United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

An essay in a new book published by the London School of Economics argues that current methods of evaluating the contribution of banks to the general economy are inaccurate, the Economist reported Thursday.[1]  --  Because much of the gross value-added of the banking industry is evaluated based on the difference between the rate charged for loans and an arbitrary and unrealistic "reference rate," yielding an amount of value-added that is vastly overstated in periods when banks systematically undervalue risk, as they did in the recent financial crisis.  --  What has really been going on, it appears, is that "The financial industry has done so well for itself . . . because it has been given the licence to make a leveraged bet on property.  The riskiness of that bet was underestimated because almost everyone from bankers through regulators to politicians missed one simple truth:  that property prices cannot keep rising faster than the economy or the ability to service property-related debts.  The cost of that lesson is now being borne by the developed world’s taxpayers."  --  COMMENT:  And not by the bankers.  --  Also, what goes unmentioned here is why banks were "given the licence" to do this.  --  For an unorthodox economic explanation, see The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009) by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff.   --  Their idea is that "stagnation generates financialization."  --  Essentially, "monopoly-finance capital" (a hyperbolic expression referring to oligopolistic capitalism) generates stagnation and excess profits that create a problem of capital accumulation and "a shortage of profitable investment opportunities."  --  A wide range of phenomena are generated, including neoliberal globalization, militaristic imperialism, chronic unemployment, advertising culture, in addition to financial speculation manias and their attendant crashes and panics....

Reviewing a recent volume on the origins of the United Nations, John Gray wrote in the June 2010 Harper's that "Liberal idealists, who support the organization as a way of promoting universal human rights and moving toward a global rule of law, have taken too seriously the moralizing rhetoric that surrounded the U.N.'s foundation."[1]  --  The U.N. never truly had idealistic aspiration; rather, it was "founded to perpetuate the global dominance of Britain and America while accommodating the unwelcome emergence of the Soviet Union."  --  Nevertheless, "the U.N. could not hold back the tide of anticolonialism, and newly independent states would soon have an influential voice in its deliberations."  --  At present, Gray believes, "American power is in rapid decline."  --  "[T]he U.N. has a useful part to play in the world today," but "[i]t no more determines the course of world affairs than it ever did.  NATO, the G20, the IMF, and the European Union are far more important in shaping events, whereas major geostrategic decisions continue to be made by sovereign states.   No program of reform could alter these facts." ...

A futile war that has gone on for nine years:  it would be surprising if Americans did not feel a renewed interest in the Trojan War.  --  But G.W. Bowersock, the 74-year American classicist who has spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is having none of it:  "[I]f today, in reading [Homer and Xenophon], we are tempted to think that we are, in Gildersleeve’s words, 'reading contemporary history,' we should follow his lead and think again.  Historical parallels are rarely parallel, and they breed false hopes."[1]  --  G.W. Bowersock reviewed Caroline Alexander's 2009 book on the Trojan war in the Apr. 29, 2010, number of the New York Review of Books.  --  The book's subtitle (The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War) "is puzzling,"  Bowersock wrote, "because there is no true story of the Iliad :  we have only the story that is in the Iliad."  --  Neverthless, he allows that her book "is far better than its title (The War That Killed Achilles) and subtitle would lead anyone to expect."  --  As for the truth about the Trojan War, "The true story of the Trojan War is beyond knowing." ...

One of America's most insightful and prolific social and historical commentators, Garry Wills, discussed David Remnick's new biography of Barack Obama in a front-page review in this week's New York Times Book Review.  --  Wills wrote:  "Obama is such a good storyteller that his biographer might well be intimidated by the thought of competing with his own version of his life. But Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of Dreams From My Father."  --  In general, Remnick shows how in telling his own story Obama has always been careful to "trim the facts" of his life to suit the inclinations of his audience.  --  The editor of the New Yorker inteprets Obama's first book as "a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a 'slave narrative,' a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession."  --  Wills notes:  "The art with which the book is constructed to serve [Obama's] deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it."  --  In The Bridge, Obama is portrayed as "a perpetual outsider who wins acceptance in whatever new company he joins."  --  The final two paragraphs of Wills's review leave Remnick's biography behind and issue a warning that Barack Obama is sure to peruse himself:  "Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation.  It had always worked.  Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness?  Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril.  To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity.  Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror -- possible future 'renditions' (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid 'a dumb war.'  He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.  --  To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis.  To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month).  All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation.  But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done.  He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid -- believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era.  That is a change no one should ever have believed in.  The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope." ...

