News&Analysis
- Chas Freeman forced by Israel Lobies to withdraw
from NIC Chairmanship, posted by
Juan Cole, Informed Comment,
- Statement By The Office Of The Director Of
National Intelligence
- The Freeman Precedent, By Andrew Sullivan | The
- The Assault on Chas Freeman, by Joe Klein, Swampland Blog | TIME.com,
- Burdening
- Here comes socialism, By Mike Madden, Salon.com,
- Don't blame the bankers - deregulation and
spending caused it too, says Williams, by Sam Jones, The Guardian,
- Patience and trust - the new economic
foundations, By Rowan Williams,
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 March 2009 00.06 GMT - Full text of Ethics, Economics
and Global Justice
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Chas Freeman forced by Israel Lobies
to withdraw from NIC Chairmanship
Below
is a note former MEPC president, Chas Freeman, sent to friends and supporters.
Begin Text:
To all who supported me or gave me words of encouragement during the
controversy of the past two weeks, you have my gratitude and respect.
You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence
Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his
invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.
I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would
not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my
credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence
Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by
unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political
faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and
protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special
interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political
campaign.
As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring
from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public
service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I
understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the
greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a
polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a
daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t
some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is
indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to
conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our
country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the
call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that
I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to
returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.
I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather
than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and
were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis
available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by
what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who
devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil
society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious
public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great
importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.
The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that
there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own
from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and
events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of
dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation,
the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an
utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy
process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who
dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for
analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans
and our government other than those that it favors.
There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the
opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on
enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the
government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to
discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the
Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that
faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of
the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say
so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle
East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United
States.
The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will
be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama
administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and
related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration
has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what
policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those
of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.
In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until
proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their
context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice
of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds.
Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal
that I or anyone else might make.
Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from
any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor
have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its
policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause,
foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to
private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than
myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and
other Americans.
I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our
country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all
patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully
lead us in surmounting them.
Middle East Policy Council
1730 M Street, NW
Suite 512
Washington, DC 20036
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/10/2009 07:51:00 PM
http://www.juancole.com/2009/03/chas-freeman-forced-by-israel-lobies-to.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The candidate for a top
The office of Director of National Intelligence Dennis
Blair said in a statement that Charles Freeman, who had been picked to head the
National Intelligence Council, had asked not to proceed.
Blair had accepted Freeman's decision with regret, the
statement said.
(Reporting by Randall Mikkelsen, Editing by Frances
Kerry)
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5296QZ20090310?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews
Statement By The Office Of The
Director Of National Intelligence
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair
announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his
selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed.
Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman's decision with regret.
The Freeman Precedent
By Andrew Sullivan | The
There are a couple of things worth noting about this
minor, yet major,
The second is that Obama may bring change in many
areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question.
Having the kind of debate in
When Obama told us that the resistance to change would
not end at the election but continue every day after, he was right. But he
never fought this one. He's shrewder than I am.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/the-freeman-pre.html
The Assault on Chas Freeman
Posted by Joe Klein
Swampland Blog | TIME.com
I've been loathe to join the argument about whether the
veteran diplomat Chas Freeman should be hired to lead the National Intelligence
Council. I don't know the man, am only vaguely aware of his reputation--very
smart but unothodox, a bit too close to the Saudis, a root canal 'realist'
whose cold analysis of the Tiananmen uprising suggested that the Chinese
government would have been better served to nip the student uprising 'in the
bud.' At the same time, there was the rabid opposition of the professional
Jewish community--some of them moderates like Jeff Goldberg, others
full-fledged members of the Israel lobby, like former AIPAC honcho Steven Cohen
Rosen, others from the neo-hysterical Commentary crowd...perpetrators of the
OMG nutsiness about Obama on a range of issues, in this case: OH MY GOD, he's
selling out Israel!
In recent days, however, two very reliable sources--at
least, I find them so--have made strong arguments in Freeman's defense. The
first was James Fallows, who made the absolutely essential argument that
Freeman's contrarian nature is precisely what you need at the National
Intelligence Council. (One can only imagine the sort of rigor Freeman would
have brought to the disgraceful October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on
The second argument comes from Andrew Sullivan, who
reconstructs the history of the campaign against Freeman--and finds it launched
primarily by neoconservatives, who don't like Freeman's position on
Demonstrably,
For almost forty years,
The suspension of the independent exercise of American
judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and
Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the
Except for the bit I've highlighted above, which I believe is quite unfair (I'd
distinguish Israeli attitudes toward the Jordanians and Egyptians, and even the
Saudis, recently, from their view of the Palestinians), I think Freeman's been
caught in the flagrant commission of a truth here. Especially now, as
Israel concocts a new government that will probably include an anti-Arab bigot
(Avigdor Lieberman) in a key cabinet position, will probably allow the cancerous
spread of Jewish settlements on Arab lands and will oppose a two-state
solution, I think it's absolutely necessary that the US government, finally,
makes it clear when Israel is behaving badly (as Hillary Clinton did recently,
when she chastised the Israelis for not allowing humanitarian supplies into
Gaza).
So, in sum, a guarded vote for Chas Freeman--not that
any votes will be necessary for this appointive position. It's time we had some
candor and intellectual noncomformity, some abrasiveness in the too-smooth
collegiality of the intelligence bunker. It is also time to resume the relative
balance that existed before George W. Bush gave veto power to Israel's
neoconservative supporters have over US government policy and appointees in the
region.
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/03/08/the-assault-on-chas-freeman/
By Roger Cohen
International Herald
Tribune
Published:
Like Hamas in
Hallelujah. Precisely the same thing could be said of
Hamas in
One difference is that Hezbollah is in the Lebanese
national unity government, whereas Hamas won the free and fair January 2006
elections to the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority, only to
discover Middle Eastern democracy is only democracy if it produces the right
result.
