Charles Arthur passes along the word that US television news is absolutely appalling. That’s not a novel idea in my household, but my wife and I were literally open-mouthed the other evening when we made the mistake of watching the first minutes of CNN Newsroom. On the CNN site, Newsroom is described as “the place to be when breaking news happens”. I just wanted to see the coverage of Obama’s trip and it was the only news program I could find on Saturday night. Instead the anchor was shouting tabloid headlines at us. I reached the power off button before our brains were permanently affected.
I agree with Arthur’s conclusion:
Anyhow, the US TV mediaâs surely looming death is thus caused by being too shallow; the print mediaâs impending doom (though not death) by being too dull.
A new stop for Obama in London: what Hadrian did.
I loved this Martin Kettle suggestion:
However, senator, we also now advise a late change to your London schedule. The truth is that you have a lot more to offer the UK politicians than they have to offer you. So we propose cutting back your facetime with Brown and the rest in favour of something much more photogenic that we think would benefit you more. That something is a visit to the British Museum’s brand new exhibition about the Emperor Hadrian. This may seem a bit left-field but here’s the reason why it couldn’t be more relevant to you today.
You see, senator, Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan had staked everything on conquering Mesopotamia, which of course is the modern Iraq. At first Trajan successfully persuaded Romans that the war was going well, but in fact the mission was overstretched and gradually his campaign was undermined by a widespread local insurgency. So when Hadrian became emperor of Rome in 117 AD, just about the first thing he did after his inauguration was to withdraw the Roman legions from Mesopotamia, Assyria and Greater Armenia. All this came as a shock to the Roman psyche, which had been nurtured on endless tales of triumph, but in the end it made much better sense to bring the boys home. It meant Hadrian was able to consolidate Rome’s boundaries and concentrate on the military campaigns that truly threatened Rome’s security.
Senator, you should know that not everything about Hadrian was as inspired and successful as the withdrawal from Mesopotamia. There are some sections of the British Museum exhibition that you should definitely avoid visiting until after election day. In particular there is a searing section which describes how he was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Jews during a revolt against Roman rule starting in 132 AD. So be certain to say very publicly that Hadrian offers eternal lessons both for good and for evil. Apart from that, the Hadrian visit will be all gain. It will show you understand the world better than President Bush. And in the end, that’s what this campaign is all about anyway, senator.
When we were in Italy earlier this month, my children had a chance to learn something essential about Italian life: lo sciopero. Our plan was to travel from Venice to Rome by train on Monday afternoon, so we could catch our early morning flight back to the US on Tuesday. When we walked into our hotel on Sunday evening, the pleasant concierge asked me if we knew about the transport strike.
No, I didn’t. What was going on? It turned out that from 9pm on Sunday until 9pm on Monday, all public transport in Italy was out on strike. Some trains might run, she said, but she couldn’t get through to the information line that supposedly listed the uncanceled trains. Incidentally, the vaporetti, Venice’s water buses, were also going to be out on strike (so much for our expensive 24-hour vaporetto tickets).
My older son and I set off for the train station in the hope we could find out anything about our train there. The still-running vaporetti took us there reasonably swiftly, where we discovered a long line for the information office. I’ll hazard a guess that the information office employees are used to harassment: they only allow one person at a time into the office, through a locked door. The train station schedule board painted a grim picture. After 9pm, there were no trains listed at all.
When we eventually made it into the information office, I asked about our reservations for Monday’s 16:42 train to Rome. The man looked through a computer print out and declared, “It’s running.” Phew. I decided to press my luck. “Does that mean it will certainly be running? Are there situations when listed trains don’t run?” He looked at me like I was a cretin. “I said it’s running.” “Certainly?” “Are you certain the world will exist tomorrow?” he replied. Everyone’s a philosopher.
In any case, we walked the next afternoon to the train station (as expensive as vaporetti are, you don’t want to even know how extortionate water taxis are in Venice). Lo and behold, our train was there. It was the only train that day running from Venice to Rome. Extraordinary luck, especially since I had tried and failed to get reservations for earlier trains.
So now my children know what a strike is.
Translation of image above: I’m on strike. I don’t want to write anything. Write something yourself.
One fact from a column by Richard Milne in yesterday’s Financial Times really shocked me:
The situation [on female directors] is even worse in Germany, which shamefully only has one female management board member from the 200 or so executives in Dax-30 companies, Bettina von Oesterreich at Hypo Real Estate.
Milne’s starting point for his column was the recent comment by Siemens’ CEO Peter Lõscher that his own group was “too German, too white and too male”. Germany has a female chancellor, which seems to me (and I imagine most Germans) unremarkable at this point. It seems extraordinary that large corporations haven’t moved with the times. What a neglect of half the country’s talent.
Milne points out the a survey of the UK’s FTSE-100 companies in 2006 found only 11 per cent of directors were female. That’s bad, but it looks wonderful compared to Germany.
I’m mystified by the growing public support for offshore oil drilling. I know it’s been a Republican talking point for weeks, and seems to be just about the only policy John McCain has on anything. But even the most rudimentary calculation reveals that opening up US coastal waters to more drilling will do nothing to gas prices â the hot issue of the moment â and will do remarkably little to supply many years down the road. As Andrew Leonard points out, it might juice Exxon’s share price a bit. Does a majority of Americans want to abandon any environmental sense for such a meaningless policy?
I gave money to Barack Obama in January and, as much as I’d like to give his campaign more, I thought I’d reached my personal limit. But so repellent has the McCain campaign been â and I’m sure it will get worse â that I clicked on my latest email from Obama to give more money. Not a lot, but doing my part.