Ian Angus, a philosopher on the faculty of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, published in December a volume entitled Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment (Arbeiter Ring, 2009).  --  Truthout posted an excerpt from the book on Sunday.[1]  --  Angus concludes that the "network society" has produced an "anxiety about identity" that the modern university would be wrong to resist.  --  "It is not by attempting to restore a monopoly of knowledge that the university can find a contemporary public function, but by taking seriously the anxiety about identity and entering into the production of self-knowledge.  At this point, the contemporary function of the university reaches back to touch its humanistic roots.  The search for self-knowledge initiated by Socrates can take on a social function in the network society."  --  Angus is also the author of Identity and Justice (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008) and Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Arbeiter Ring, 2002).  --  NOTE: This Ian Angus is not to be confused with the 60-something Canadian socialist activist of the same name.  --  The author of Love the Questions was born in London, holds dual Canadian and U.K. citizenship, has taught at universities in the U.S. (Univ. of New Hampshire, Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst), and holds a 1980 Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought from NYU....

Lawrence Wittner spoke in Seattle on Sat., Apr. 3, 2010, on "How Peace Activists Saved the World from Nuclear War."  --  His talk was filmed by activist Todd Boyle and posted on the website Vimeo.[1]  --  Lawrence S. Wittner, 68, is the preeminent historian of the struggle for nuclear disarmament and is the author of a scholarly trilogy entitled The Struggle Against the Bomb (1993, 1997, 2003).  --  In 2009, he published an abridgment, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement.  --  He is also the author of Rebels Against War (1969, rev. ed. 1984), Cold War America (1974, rev. ed. 1978), and American Intervention in Greece (1982).  --  Wittner's 1967 Ph.D. is from Columbia; he taught for most of his career at SUNY-Albany.  --Thanks to Todd Boyle for filming and posting this....

In his criticisms in a London Review of Books review of Garry Wills's Bomb Power, Stephen Holmes is surprisingly obtuse and seems to miss the forest for the trees, suggesting that the fact that the U.S. president is still concerned about public opinion somehow establishes that the constitutional order in American politics has not been subverted, or not as much as Wills claims.[1]  --  But since it is as much the struggle to hold or obtain the White House as to gain control of Congress that motivates concern for public opinion, this is a non sequitur.  --  Wills is right to argue that constitutional normality never returned to the U.S. after the invention of the Bomb.  --  Holmes's notion that "Obama, on the other hand, benefits from [what Wills calls Bomb Power] not at all" is bizarre.  --  And fears about nuclear proliferation and the powers they lead the executive to ascribe to itself are part of what Wills is discussing, not counterexamples.  --  (Holmes is right, though, to complain that Wills fails to consider imperialism as a causal factor, as opposed to the development of nuclear weapons.) --  Holmes's real animus against Wills is revealed in his final paragraph:  "That an irreverent critic of American myths, and one as knowledgeable as Wills is about the universal narcissism of tribes and nations, feels drawn to the idea of American exceptionalism is revealing.  His patriotism is penitent, not smug, but it nevertheless rests on a strong asymmetry or moral non-equivalence between the U.S. and other nations.  Perhaps the crimes committed during the last 65 years by American governments in the name of national security are a result not of the invention of weapons of unimaginable destructiveness, but rather of a deeply ingrained way of seeing the world, a belief in America’s ineffable connection to truth and justice, shared by no other people, which even the country’s most contrarian critics cannot shake off."  --  Holmes, it turns out, is a cynic, Wills a patriotic idealist.  --  See here for a synopsis of Garry Wills's Bomb Power, which was discussed by UFPPC's book group on Mar. 19.....

On Mon., Feb. 22, UFPPC's book group, Digging Deeper, will discuss Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos (2008).  --  The volume was published in June 2008, in the midst of the U.S. presidential election, and has certainly influenced President Barack Obama's "new policy" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  --  Descent into Chaos was called "brilliant and passionate" in a long review by William Dalrymple that appeared in the New York Review of Books in Februray 2009.[1]  --  The most important aspect of the book, perhaps, is its exploration and exposure of the double game being played by the Pakistani military, supporting both the U.S. and the jihadi groups that oppose the U.S.  --  NOTE: Digging Deeper reading selections for March 2010 have been posted....

Most economists "don’t just oppose any moves to make that distribution more equal," wrote Sam Pizzigati in a review of Moshe Adler's new book, Economics for the Rest of Us.[1]  --  "They tout, Adler notes, 'a theory that justifies the process that creates inequality to begin with.'"  --  But "Economics for the Rest of Us blasts away against that theory -- and all the other contortions economists go through to make the case that 'what’s good for the economy' must always be what’s 'good for the rich.'" ...

This Monday and last Monday (Feb. 1 & 8) UFPPC's Monday evening book discussion group, Digging Deeper, is examining two recent books by philospher Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008) and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso, 2009).  --  The French translation of the latter was reviewed last week in Le Monde (Paris); Jean Birnbaum's mixed review is translated below.[1] ...