The
A rapprochement between the two wings of the
Palestinian movement was briefly achieved at
It won't be easy. Resolve is not the most conspicuous
characteristic of those three allies. But it's not impossible. As long as
Palestinians are divided, peace efforts will flounder.
With respect to Hamas, the West is bound to three
conditions for any contact: Hamas must recognize
The 1988 Hamas Charter is vile but I think it's wrong
to get hung up on the prior recognition of
One view of Israel's continued expansion of
settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to
high-tech force would be that it's all designed precisely to bludgeon,
undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood
and dignity evaporate.
The argument over recognition is in the end a form of
evasion designed to perpetuate the conflict.
Of course it's desirable that Hamas recognize
What is essential is that it renounce violence, in
tandem with
Speaking of violence, it's worth recalling what
At this vast human, material and moral price,
No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah are seen throughout the
Arab world as legitimate resistance movements.
It's time to look at them again and adopt the new
British view that contact can encourage Hezbollah "to move away from
violence and play a constructive, democratic and peaceful role."
The British step could be a game-changer. By contrast,
That requires Obama to tell
Readers are invited to comment at my
blog: www.iht.com/passages
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/08/opinion/edcohen.php
Burdening
The
weight of being the bulwark of civilization
By Brendan O’Neill
Copyright
© 2009 The American Conservative
It is a
“beleaguered, courageous little democratic upholder of freedom and
enlightenment.” It is defending “the modern world and its achievements” and
“the very future of our species.” It stands on “the side of morality, justice,
and civilization,” and anyone who criticizes it is a “fellow-traveller of
barbarism.” It is possessed of the “values that underscore the Judeo-Christian
culture that fostered the Enlightenment” and is a beacon of “political liberty
and freedom.”
What
could these commentators possibly be gushing about? A plucky new political
movement that fights for democracy, liberty, and Truth with a capital T? A
humanist journal that faces down the tidal wave of relativism and makes the
case for Enlightenment values?
In fact,
they’re writing about
There
are major differences in the way Americans view Israel—most are generally
favorable—and the way Europeans view Israel—many are increasingly hostile to
the Jewish state. Yet what unites pro-Israel thinkers on both sides of the
This is
a mad, bad, ill-informed fantasy. A hundred years ago, the German Socialist
August Bebel coined the phrase “socialism of fools” to describe those left-wingers
who blamed Jews for the ills of modern society. Today, in the elevation of
A new
band of writers is continually infusing the squalid wars in the
During
Earl
Tilford writes in Frontpage magazine about the contrast between
Where
once
Here we
can glimpse the fantasy politics, even the conspiracy theory, that underpins
the promotion of
Melanie
Phillips, one of
What is
going on here? How can a conflict that looks to many reasonable people like a
long-running national and political clash be described as a grand battle for
mankind? In effect, Israel is cynically, and lazily, being turned into a proxy
army for a faction in the Western Culture Wars that has lost its ability to
defend Enlightenment values on their own terms or even to define and face up to
the central problem of anti-Enlightenment tendencies today.
It is
striking that many of the newfound, passionate defenders of
In
debates about education, for example, they critiqued the trend toward “dumbing
down” and “relevance” and defended a Plato-style communication of knowledge and
rigorous training of the next generation’s minds. In the discussion about
multiculturalism in
All of
this was—and is—an uphill struggle. It is hard work, in our Age of Relativism,
to argue for the values of liberty, equality, and excellence. As the cliché
goes, where the Right won the economic war, the cultural Left—with its innate
hostility toward apparently oppressive and discriminatory “Western values”
(always said with a sneer)—won the Culture War. Faced with the relentless
denigration of intellectualism, the defenders of Enlightenment values became
increasingly discombobulated and allowed their arguments to become shrill
caricatures.
Over the
past few years, since 9/11 in particular, they have opportunistically hitched
their pro-civilization stance to the war against al-Qaeda, against myopic
Islamic radicalism, against small groups of religious militants whom they
depict as the greatest threat to the Western way of life. Their flagging,
battered 1990s struggle to defend the Enlightenment was re-energized by the
brutally simplistic war on terror. Eventually they came to see Islamic
militancy as the great enemy of the Enlightenment and thus
This is
a worrying development. It distorts the truth about the conflict in the
Worst of
all, the “enlightened” pro-Israel lobby now presents the threat to Western
values as a purely external one, emanating from the slums of Gaza or the towns
of southern Lebanon or the radical mosques of Iran when, in truth, the
Enlightenment is being corroded from within the West itself. In describing
It is of
course true that Jews have contributed enormously to history, literature, and
culture. Yet as Richard S. Levy argues in his book Anti-Semitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice
and Persecution,
simple philosemitism, like anti-Semitism, also treats the Jews as “radically
different or exceptional.” Only in this instance, they are looked upon as the
saviors of mankind, the lone defenders of civilization rather than as society’s
destroyers. Where anti-Semites project their frustrations with the world and
their naked prejudices onto the Jews, and frequently onto
Anyone
interested in breathing life back into the enlightened way of life and thinking
should be prepared to have some hard arguments, alongside Jews, Muslims, and
anyone else who wants to get involved, rather than pushing Israel forward as a
kind of canary in the mine of collapsing Western civilization. 
Brendan
O’Neill is editor of spiked
in
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/mar/09/00020/
Here comes
socialism
Some kind of bank
nationalization is probably inevitable. The Democrats don't want to admit it
yet. The Republicans just want you to be scared.
