Does Liu Xiaobo Really Deserve the Peace Prize?
"Bush Was Right to Go to War"
By TARIQ ALI
CounterPunch: December 13, 2010
Last year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize escalated the war in
Afghanistan a few weeks after receiving the prize. The award surprised even
Obama. This year the Chinese government were foolish to make a martyr of the
president of Chinese PEN and neo-con Liu Xiaobo. He should never have been
arrested, but the Norwegian politicians who comprise the committee, led by
Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Labour prime minister, wanted to teach China a
lesson. And so they ignored their hero's views.
Or perhaps they didn't, given that their own views are not dissimilar. The
committee thought about giving Bush and Blair a joint peace prize for
invading Iraq but a public outcry forced a retreat.
For the record, Liu Xiaobo has stated publicly that in his view:
(a) China's tragedy is that it wasn't colonised for at least 300 years by a
Western power or Japan. This would apparently have civilised it for ever;
(b) The Korean and Vietnam wars fought by the US were wars against
totalitarianism and enhanced Washington's 'moral credibility';
(c) Bush was right to go to war in Iraq and Senator Kerry's criticisms were
'slander-mongering';
(d) Afghanistan? No surprises here: Full support for Nato's war.
He has a right to these opinions, but should they get a peace prize?
The Norwegian jurist Fredrik Heffermehl argues that the committee is in
breach of the will and testament left behind by the inventor of dynamite
whose bequests fund the prizes:
'The Nobel committee has not received prize money for free use, but was
entrusted with money to give to the pivotal element in creating peace,
breaking the vicious circle of arms races and military power games. From
this point of view the 2010 Nobel is again an illegitimate prize awarded by
an illegitimate committee.'
*Tariq Ali's* latest book "The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War
Abroad<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844674495/counterpunchmaga>'
is published by Verso.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/return_of_the_great_triangulator_20101215/
Return of the Great Triangulator
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: December 15, 2010
The sight of Bill Clinton back on the White House podium defending tax cuts
for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of
economic policy. How desperate is the current president that he would turn
to the great triangulator, who opened the floodgates to banking greed, for
validation of the sorry opportunistic hodgepodge that passes for this
administration's economic policy? A policy designed and implemented by the
same Clinton-era holdovers whose radical deregulation of the financial
industry created this mess in the first place.
As a candidate running against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama quite
accurately excoriated the economic policies of the Clinton years when the
Democratic president united with congressional Republicans, led by Senate
Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, to obliterate sensible regulations of
the New Deal. The result, as candidate Obama noted in March 2008, has been
chaos:
"Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework,
we simply dismantled the old one-aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in
which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight.
In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything-goes environment that
helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."
These dislocations were authorized when Clinton signed off on the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which reversed the Glass-Steagall Act's separation
between the high rollers of investment banking and the properly
conservative, insured and regulated activities of commercial banks entrusted
with the life savings of ordinary folks. With a stroke of a pen that he then
presented as a gift to Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, Clinton opened the door to
the too-big-to-fail monstrosities that have caused so much misery.
Back in 1999, even though he had been warned of the coming financial
instability, foreshadowed by the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management,
Clinton was giddy in signing the bill: "Over the past seven years we have
tried to modernize the economy," he enthused. "And today what we are doing
is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those
antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority."
A year later Clinton signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act,
advanced most fiercely by his treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, who has
been the dominant personality setting economic policy for Obama. Titles 3
and 4 of that act summarily exempted from the surveillance of any existing
regulatory agency or laws all of the newfangled financial gimmicks-the
collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps-that have proved so
toxic to the jobs and homes of tens of millions of Americans.
In his rambling and somewhat incoherent comments on the economy at the White
House last week, Clinton attempted to explain away the failure of the banks
to use the money that the government has made available to them to shore up
housing and create jobs. As an aside, in commenting on community banks,
Clinton touched on the mortgage security mess that his law enabled, but he
still doesn't seem to get his connection with the problem: " . some of them
may have a few mortgage issues unresolved, most of that mortgage debt has
been offloaded to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or has vanished into
cyber-sphere with those securitized subprime mortgages. I don't like the
securities, but they happened."
What gibberish. The mortgage-backed securities didn't just happen. Clinton
signed legislation freeing those securities from any effective government
regulation. Most Americans' homes, which represented their dreams and
savings, were turned into gambling chips in the Wall Street casino on a
scale unknown and indeed unthinkable before the Clinton presidency. What has
vanished is the equity of homeowners. As for the offloading to Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, that represents at least a $700 billion burden on taxpayers
who have had to bail out those government-sponsored agencies that became
totally corrupt on Clinton's watch.
The bottom line on the Clinton legacy is that the census now finds an
all-time high of 44 million Americans living under the poverty line,
bringing us back, as a percentage of the population, to Bill Clinton's first
two years in office. One big difference is that thanks to Clinton's
so-called welfare reform program, there is no longer a significant federal
anti-poverty program, and the plight of the poor is now a problem for the
state governments, which also have been impoverished thanks to the bursting
of the Clinton bubble.
As a candidate, Obama laid responsibility for the meltdown on the bipartisan
deregulation of the Clinton years: "This loss has not happened by accident.
It's because of decisions made in boardrooms, on trading floors, and in
Washington. Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to
guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation
instead of productivity and sound business practices. We let the special
interest put their thumbs on the economic scales."
That's the path Clinton followed after his party's electoral reversal after
he had been in office two years, a fact that made it all that more ominous
to witness the great triangulator back on a White House podium.
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