrongdoing? According to BusinessWeek:

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The Empty Branding Of The GOP

Among the many problems plaguing contemporary American politics is the proliferation of sound bite politics. The purpose of a sound bite is to capture the essence of a larger issue in the form of a single word or phrase; to simplify otherwise complex issues into quotable, easily-digestible buzzwords. Unfortunately, one need not look any further than the current GOP debates to see examples of this political pollution.

The recent GOP debates have provided fertile ground for the cultivation of various sound bites and buzzwords. Herman Cain branded himself with his “9-9-9” comprehensive tax reform plan and strategically plugged it into many of his speeches and debate responses. Championing the initiative not only for its simplicity and transparency but also for its effectiveness in reducing taxes, Cain and his litany-like recital of its principles actually ignored larger socioeconomic factors that necessitate a more nuanced tax code; in fact, economists have concluded that 9-9-9 would raise taxes for the majority of Americans .

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Understanding Iran

The Article: If you lived in Iran, wouldn’t you want the nuclear bomb? by Mehdi Hasan in the Guardian.

The Text: Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.

On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America’s Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to “attack Iran” and “cut off the head of the snake”.

Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents.

The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.

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