By Mike Madden
Salon.com
March 10, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- Until the U.S. economy
fell to pieces last fall, the phrase "nationalize the banks" usually
conjured up, in the popular imagination, scenes of the early days of a
revolution in some far-off land (if it conjured up anything at all). Government
takeovers of entire financial systems were something newspapers buried deep
inside the foreign news section for the truly diligent readers, complete with
sad little photos of mobs gathering outside banks to get their last
withdrawals.
Which is why you may feel a little disoriented if you've turned on a TV or flipped through conservative
opinion columns lately. All of a sudden, nationalization seems to
have come home. These days, a federal takeover of the banking system is
practically the only thing Republicans want to talk about. If South Carolina
Sen. Jim DeMint isn't declaring that even temporary nationalization of banks is
"the same idea as
socialization," then his colleague from the same state, John McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham,
is telling NBC's "Meet the Press" that Obama needs to consider the
idea. Even Alan Greenspan is part of the conversation. The Ayn Rand disciple
whose every public utterance for most of his life has been devoted to extolling
the virtues of the free market is suddenly pushing nationalization.
Of course, even though
the federal government now owns 36 percent of Citigroup,
and Citigroup and other massive banks are teetering on the edge of insolvency,
the Obama administration swears there's no plan for a government takeover.
"This is a very complex set of problems, and bad decisions can result in
huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results," President Obama told the New York
Times on Friday, bringing up -- and then shooting down -- the idea
that bank nationalization would save the financial sector. Treasury Secretary
Tim Geithner told PBS's Jim Lehrer last week that nationalization is "the wrong strategy."
Yes, some liberal commentators, like Paul Krugman, are
pushing the administration to take more control of big banks as a way of
clearing bad home loans and related financial detritus out of the system. But
much of the conservative chatter seems aimed at freaking people out about
creeping socialism, rather than solving the banking crisis. As one Democratic
aide on Capitol Hill put it, "The only people talking about
nationalization are Republicans -- this is crazy to me, that they have traded their
entire ideology within six weeks." Another aide likened the GOP buzz about
bank nationalization to the "Joe the Plumber" phase of McCain's
campaign -- talking about a federal takeover of banks is like screaming that
Obama wanted to "spread the wealth" around. And, as if on cue,
conservative firebrand Michelle Malkin called Obama a
socialist on Monday, referring back to the McCain campaign's old language
about "Barack the Redistributor."
Chances are, of course, that some of the country's
biggest banks will fail the "stress tests" the Treasury Department
plans to administer soon -- and will effectively prove insolvent, forcing the
issue. (Geithner was set to meet with House Democrats Monday night to explain the tests.)
The problem with the GOP talking points is that the scenario DeMint sketched out
-- government bureaucrats running banks, deciding who gets loans and who
doesn't -- isn't what anyone is contemplating. Instead, any nationalization is
likely to be brief, narrow and aimed at saving any assets worth saving from
banks that would otherwise go under. (Which isn't that different from what the U.S. already does with
failed banks.) But to Republicans, the details seem beside the
point. "Nationalization" is just another way to make voters fear
Obama's stewardship of the economy.
Whether that scare strategy works politically is hard
to gauge. But what Republicans apparently believe will work economically would
probably frighten even more people. Instead of nationalizing banks, they want to let them fail.
"I think that [the Obama administration has] got to close some big banks.
They don't want to do it," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the
highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, told ABC's
"This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. "I don't want to nationalize
them. I think we need to close them." If the debate comes down
to simply watching banks go under or letting the government sell off any
valuable assets they've still got on the books, nationalization may not seem
like such a bad idea.
For now, pollsters say the public isn't paying enough
attention to the debate over the financial system to have strong feelings about
any one proposal or another. "People are more concerned about losing their
jobs, losing their house, the change of living standards that they're
facing," said Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman. "From a consumer
point of view, I don't think it matters, and they're way too caught up in their
own situation to be fixated on those sort of mega-questions." As for calling
Obama a socialist, that may not be working, either. " If you did a poll
and asked people, 'Here are terms, and see if you think they are an accurate
description of Barack Obama,' I bet there are 10 times as many people who say 'Muslim' as say 'socialist,'" Hickman
said. "It's sort of like calling somebody a carpetbagger, a scalawag -- it's sort of a word that is devoid
of meaning for most people, especially anybody who actually voted for
Obama."
What people are most irritated about is the money the
banks have already gotten from the government, not what might happen to them
under government control. A Newsweek poll last week found 56 percent of voters would rather have the government
take over failing banks than just hand over more tax dollars, and 62
percent think the government has already done too much to help banks. The
hostility most voters have to helping the banks could make it hard to do
anything more no matter how it's spun. Democrats and Republicans alike say
there's no way Congress will give the White House more cash to bail out banks
without some sign that the $700 billion already authorized has done
some good. And as anyone tracking the stock market
knows, finding some good news in the financial system these days might be even
harder to do than leading a government takeover of all the nation's banks.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/03/10/banks/
Don't blame
the bankers - deregulation and spending caused it too, says Williams
• Archbishop delivers attack on impact of globalisation
• Time for everyone to look at own lifestyles, he says
The Guardian,
Blaming the greed of individual bankers for the
financial crisis was too easy and people should instead be asking profound
questions about how poorly regulated economies obsessed with ever-growing
consumer choice have skewed the judgments of entire countries, the Archbishop
of Canterbury has said.
The Right Rev Rowan Williams used a lecture in Cardiff at
the weekend to deliver a wide-ranging attack on a globalised economic system
which had been "spectacularly successful in generating purchasing
power" but which had also led us to "the most radical insecurity
imaginable".
As economists struggle to find technical solutions to
the recession, which has brought interests rates to their lowest level in 300
years and forced the government to cut VAT in an effort to get shoppers back
into the high street, he said ordinary people had to ask themselves difficult
questions about their own lives.
