How Do Trillion Dollar Bank Bailouts Fit With "Free-Market Fundamentalism?"
April 20, 2009 10:03 pm

Dean Baker

The obvious answer is, they don't. If you are a free-market fundamentalists then you are absolutely opposed to bank bailouts. That one is really really simple. See, the free-market means you leave the market to run itself. Bank bailouts involve taking taxpayer dollars and handing them to banks that would go belly up if left to the market.

However simple this distinction might seem, it somehow escaped the NYT which discussed the policies promoted in recent decades as though they could be plausibly described as "free-market fundamentalism." It should be perfectly apparent to everyone at this point that the people designing economic policy in recent decades had no philosophical commitment to "free markets," they were trying to design policies that had the effect of redistributing income upwards.

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A Gaythering Storm
April 21, 2009 9:27 pm

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Ed Schultz goes off on Dick Cheney
April 21, 2009 9:44 pm

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Texas is Revolting? Sounds like a good idea!
April 23, 2009 10:55 pm

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The British’s Resentful Relationship With A Hindu India
April 25, 2009 7:27 pm

Mihir Bose

It may be hard to credit now, as 700 million voters go to the polls in the world’s biggest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be divided into smaller mutually hostile states. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet communism. India’s predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.

Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tucker who, as General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, had been in charge of large parts of the country. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British: "Hindu India was entering its most difficult phase of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. We may well expect, in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion."

Tucker was hardly alone among Raj officials. By then, it was almost an orthodoxy to believe that Hinduism was, if not an evil force, at least spent and worthless. Islam, on the other hand, was a religion the west could understand and with whose political leaders it could do business.

Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of the Raj, had long made clear his fondness for Muslims and his distrust of Hindus. He was appalled by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Hindu classics, and repulsed by the jumble of the faith’s beliefs. In contrast, Kipling claimed that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its people, for "where there are Muslims there is a comprehensive civilization".

Such caricatures of Hindus were not uncommon, but it was when this view was espoused by major politicians such as Winston Churchill that it became truly dangerous. When Churchill argued vehemently against Indian independence in the 1930s, his fire was directed mainly at the Hindus. As the Second World War neared its close, the British prime minister was so consumed by hatred of the Hindus that he told his private secretary John Colville, "The Hindus were a foul race."

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The Banality of Bush White House Evil
April 26, 2009 8:52 am

Frank Rich, NYT

.....Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

.....Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality......

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JPMorgan Chairman: Iraq War, Greed Contributed To Economic Collapse
April 26, 2009 5:55 pm

JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, in a letter to shareholders, touched on a theme that critics of the Iraq war were highlighting more than a year ago: That spending on the war was damaging to the economy.

Dimon cited "an expensive war in Iraq" as one of the possible triggers of the economic collapse. Spending on the war ballooned the deficit and crowded out investment in domestic priorities. Meanwhile, the trade deficit soared.

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