Some links and comments. Originally started last week, then postponed to mid-week, then a bit later:
Gerry Adams: Thatcher's Legacy in Ireland: On the late UK prime minister:
Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Her right wing politics saw Thatcher align herself with some of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the late 20th century -- including apartheid South Africa and Chile's Pinochet. Her description of the ANC and Mandela as terrorists was evidence of her ultra conservative view of the world.
She championed the deregulation of the financial institutions, cuts in public services and was vehemently anti-trade union. She set out to crush the trade union movement. The confrontation with the miners and the brutality of the British police was played out on television screens night after night for months. The current crisis in the banking institutions and the economic recession owe much to these policies. And she went to war in the Malvinas.
But for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. For longer than any other British Prime Minister her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights.
Her most immediate impact on the US came out of the Malvinas (Falklands) War, which played so jolly well on British TV that she got a big popularity boost. She later used it to convince the first George Bush how he could use war in Kuwait to push up his own ratings, a lesson Bush's idiot son not only learned but refined, thus sparking the neverending War on Terror.
Thatcher has been all over the pundit-world recently. On two succesive days, the Wichita Eagle had opinion pieces that doted on her: one by the Kansas Republican chairman extolling Brownback as a Thatcherite; and one by Cal Thomas on how the left is full of hate for pointing out her supposed faults. One thing that I haven't read about recently was how Thatcher was so extreme in her reactionary views that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party, which replaced her with John Major. Now the efforts to canonize her are reminiscent of the much more organized efforts to name things after Ronald Reagan.
John Cassidy: The Crumbling Case for Austerity Economics: Starts off with a nod to Thatcher, who put austerity into practice back in 1979, a prescription for national impoverishment that the current Conservative cabal running the UK has embraced, once again disastrously. Cassidy then moves on to "glaring faults and omissions in the widely cited research of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff" -- turns out that their paper predicting doom when a national debt exceeds 90% of GDP was severely fudged ("omitted relevant data, weighted their calculations in an unusual manner, and made an elementary coding blunder," slanting their results in favor of their thesis). For more on Reinhart-Rogoff, see Mike Konczal (wonkish), and Paul Krugman (although if you rumage through his blog you'll find several more).
Maureen Dowd: Courting Cowardice:
Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about "uncharted waters," and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling. Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.
"Same-sex couples have every other right," Chief Justice John Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. "It's just about the label in this case." He continued, "If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, 'This is my friend,' but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend." [ . . . ]
Charles Cooper, the lawyer for the proponents of Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, was tied in knots, failing to articulate any harm that could come from gay marriage and admitting that no other form of discrimination against gay people was justified. His argument, that marriage should be reserved for those who procreate, is ludicrous. Sonia Sotomayor was married and didn't have kids. Clarence and Ginny Thomas did not have kids. Chief Justice Roberts's two kids are adopted. Should their marriages have been banned? What about George and Martha Washington? They only procreated a country.
As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out to Cooper, "Couples that aren't gay but can't have children get married all the time."
Justice Elena Kagan wondered if Cooper thought couples over the age of 55 wanting to get married should be refused licenses. Straining to amuse, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in: "I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage -- you know, 'Are you fertile or are you not fertile?'"
Scalia didn't elaborate on his comment in December at Princeton:"If we cannot have moral feeling against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?"
Paul Krugman: Europe in Brief: A good basic summary of what's happened to the Euro:
The first effect of the euro was an outbreak of europhoria: suddenly, investors believed that all European debt was equally safe. Interest rates dropped all around the European periphery, setting off huge flows of capital to Spain and other economies; these capital flows fed huge housing bubbles in many places, and in general created booms in the countries receiving the inflows.
The booms, in turn, caused differential inflation: costs and prices rose much more in the periphery than in the core. Peripheral economies became increasingly uncompetitive, which wasn't a problem as long as the inflow-fueled bubbles lasted, but would become a problem once the capital inflows stopped.