"To use one of the more obvious examples, it has
become clear that lifestyles dependent on high levels of fossil fuel
consumption reduce the long-term opportunities of basic human flourishing for
many people because of their environmental cost - not to mention the various
political traps associated with the production and marketing of oil in some
parts of the world, with the consequent risks to peace and regional
stability."
Dr Williams criticised the unthinking pursuit of
growth, which had led to an "unhealthily hyperactive" economy. He
said: "If it is essential to invest in certain kinds of productive
ventures, how does this relate to the broader and longer-term imperative of
securing the funding of social care future by way of sustainable shared
resources, accumulated wealth?"
The global economic downturn has hurled several
powerful bankers from relative anonymity into the limelight.
Chief among them is the former chairman of the Royal
Bank of
Many senior figures in the government have questioned
whether he deserved such a large reward given his stewardship of the bank,
which lost £24bn last year. But although Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of
the Labour party, has described Goodwin's pension as "unacceptable",
Dr Williams questioned whether heaping blame on individual bankers served any
purpose when much of the fault lies with the financial system itself.
Focusing on the greed of bankers had made people lose
sight of the fact that "governments committed to deregulation and to the
encouragement of speculation and high personal borrowing were elected
repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a crucial couple of
decades", he said. "Add to that the fact of warnings of some of the
risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question of what it
was that skewed the judgment of a whole society as well as of financial
professionals."
The archbishop is known to have had several meetings with
bankers and financial experts as he developed his critique of the way in which
- as he sees it - a consumer class in developed countries had helped to a
"new group of urban paupers" in unstable developing countries.
He said that governments which promised "maximised
choice and minimised risk" encouraged voters to forget the fundamentals of
economic reality.
He criticised a financial system which, he said,
displayed deep and systemic impatience.
"A badly or inadequately regulated market is one
in which no one is properly monitoring the scarcity of credit. And this absence
of monitoring is especially attractive when governments depend for their
electability on a steady expansion of spending power for their citizens."
The archbishop cautioned against a move towards
protectionism, but attacked "opportunistic" offshoring and
outsourcing by large international companies. "The present situation
favours economic agreements that give little or no leverage to workers and that
have minimal reference to social, environmental or even local legal concerns.
"Learning how to use governmental antitrust
legislation to break up the virtually monopolistic powers of large
multinationals that have become cuckoos in the nest of a national economy would
also be an essential part of a strategy designed to stop the slide from
opportunistic outsourcing towards protectionism and monitoring or policing the
chaotic flow of capital across boundaries," he said.
In future politicians and economists would have to move
away from the idea that wealth and profit could be achieved without risk. He
called for a "return to the primitive capitalist idea" of
risk-sharing. He also demanded that environmental costs should be factored into
all future economic calculations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/09/deregulation-spending-banking
Patience and trust -
the new economic foundations
In a lecture entitled Ethics, Economics and Global
Justice which was given on Saturday in
guardian.co.uk,
Full text of Ethics, Economics and
Global Justice
In a conversation a couple of months ago at Canary
Wharf, a senior manager in financial services observed that recent years had
seen an erosion of the notion that certain enterprises necessarily took time to
deliver and that therefore it was a mistake to look for maximal profits on the
basis of a balance sheet covering only one or two years. There had been, he
suggested, a deep and systemic impatience with the whole idea of taking time to
arrive at a desired goal – and thus with a great deal of the understanding of
both labour and the building of confidence. Either an enterprise delivered or
it didn't, and the question could be answered in a brief and measurable
time-span.
For all the rhetoric about accountability, getting your
money's worth, the effect of such assumptions in all kinds of settings has been
a spectacular failure to understand the variety of ways in which responsible
practice might be gauged – whether in relation to investment in actual
production or in relation to new financial products, whose sustainability and
reliability can only be proved after the passage of time. Very much the same
kind of impatience has also been part of the tidal wave of assault on the
historic professions – including the law, teaching and academic research and
some aspects of public service. The short-term curse continues to afflict the
voluntary sector in the absurd timescales attached to grant-giving; but all
that is material for a lecture in its own right …
But in connection specifically with the financial
crisis, the main point is about what appropriate patience might look like where
various financial and commercial enterprises are concerned. The loss of a sense
of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes
how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather
than being automatically deliverable according to a set of static conditions
laid down. It involves a degree of human judgement, which in turn involves a
level of awareness of one's own human character and that of others – a degree
of literacy about the signals of trustworthiness; a shared culture of
understanding what is said and done in a human society.
And this learning entails unavoidable insecurity. I do
not control others and I do not control the passage of time and the processes
of nature; even the processes of human labour are limited by things outside my
control (the capacities of human bodies). My lack of a definitive and
authoritative or universal perspective means that I may make mistakes because I
misread others or because I miscalculate the levels of uncertainty in the
processes I deal in. And the further away I get from these areas of learning by
trial and error, the further away I get from the inevitable risks of living in
a material and limited world, the more easily can I persuade myself that I am
after all in control.
Although people have spoken of greed as the source of
our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper. It is a little too easy to
blame the present situation on an accumulation of individual greed, exemplified
by bankers or brokers, and to lose sight of the fact that governments committed
to deregulation and to the encouragement of speculation and high personal
borrowing were elected repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a
crucial couple of decades.