The fault lies with Bush⦠again.
If you want to be depressed, but informed, read Clive Crook’s Financial Times column about the plight of the US economy. He starts with an excellent run-down of the poor shape of the economy:
The US economy may not be in recession, but this is the nearest thing. In spite of the recent fiscal stimulus, output grew less than 2 per cent at an annual rate in the second quarter, slower than expected. That followed growth of 1 per cent in the first quarter and a contraction (on revised numbers) of 0.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2007. A recession is usually defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking output. It has not happened yet, but it very well might in the next few quarters. Even if it does not, that would be little consolation.
Prospects for the second half of the year are poor. Some of the current boost from the fiscal injection delivered last quarter will keep feeding through, but consumer spending, the hitherto unstoppable engine of US growth, is stalling. The prices of food and petrol, together with still-tightening credit conditions and a housing market that has not yet touched bottom, are weighing it down. Net exports were the main accelerator in the second quarter â without that rise, in fact, output would have fallen, fiscal stimulus or no. But they cannot be relied on in future because growth in Europe and elsewhere is going to be limited by, among other things, policymakersâ worries about inflation.
Most forecasters are expecting a double-dip US slowdown â and the second dip could be a technical recession. Regardless, the labour market is already behaving that way. Unemployment moved up to 5.7 per cent in July, the labour department reported on Friday. Overtime is falling; involuntary part-time working is on the rise. Unemployment will climb above 6 per cent next year. While it may be true that the US has seen much worse, this is no mere âmental recessionâ.
He makes clear how little room for maneuver there is, in either monetary or fiscal policy. What raises Crook’s column above the ordinary, however, is his clarity about why we’ve reached this point:
It is worth remembering where the blame for this neutering of fiscal policy lies: squarely with the Bush administration. At the start of this decade, the budget stood in surplus to the tune of 2.4 per cent of GDP. On unchanged policy, this was expected to grow to a surplus of 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2008. This yearâs actual deficit of 3 per cent of GDP therefore represents a worsening of more than 7 per cent of GDP, or roughly $1,000bn. Almost all of this deterioration is due to policy: to tax cuts, spending increases, and their associated debt-service costs.
That projected surplus was a priceless gift to the White House. It offered the Bush administration ample scope for outlays on homeland security and other unforeseen priorities, and moderate tax cuts as well, all within a budget balanced over the course of the business cycle. Instead, the administration knowingly opted for outrageous fiscal excess â adding insult to injury with its phoney tax-cut sunset provisions, designed for no other purpose than to disguise the long-term fiscal implications. Eight years on, this startling record of fiscal irresponsibility has all but taken fiscal policy off the table as an available response to the slowdown.
If, like me, you’re an obsessive reader of the political blogs, you probably have encountered references throughout the political season to Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes. By all accounts, it’s the landmark work on presidential primaries. When I first saw a recommendation of it, I wasn’t impressed. Why, after all, would I want to read 1,100 pages on the 1988 presidential primaries, which in my memory ranked among the least memorable of contests.
The regular drumbeat of recommendations finally got the better of me a few weeks ago. Here’s the verdict: drop whatever else you’re reading and pick up What It Takes. The first two chapters alone make the book a classic. In the first chapter, Cramer details then vice-president George H. W. Bush’s trip to Houston to throw the first ball at the 1987 National League Championships Series game. It’s funny, but it also brilliantly conveys a host of Bush character traits that prove crucial in the rest of the book. Junior also makes a memorable appearance, which should have told anyone what a disaster he would be. The second chapter goes back to Bob Dole’s childhood in rural Kansas. I never understood how Dole became a national-level politician, but a reader can’t fail to be moved by Cramer’s account.
In addition to the two Republicans, Cramer follows Gary Hart, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt and the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. I really feel, falsely in many ways, that I know all six of these politicians now. You could extract Cramer’s chapters on each of them and have a fantastic biography. Put it all together and you’ll never feel so gripped by 1,100 pages of political writing.
Your choice: drunks, connivers, thugs or lunatics.
Douglas Muir at Fistful of Euros provides a pithy, essential summary of political leadership following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In my Davos role, I saw many of this crop and it wasn’t a pretty sight:
All across Eurasia, in the early 1990s, you had a first generation of post-Communist leaders taking power. And by and large, it wasnât a very promising crop. You had drunks (Yeltsin), slimy connivers (Iliescu), petty, mean-spirited nationalists (Tudjman), slimy connivers pretending to be petty, mean-spirited nationalists (Milosevic), corrupt thugs (Lukashenko, Smirnov), guys who had no idea what the hell they were doing (Izetbegovic, Berisha) and just plain lunatics (Niyazov).
But in terms of sheer damage inflicted upon his hapless country, nobody â not Yeltsin, not Berisha, not even Milosevic â came close to Gamsakhurdia.
Muir isn’t just offering dispassionate history, of course. He’s trying to give some of the background to the Georgia/Russia conflict that is missing in most accounts.
Six months ago, not incidentally, I linked to Muir’s essential guide to the then “frozen conflict” of South Ossetia. Pity he didn’t have many more readers then.
When I saw the announcement, I thought Google’s Power Readers was a good idea. I’d like to know what feeds people are reading. But if you actually look at the feed lists, they are all boring to a fault and incredibly conventional. Either these folk have drastically edited their lists, had them confected by someone that has no clue, or it’s a very sad reflection on their ability to trawl the interwebs.
Ages ago, Dave Winer tried to whip up enthusiasm for the same idea, but he was way, way ahead of his time. Needless to say, it’s far better to be ahead of your time than behind.
Refresh.