And stop they did. The result was serious slumps in the periphery, which lost a lot of internal demand but remained weak on the external side thanks to the loss of competitiveness.
This exposed the deep problem with the single currency: there is no easy way to adjust when you find your costs out of line. At best, peripheral economies found themselves facing a prolonged period of high unemployment while they achieved a slow, grinding, "internal devaluation."
The problem was greatly exacerbated, however, when the combination of slumping revenues and the prospect of protracted economic weakness led to large budget deficits and concerns about solvency, even in countries like Spain that entered the crisis with budget surpluses and low debt. There was panic in the bond market -- and as a condition for aid, the European core demanded harsh austerity programs.
Austerity, in turn, led to much deeper slumps in the periphery -- and because peripheral austerity was not offset by expansion in the core, the result was in fact a slump for the European economy as a whole. One consequence has been that austerity is failing even on its own terms: key measures like debt/GDP ratios have gotten worse, not better.
One thing to note is that aside from his concern about the human costs of austerity programs little in Krugman's critique of the euro is political. The euro could easily be seen as a liberal project, and as a failure of liberalism. And while one could argue that the failure had less to do with its liberal intent than with an implementation that was overly controlled by conservative bankers -- regulation of those capital flows would have helped -- Krugman tends not to do so.
Also see Brad DeLong: The Future of the Euro: Lessons From History:
How did this come about? Why didn't Maastricht set up a single Eurovia-wide banking regulator and supervisor to align financial policy with monetary policy? Why didn't Maastricht set up the fiscal-transfer funds that would be needed when -- as would inevitably happen -- some chunk of the future Eurovia went into recession while other chunks were in boom? Why did Maastricht leave a good chunk of lender-of-last-resort authority in the hands of national governments that could not print money and so fulfill the lender-of-least-resort function rather than placing all of it in the European Central Bank, which could? And why -- given that one country's exports are another's imports -- does the adoption of policies in deficit countries to reduce their imports and boost their export not automatically trigger the adoption of policies in surplus countries to boost their imports and reduce their exports?
Barry Ritholtz: 12 Rules of Goldbuggery: Mostly about gold as a speculative investment, which is easy to see as a psychological disorder. As for tying the economic system to the gold standard, that is the all-time number one stupid idea in the history of economics.
MJ Rosenberg: Netanyahu to US: Drop Dead: What's the difference between Binyamin Netanyahu and Yitzhak Shamir? Netanyahu will make a bit of effort to string you along, whereas it was obvious even to Americans that Shamir would never budge on anything. The first Bush administration's displeasure with Shamir led to his downfall, replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, which led to the ill-fated Oslo Accords. Lots of things made them ill-fated, but pride of place went to Netanyahu, who when pushed hard enough agreed to things he'd never get around to implementing. Well, Netanyahu's back, but with Oslo dead and Congress in his pocket, is reverting to his inner Shamir:
The good news is that Netanyahu has made everything so clear. He has no interest in peace, negotiations, any kind of territorial withdrawal or even freezing settlements. Like Shamir, he just wants to buy time until it will be absolutely impossible to create a Palestinian state, if it isn't already. As for the United States, Netanyahu is not interested in what it wants.
The only question left is what the Obama administration will do in response. It could follow Baker's example and take a walk. Even better, it could tell Netanyahu that future aid from the U.S. will be linked to its occasional compliance with U.S. wishes regarding the occupation. Or it could say, it won't keep following Israel's dictates on sanctions or Palestine's right to recognition by the United Nations. Or it could, as Bush and Baker did, squeeze the Israeli prime minister until the Israeli public dumps him.
It could do any of those.
Will it? I'm taking bets.
But here is a sure one. There is no possibility of serious negotiation so long as Binyamin Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel.
I personally thought that was obvious when Netanyahu became prime minister shortly after Obama won his first term. Netanyahu's victory and coalition were so shaky that it wouldn't have taken much to nudge them apart, but Obama did nothing and got nothing (but a second term for Netanyahu).