Harvest

Zhugao, China: A woman picks vegetables while carrying her child [Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images]

Naomi Klein has a Comment up at the Guardian… a walk thru some of the global protest ongoing…

[P]erhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a rejection of the logic of “extraordinary politics” – the phrase coined by the Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis, politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular “reforms”.

That trick is getting tired, as South Korea’s government recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with the US. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes, legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Opposition politicians were having none of it: using sledgehammers and an electric saw, they broke in and staged a 12-day sit-in of parliament. The vote was delayed, allowing for more debate – a victory for a new kind of “extraordinary politics”.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale.

As Italy’s students have taken to shouting in the streets: “We won’t pay for your crisis!”

If only…

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While I was there saw a short take on Davos this year, from Joseph Stiglitz… a dark take.

[T]o this litany of concerns we can add the fear that borrowers, wary of massive American deficits, and holders of US dollar reserves, worried that the US may be tempted to inflate away its debt, might respond by draining the supply of global savings. At Davos, those who trusted the US not to inflate away its debt intentionally worried that it might happen unintentionally. There was little confidence in the none-too-deft hand of the US Federal Reserve – its reputation marred by massive monetary-policy failures in recent years – to manage the massive build-up of debt and liquidity.

President Obama seems to be offering a needed boost to American leadership after the dark days of George W Bush; but the mood in Davos suggests that optimism and confidence may be short-lived. America led the world in globalisation. With American-style capitalism and America’s financial markets in disrepute, will the US now lead the world into a new era of protectionism, as it did once before, during the Great Depression?

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Last but not least… the Zinni story is REALLY getting around.  In this, Flynt Leverett and Korb are quoted.  Not inconsequential critics.  Nor is Leverett merely ”a former Clinton” whatever, it was his wife who unloaded on Olberman on how useless the Hillary contingent would be in Middle East (and the interview was cut off)…

“They handled this in an extremely amateurish way and then they compound this by letting the world know that they don’t really care who’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia,” said Flynt Leverett, a foreign policy official under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who said the transition had been characterized by such “stumbles.”

“It is astounding to me,” he said. “It does appear like there are some real struggles going on.”

Korb:

Yet on the lower levels of the transition, many among the army of Democratic foreign policy hands who labored for Obama’s campaign say they have heard little since election day. Lawrence Korb, a top Reagan Defense Department official and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who headed Obama’s defense policy team during the campaign, sent his aides a memo soon after the election.

“I said, ‘These are the people who really work and they should be involved in the transition and the administration,'” he recalled. “I never heard anything and neither did they.”

“I don’t know who’s doing what, who’s in charge,” Korb said.

Lotta chiefs (Czars, Tsars, Princes of the Purse, Gods of the Armies) is my impression as well… pontificating from my cubby hole.  Hey!  It’s tough being Leader of the Free World.  or Whirled.

Have a heart for our leaders… it likely is all you can afford to give!

“There’s a lot of chiefs and not a whole lot of Indians,” said [Aaron David] Miller. “You’ve just got to make sure that when chiefs interact, the casualty of this interaction isn’t an effectively and seamlessly organized American policy.”

Most Democrats remain hopeful, however, that the process’s frustrations are largely products of the speed and of the administration’s early days, and that ruffled feathers will soon be smoothed. “Part of it of it is the normal bumps in the road,” said Korb. “And you’ve also got two wars going on and a lot of international crises.” Other tensions, though, may not be resolved until the internal pecking order among the administration’s major players becomes clear. “In any administration you get somebody who dominates,” Korb added. “Nobody had ever heard of Kissinger before he went in there, and pretty soon he was running things.”

Well they promised a lot.  And now the mashed potatoes have LUMPS.  I am sure it will all turn out fine.

Why would it not, God Blesses Us Everyday.  He prays for us first.  He sent his only begotten son, from a white woman in Hawai’i and a son of a village chief in Kenya, to save us.

We are blessed.  Care to dare to say we are not?

(my usual tirade)