The Living Room

Illusions and Plunder

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Michaela

Meltdown-The men who crashed the world

The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.

Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Financial system, Greed, housing crisis, recklessness, Wall Street | Leave a comment

Peace Now, or Never

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Michaela

By Ehud Olmert

As the United Nations General Assembly opens this year, I feel uneasy. An unnecessary diplomatic clash between Israel and the Palestinians is taking shape in New York, and it will be harmful to Israel and to the future of the Middle East.

I know that things could and should have been different.

I truly believe that a two-state solution is the only way to ensure a more stable Middle East and to grant Israel the security and well-being it desires. As tensions grow, I cannot but feel that we in the region are on the verge of missing an opportunity — one that we cannot afford to miss.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, plans to make a unilateral bid for recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations on Friday. He has the right to do so, and the vast majority of countries in the General Assembly support his move. But this is not the wisest step Mr. Abbas can take.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared publicly that he believes in the two-state solution, but he is expending all of his political effort to block Mr. Abbas’s bid for statehood by rallying domestic support and appealing to other countries. This is not the wisest step Mr. Netanyahu can take.

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Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, Middle East, Palestinian people, United Nations General Assembly | 1 Comment

The Beauty of Death

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Michaela

By Khalil Gibran

Part I: The Parting

Let me sleep, for my soul is intoxicated with love and
Let me rest, for my spirit has had its bounty of days and nights;
Light the candles and burn the incense around my bed, and
Scatter leaves of jasmine and roses over my body;
Embalm my hair with frankincense and sprinkle my feet with perfume,
And read what the hand of Death has written on my forehead.

Let me rest in the arms of Slumber, for my open eyes are tired;
Let the silver-stringed lyre quiver and soothe my spirit;
Weave from the harp and lute a veil around my withering heart.

Sing of the past as you behold the dawn of hope in my eyes, for
It’s magic meaning is a soft bed upon which my heart rests.

Dry your tears, my friends, and raise your heads as the flowers
Raise their crowns to greet the dawn.
Look at the bride of Death standing like a column of light
Between my bed and the infinite;
Hold your breath and listen with me to the beckoning rustle of
Her white wings.

Come close and bid me farewell; touch my eyes with smiling lips.
Let the children grasp my hands with soft and rosy fingers;
Let the ages place their veined hands upon my head and bless me;
Let the virgins come close and see the shadow of God in my eyes,
And hear the echo of His will racing with my breath.

Heureka

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Michaela

Greek Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos: “We haven’t realised the dangers. The dangers are not that our income has been reduced, the danger is not that pensions are being reduced or the value of property. The dangers are not that the real estate market might disintegrate, or that we will have problems in other sectors of production, the danger is that the whole system collapses.”

Indeed. The danger is that the whole system collapses. But that may be the good news.

Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | 1 Comment

Perfect Storm

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Michaela

By Mark Levine

Perhaps the title isn’t fair. The storm that awaits Barack Obama at the UN is not entirely of his own creation.

He did not create half a century of US foreign policy based on support for authoritarianism and occupation in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds. It was not Obama, but his predecessors – going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who cosied up to the Saudis and promised them unlimited protection in return for unlimited access to all that oil.

It was not Obama but Richard Nixon who put geostrategic considerations ahead of pushing for a robust and fair negotiating process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, when there were only a few settlements and Israelis and Palestinians had not yet moved towards ideological extremism and terrorism as their chosen means of communication.

It was not Obama but Jimmy Carter who toasted the Shah’s health in 1977, as Iran was primed to explode in revolutionary fervour (Mr Carter’s introductory joke – “There’s one thing I can say about the Shah: He knows how to draw a crowd”, – did turn out to be prescient, but not in ways he imagined). Carter did set a very high bar with the Camp David Accords – more than half of which were devoted to the Palestinian issue – but he never pressed Israel to honour the spirit of the Accords once it became clear that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had no intention of doing so. This was a mistake that quite possibly cost Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat his life.

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Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Barack Obama, Israel, Middle East, Palestinian people, United Nations | Leave a comment

The dogmatist

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Michaela

From ” Der Spiegel”

One thing is already clear: The two men will be all smiles when they meet.

If all goes according to plan, German President Christian Wulff will greet the pope at 11:15 a.m. this Thursday in front of Bellevue Palace, the president’s official residence in Berlin. Photographers and cameramen will be eagerly jostling for the best spots, security teams will be intently scanning the area, and Wulff will shake his guest’s hand with the proper degree of decorum.

But what will happen next? What will the German head of state and the leader of the Roman Catholic Church talk about when they meet for the first time, shortly after Benedict XVI’s landing in Berlin? Will they talk about the fact that Wulff, a practicing Catholic, is divorced and remarried, a fact that, under the current rules of the Church, excludes him from receiving Communion?

Will Benedict XVI address the sensitive issue in his speech before the German parliament, the Bundestag, that afternoon? Although about 100 Bundestag members plan to boycott his address, Gerda Hasselfeldt, the Catholic chairwoman of the conservative Christian Social Union’s group in the Bundestag, will be there without fail. Hasselfeldt is also divorced and has remarried. So has the leader of her party, Horst Seehofer, who also fathered an illegitimate child, and Oskar Lafontaine, the former co-chairman of the Left Party and a former Jesuit school pupil.

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Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Berlin, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Dogma, Pope Benedict XVI | Leave a comment

Unstoppable ?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Michaela

From the Economist

So grave, so menacing, so unstoppable has the euro crisis become that even rescue talk only fuels ever-rising panic. Investors have sniffed out that Europe’s leaders seem unwilling ever to do enough. Yet unless politicians act fast to persuade the world that their desire to preserve the euro is greater than the markets’ ability to bet against it, the single currency faces ruin. As credit lines gum up and outsiders plead for action, it is not just the euro that is at risk, but the future of the European Union and the health of the world economy.

It is a sobering thought that so much depends on the leadership of squabbling European politicians who still consistently underestimate what confronts them (see article). But the only way to stop the downward spiral now is an act of supreme collective will by euro-zone governments to erect a barrage of financial measures to stave off the crisis and put the governance of the euro on a sounder footing.

The costs will be large. Few people, least of all this newspaper, want either vast intervention in financial markets or a big shift of national sovereignty to Europe. Nor do many welcome a bigger divide between the 17 countries of the euro zone and the EU’s remaining ten. It is just that the alternatives are far worse. That is the blunt truth that Germany’s Angela Merkel, in particular, urgently needs to explain to her people.

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Tagged Eurobond, European Central Bank, European Financial Stability Facility, European Union, Eurozone, Government, Greece | 2 Comments

Debt, division & delay

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Michaela

…because we just don’t know what to do….meanwhile the Swiss were close to ban investment banking after UBS lost about 2.3 bio Euros on unauthorised trades.

Posted in The world we live in Now | Tagged Austerity, Debt, DEfault, ECB, Economy, European Union, Politics | Leave a comment

Bleeding

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Michaela

By Paul Krugman

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated by calls for fiscal austerity. By slashing spending and reducing deficits, we were told, nations could restore confidence and drive economic revival.

And the austerity has been real. In Europe, troubled nations like Greece and Ireland have imposed savage cuts, even as stronger nations have imposed milder austerity programs of their own. In the United States, the modest federal stimulus of 2009 has faded out, while state and local governments have slashed their budgets, so that over all we’ve had a de facto move toward austerity not so different from Europe’s.

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