Add to that the fact that warnings were not lacking of
some of the risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question
of what it was that skewed the judgment of a whole society as well as of
financial professionals. John Dunning, a professional analyst of the business
world, wrote some six years ago about what he called the "crisis in the
moral ecology" of unregulated capitalism (in the editorial afterword to a
collection of essays on Making Globalisation Good, p.357); and he and other
contributors to his book discussed how "circles of failure" could be
created in the global economy by a combination of moral indifference,
institutional crisis and market failure, each feeding on the others. Yet warnings
went unheeded; people's rational capacities, it seems, were blunted, and
unregulated global capitalism was assumed to be the natural way of doing
things, based on a set of rational market processes that would deliver results
in everyone's interest.
This was not just about greed. At least some apologists
for the naturalness of the unregulated market pointed – quite reasonably in the
circumstances – to the apparently infallible capacity of the market to free
nations from poverty. It may help to turn for illumination to an unexpected
source. Acquisitiveness is, in the Christian monastic tradition, associated
with pride, the root of all human error and failure: pride, which is most
clearly evident in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my
environment, my illusion that I can shape the world according to my will. And
if that is correct, then the origin of economic dysfunction and injustice is
pride – a pride that is manifest in the reluctance to let go of systems and
projects that promise more and more secure control, and so has a bad effect on
our reasoning powers.
This in turn suggests that economic justice arrives
only when everyone recognises some kind of shared vulnerability and limitation
in a world of limits and processes (psychological as well as material) that
cannot be bypassed. We are delivered or converted not simply by resolving in a
vacuum to be less greedy, but by understanding what it is to live as an
organism which grows and changes and thus is involved in risk. We change
because our minds or mindsets are changed and steered away from certain
powerful but toxic myths.
Now, you could say that ethics is essentially about how
we negotiate our own and other people's vulnerabilities. The sort of behaviour
we recognise as unethical is very frequently something to do with the misuse of
power and the range of wrong or corrupt responses to power – with the ways in
which fear or envy or admiration can skew our perception of what the situation
truly demands of us. Instead of estimating what it is that we owe to truth or
to reality or to God as the source of truth, we calculate what we need to do so
as to acquire, retain or at best placate power (and there is of course a style
of supposedly religious morality that works in just such an unethical way). But
when we begin to think seriously about ethics, about how our life is to reflect
truth, we do not consider what is owed to power; indeed, we consider what is
owed to weakness, to powerlessness.
Our ethical seriousness is tested by how we behave
towards those whose goodwill or influence is of no "use" to us. Hence
the frequently repeated claim that the moral depth of a society can be assessed
by how it treats its children – or, one might add, its disabled, its elderly or
its terminally ill. Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at
risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other's need. To be an
ethical agent is thus to be aware of human frailty, material and mental; and
so, by extension, it is to be aware of your own frailty. And for a specifically
Christian ethic, the duty of care for the neighbour as for oneself is bound up
with the injunction to forgive as one hopes to be forgiven; basic to this whole
perspective is the recognition both that I may fail or be wounded and that I may
be guilty of error and damage to another.
It's a bit of a paradox, then, to realise that aspects
of capitalism are in their origin very profoundly ethical in the sense I've
just outlined. The venture capitalism of the early modern period expressed
something of the sense of risk by limiting liability and sharing profit; it
sought to give limited but real security in a situation of risk, and it assumed
that sharing risk was a basis for sharing wealth. It acknowledged the lack of
ultimate human control in a world of complex processes and unpredictable agents
and attempted to "negotiate vulnerabilities", in the terms I used a
moment ago, by stressing the importance of maintaining trust and offering some
protection against unlimited loss. By sharing risk between investor and
venturer, it also shared power.
The problems begin to arise when the system offers such
a level of protection from insecurity that risk comes to be seen as exceptional
and unacceptable. We take for granted a high level of guaranteed return and so
come to prefer those transactions in which the actual business of time-taking
and the limits involved in material labour and scarcity of goods are less
involved. It has been persuasively argued that things begin to go astray,
morally, in the early and intimate association between capitalism and various
colonial projects, in which abundant new natural resources and abundant new
reserves of labour (notably in the shape of slavery) could be counted on to
minimise some kinds of risk.
In the post-colonial climate, it has been the world of
financial products that becomes the favoured basis for both personal and social
economy. A badly or inadequately regulated market is one in which no one is
properly monitoring the scarcity of credit. And this absence of monitoring is
especially attractive when governments depend for their electability on a
steady expansion of spending power for their citizens. Increasingly, to pick up
the central theme of Philip Bobbitt's magisterial works on modern global and
military politics, government rests its legitimacy upon its capacity to satisfy
consumer demands and maximise choices – its capacity to defer or obscure that
element of the uncontrollable which in earlier phases of capitalist production
dictated the habits of mutual trust and shared jeopardy, the habits that made
sense of the otherwise morally controversial idea that the use of money was
itself in some sense a chargeable commodity, something that needed to be paid
for.
Maximised choice is a form of maximised control. And it
presupposes and encourages a basic model of the ideal human agent as an
isolated subject confronting a range of options, each of which they are equally
free to adopt for their own self-defined purposes. If an economy resting on
financial services rather than material production offers more choice, a
government will lean in this direction for electoral advantage, since its claim
to be taken seriously is now grounded in its ability to enlarge the market in
which individuals operate to purchase the raw materials for constructing their
identities and projects.
As I hope will be clear, this is a deeper matter than
just "greed". It is a fairly comprehensive picture of what sort of
things human beings are; and to recognise it as a reasonably accurate model of late
modern "developed" society, especially in the north Atlantic world,
is not to suggest any blanket condemnation of market principles, any nostalgia
for pre-modern social sanctions and so forth – only to begin to sketch an
analysis of where and how certain quite intractable problems arise.
As already indicated, the modern market state, in
Bobbitt's sense of the term, the state that promises maximised choice and
minimal risk, is in serious danger of encouraging people to forget two
fundamentals of economic reality: scarcity as an inexorable truth about a
materially limited world, and concrete productivity and added value as the
condition for increasing purchasing power or liberty, and thus sustaining any
kind of market. The tension between these two things is, of course, at the
heart of economic theory, and imbalance in economic reality arises when one or
the other dominates for too long, producing an unhealthily controlled economy
(scarcity-driven) or an unhealthily hyperactive and ill-regulated economy (based
on the simple expansion of purchasing power).
But forget that tension and what happens is not
stability but plain confusion and fantasy. We have woken up belatedly to the
results of behaving as though scarcity could be indefinitely deferred: the
ecological crisis makes this painfully clear. We have woken up less rapidly and
definitively to the effects of displacing labour costs to undeveloped
economies. The short-term benefits to local employment in these settings and in
lower prices elsewhere cannot offset longer-term issues about security of
employment (jobs will move when labour is cheaper in other places) and thus
also the problematic social changes brought by large-scale movement towards new
employment patterns that have no long-term guarantees. One effect of this
pattern is the creation not of a new consumer class but of a new group of urban
paupers in unstable developing economies – a phenomenon visible in some east
Asian contexts.
The move away from a realistic focus on scarcity and
productivity/added value and towards the virtualised economy of money
transactions has been deeply seductive, and, over a limited time-frame,
spectacularly successful in generating purchasing power. Given that credit is
not something that is naturally 'scarce' in precisely the same sense that
material resources are, inadequate regulation can, as already noted, foster the
illusion that the money market is effectively risk-free; that money can
generate money without constraint.
In contrast to an economic model in which the exchange
of goods is the basic process being analysed or managed, we have increasingly
privileged and encouraged a model in which the process of exchange itself has
become the raw material, the motor of profit-making. But, to repeat the point
made so many times in the last few months, the problem comes when massively
inflated credit is "called in": when the disproportion between
actual, measurable material security and what is being claimed and traded on
the market is so great that confidence in the institutions involved collapses.
The search for impregnable security, independent of the limits of material
resource, available labour and the time-consuming securing of trust by working
at relationships of transparency and mutual responsibility, has led us to the
most radical insecurity imaginable.
This is not the only paradox. In a recent essay in
Prospect, Robert Skidelsky discusses why it is that a globalised economy has
produced a resurgence of protectionism and nationalism, not to mention the
political and economic domination of a single state, the
Skidelsky argues that we need to take steps to reduce
the attractions of relocating and "offshoring" in the first place, so
that countries can focus afresh on their own processes of production so as to
keep both internal and external investment alive. As he says, the present
situation favours economic agreements that give little or no leverage to
workers and that have minimal reference to social, environmental or even local
legal concerns. Learning how to use governmental antitrust legislation to break
up the virtually monopolistic powers of large multinationals that have become
cuckoos in the nest of a national economy would also be an essential part of a
strategy designed to stop the slide from opportunistic outsourcing towards protectionism
and monitoring or policing the chaotic flow of capital across boundaries.
We have yet to see how much of this is deliverable, but
the thrust of the argument is hard to resist, either morally or practically.
Morally, protectionism implicitly accepts that wealth maintained at the cost of
the neighbour's disadvantage or worse is a tolerable situation – which is a
denial of the belief that what is good for humanity is ultimately coherent or
convergent. Such a denial is a sinister thing, since it undermines the logic of
assuming that what the other finds painful I should find painful too – a basic
element of what we generally consider maturely or sanely ethical behaviour.
Practically, protectionism is another instance of short-term vision, securing prosperity
here by making prosperity impossible somewhere else; in a global context, this
is inexorably a factor in ultimately shrinking potential markets.
And the wider agenda sketched by Skidelsky means also
that commercial concerns would be prevented from overturning the social and
political priorities of elected governments. The arguments around unrepayable
international debt a decade ago repeatedly underlined the destructive effects
of imposed regimes of financial stabilisation that derailed governmental programmes
in poor countries and effectively confiscated any means of shaping a local
economy to local needs. And we hardly need reminding of the distorting effect
on a national economy – and public ethics, too - of being seen as a pool of
cheap labour and a haven for irresponsible practices.
Several writers have said that a reformed and
revitalised WTO ought to be able to move us further towards the monitoring I
mentioned a moment ago. Some would be more specific and argue that for this to
work effectively, there needs also to be some regulation of capital flow and
exchange mechanisms, and this is where a variety of commentators from very
diverse backgrounds see the "Tobin tax" proposals as having a place
taxing currency exchanges in ways that would serve national economies. We
should also need some mechanisms by which it could be guaranteed that a
recognisable proportion of "savings", locally generated profits in a
national economy, could be ploughed back into investment in local
infrastructure, so that we should not constantly have to deal with the
consequences of new money in a growing economy roaming around looking for a
home and ending up fuelling the pressure on banks to lend above their capacity
so as to keep the money moving.
Most such moves would, of course, require a formidable,
perhaps unattainable level of global agreement and global enforceability; short
of this, they could be counterproductive. But the debate on what kinds of
international convergence are possible and necessary is a crucial one. The
basic question that Skidelsky and others are posing, however, is how the market
as we know it can be restructured so as to make it do what it is supposed to do
– i.e. to offer producers the chance of a fair and competitive context in which
to trade what they produce and become in turn effective investors and
developers of the potential of their business and their society.
The last few months have seen an extraordinary and
quite unpredictable shift in the balance, with international financial
transactions losing credibility and national governments coming into their own
as guarantors of some level of stability. It is a rather ironic mutation of the
idea of the market state: when it comes to the (credit) crunch, populations
want governments to secure their basic spending power, even if it limits their
absolute consumer freedoms. There is also a point, recently underlined in the
debate in the Church of England's General Synod on this subject, about securing
justice for future generations: any morally and practically credible policy
should be looking to guarantee that future generations do not inherit
liabilities that will cripple the provision of basic social care, for example.
Unregulated 'freedom' in the climate of destructive speculation is not the most
attractive prospect, certainly not compared with a guarantee that assets will
not be allowed to drop indefinitely in value. The only way of 'maximising
choice' is to make sure that it is still possible to choose and to use
something, and to secure the possibilities reasonable choice for our children
and grandchildren, even at the price of restricting some options. Without that
restriction, nothing is solid: we should face a world in which everything
flows, melts, dissolves, in a world of constantly shifting and spectral
valuations.
If we try to draw some of this together into a few
governing principles, what might emerge? The non-economist is bound to be
intimidated by the complexity of what we confront, but, as has been said,
"we are all economists now"; the specialists are not more
conspicuously successful than others in mapping the territory, and this at
least encourages some tentative proposals from the sidelines, however broad and
aspirational. Certainly, over the last century and a half, Anglican theologians
have from time to time taken their courage in their hands and attempted to
outline what an ethically responsible economy might look like, and I am
conscious of standing in the shadow of some very substantial commentators
indeed, from F.D.Maurice to William Temple.
In the background too is the formidable legacy of Roman
Catholic social teaching, expressed in some powerful statements from the
British and American Bishops' Conferences in recent decades. So with this
heritage in mind, I shall suggest five elements, in descending order of
significance, that might provide the bare bones of an economic culture capable
of delivering something like an ethically defensible global policy.
(i) Most fundamentally: we need to move away from a
model of economics which simply assumes that it is essentially about the
mechanics of generating money, and try to restore an acknowledgement of the
role of trust as something which needs time to develop; and so also to move
away from an idea of wealth or profit which imagines that they can be achieved
without risk, and to return to the primitive capitalist idea, as sketched
above, of risk-sharing as an essential element in the equitable securing of
wealth for all.
(ii) As many writers, from Partha Dasgupta to Jonathon
Porritt have argued, environmental cost has to be factored into economic
calculations as a genuine cost in opportunity, resource and durability – and
thus a cost in terms of doing justice to future generations. There needs to be
a robust rebuttal of any idea that environmental concerns are somehow a side
issue or even a luxury in a time of economic pressure; the questions are
inseparably connected.
(iii) We need to think harder about the role – actual
and potential – of democratically accountable governments in the monitoring and
regulation of currency exchange and capital flow. This could involve some
international conventions about wages and working conditions, and cooperation
between states to try and prevent the indefinite growth of what we might call –
on the analogy of tax havens – cheap labour havens. Likewise, it might mean
considering the kind of capital controls that prevent a situation where it is
advantageous to allow indefinitely large sums of capital out of a country.
(iv) The existing international instruments – the IMF
and World Bank, the WTO and the G8 and G20 countries – need to be reconceived
as both monitors of the global flow of capital and agencies to stimulate local
enterprise and provide some safety nets as long as the global playing field is so
far from being level. They need to provide some protective sanctions for the
disadvantaged – not aimed at undermining market mechanisms but at letting them
work as they should, working to allow countries to trade their way out of
destitution.
(v) Necessary short-term policies to kickstart an
economy in crisis – such as we have seen in the
Aspirational these may be; but what I hope is not vague
here is the moral orientation that lies behind all these points. Ethics, I
suggested, is about negotiating conditions in which the most vulnerable are not
abandoned. And we shall care about this largely to the extent to which we are
conscious of our own vulnerability and limitedness. One of the things most
fatal to the sustaining of an ethical perspective on any area of human life,
not just economics, is the fantasy that we are not really part of a material
order – that we are essentially will or craving, for which the body is a useful
organ for fulfilling the purposes of the all-powerful will, rather than being
the organ of our connection with the rest of the world. It's been said often
enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a
materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality,
hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of
being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable
changes and to sheer accident.
Implied in what has just been said is a recognition of
the dangers of "growth" as an unexamined good. Growth out of poverty,
growth towards a degree of intelligent control of one's circumstances, growth
towards maturity of perception and sympathy – all these are manifestly good and
ethically serious goals, and, as has already been suggested, there are ways of
conducting our economic business that could honour and promote these. A goal of
growth simply as an indefinite expansion of purchasing power is either vacuous
or malign – malign to the extent that it inevitably implies the diminution of
the capacity of others in a world of limited resource. Remember the significance
of scarcity and vulnerability in shaping a sense of what ethical behaviour
looks like.
It is true that modern production creates markets by
creating new "needs" – or more properly, new expectations. Human
creativity moves on and human ingenuity constantly enlarges the reach of human
management of the environment. That isn't in itself an evil; but a mature
perspective on this would surely note two things. One is that there is always
some choice involved in what is to be developed – and thus some opportunity
cost. Not everything can be produced according to the dictates of desire, and
so there will still be the need to sort out priorities. Second, we cannot
ignore or postpone the question of what we want enlarged management of the
environment for. The reduction of pain or of frustration, the augmenting of
opportunity for human welfare and joy – again, these are obviously good things.
They are good because they connect with a sense of what is properly owing to
human beings, a sense of human dignity. And thus if the way in which they are
secured for some reduces the opportunities of others, the pursuit of them is
not compatible with a serious commitment to human dignity.
All this amounts to a belief that pursuing ethical
economic growth, while not systematically hostile to new demands and new
markets, while indeed acknowledging the way in which new markets can and should
help to secure the prosperity of new producers, necessarily means looking
critically at our lifestyle. To make it specific, and to use one of the more
obvious examples, it has become more and more clear that lifestyles dependent
on high levels of fossil fuel consumption reduce the long-term opportunities of
basic human flourishing for many people because of their environmental cost –
not to mention the various political traps associated with the production and
marketing of oil in some parts of the world, with the consequent risks to peace
and regional stability. Growth as an infinitely projected process of better and
cheaper access to fossil fuel-related goods, including transport, would not be
an impressive ethical horizon. The question which present circumstances are
forcing rather harshly on our attention is how self-critical we can find it in
ourselves to be about our lifestyle in the more affluent parts of the world –
not in order to adopt a corporate monastic poverty but in order to arrive at a
sense of the acceptable limits to growth in the context of what might be good
for the human family overall and the planet itself.
The five broad principles sketched above could only be
fleshed out against a background in which people recognised that talking about
the need for growth made no sense except in relation to a world of complex
social and political relationships and of limited material resources – a
background of willingness to ask not what might be abstractly possible in terms
of increasing the range of consumer goods but what might be manageable as part
of a balanced global network of forces, basic needs, mutual respect and so on.
Basic to everything we might want to say about the
financial crisis from the religious point of view is the question, "what
for?" What is growth for? For what and for whom is wealth important? If it
is essential to invest in certain kinds of productive ventures, how does this
relate to the broader and longer-term imperative of securing the funding of
social care future by way of sustainable shared resources, accumulated wealth?
And so on. But behind such questions as these is the unavoidable issue of what
human beings are for; or, to put it less crudely, what the content is of ideas
of human dignity and where we look for their foundation or rationale. The
principles outlined a moment ago require a context not only of geopolitical and
social analysis, not even of pragmatic recognitions of the limits of material
resources or the opportunity costs of certain financial decisions, but of a
comprehensive sense of belonging in a world – and a world that is neither
self-explanatory nor self-sufficient, but is transparent to a deeper level of
agency or liberty, that level that is called God by the religious traditions of
humanity.
In Christian belief, the world exists because of a free
act of generous love by the creator. God has made a world in which, by working
with the limitations of a material order declared by God to be 'very good',
humans may reflect the liberty and generosity of God. And our salvation is the
restoration of a broken relationship with this whole created order, through the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the establishing by the power of his
Spirit a community in which mutual service and attention are the basic elements
through which the human world becomes transparent to its maker.
The realising of that transparency is, for religious
believers of whatever tradition, the beginning of happiness – not of a
transient feeling of well-being or even euphoria, but of a settled sense of
being at home, being absolved from urgent and obsessional desire, from the
passion to justify your existence, from the anxieties of rivalry. And so what
religious belief has to say in the context of our present crisis is, first, a
call to lament the brokenness of the world and invite that change of heart
which is so pivotal throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures; and,
second, to declare without ambiguity or qualification that human value rests on
God's creative love and not on possession or achievement. It is not for
believers to join in the search for scapegoats, because there will always be,
for the religious self, an awareness of complicity in social evil. Nor is it
for believers to make light of the real suffering that goes with economic
uncertainty and loss – no less real for the formerly affluent Westerner faced
with redundancy than for the powerless farmer or woman worker enduring yet
another change for the worse in a battered and injured African or Asian
economy.
But the task is to turn people's eyes back to the
vision of a human dignity that is indestructible. This is the vision that will
both allow us to retain a hold on our sense of worth even when circumstances
are painful or humiliating and sustain the sense of obligation to the needs of
others, near at hand or strangers, so that dignity may be made manifest.
In conclusion, let me suggest three central aspects of
a religious – and more specifically, Christian – contribution to the ongoing
debate, which may focus some more detailed reflection:
(i) Our faith depends on the action of a God who is to
be trusted; God keeps promises. There could hardly be a more central theme in
Jewish and Christian scripture, and the notion is present in slightly different
form in Islam as well. Thus, to live in proper harmony with God, human beings
need to be promise-keepers in all areas of their lives, not least in financial dealings.
(ii) As we have noted more than once already, the
perspective of faith understands human beings as part of creation – not wholly
in control, though gifted with capacities that allow real and significant
powers over the environment, bound to material identity and unable to escape
material need. Living in faith is living in awareness of this created and
limited identity without resentment or fantasy.
(iii) Living as part of creation brings with it a sense
of the common destiny and common predicament of humanity. But more
specifically, the scriptural understanding of our calling, especially as set
out in the letters of
So: trustworthiness, realism or humility and the clear
sense that we must resist polices or practices which accept the welfare of some
at the expense of others – there is a back-of-an-envelope idea of where we
might start in pressing for a global economic order that has some claim to be
just. It can't be too often stressed that we are not talking about simply
limiting damage to vulnerable societies far away: the central issues exposed by
the financial crisis are everyone's business, and the risks of what some
commentators (Timothy Garton Ash and Jonathon Porritt) have called a "barbarising"
of western societies as a result of panic and social insecurity are real
enough.
Equally it can't be too often stressed that it is only
the generosity of an ethical approach to these matters that can begin to relate
material wealth to human well-being, the happiness that is spiritual and
relational and based on the recognition of non-negotiable human worth. There is
much to fear at the moment, but, as always, more to hope for – so long as we
can turn our backs on the worlds of unreality so seductively opened up by some
of our recent financial history. Patience, trust and the acceptance of a world
of real limitation are all hard work; yet the only liberation that is truly
worth while is the liberation to be where we are and who we are as human beings,
to be anchored in the reality that is properly ours. Other less serious and
less risky enterprises may appear to promise a power that exceeds our
limitations – but it is at the expense of truth, and so, ultimately at the
expense of human life itself. Perhaps the very heart of the current challenge
is the invitation to discover a little more deeply what is involved in human
freedom – not the illusory freedom of some fantasy of control.
Copyright Rowan Williams 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/09/rowan-williams-lecture-full-text