Weekend reading

Here are some articles my kitten Ella highly recommends:

"How a housing slowdown will cause a recession", Bonddad
Housing, housing and more housing - that has been the dominant economic story for the last few weeks. The news has been universally bad: inventories are rising to 10-year high levels, buyers are already saddled with massive amounts of debt, homebuilders are cutting profit projections and overall investment is negative. And here is more from Nouriel Roubini: housing is already in free fall and will cause a recession by the summer of 2007.

"The Death of Doha", David Moberg
The Doha collapse is good for the poor mainly because it thwarts an expansion of a global economy built around opening markets for multinational corporations and protecting their interests. As a result, the collapse also signals a turning point for regulation of the global economy, even if it provides no tangible gain for the poor.

Bits and pieces of an alternative that promotes a broader vision of social and economic development have emerged, but there is still no consensus (for example, over ways to protect workers’ rights), let alone enough powerful governments willing to push for it. Until governments—especially the United States—accept the need for a alternative, perhaps developed outside the confines of the WTO, the best that can be achieved is gridlock.

Although the comatose WTO talks may eventually be revived, in the meantime countries will accelerate negotiation of bilateral trade agreements, like the pending agreements between the United States and both Peru and Colombia. In most cases, developing countries and especially their poor will likely suffer more in such lopsided negotiations than they would in the multilateral WTO talks.

"Don't look away", Ezra Klein
To weep and wail over the genocide that AIDS is wreaking on Africa has become somewhat unfashionable -- relegated to the purview of hemp-clad college activists and shrill scolds. That the epidemic has done incalculable damage is well known; to reiterate its toll is to waste the speaker’s energy and spoil the listener’s mood. The crisis is so huge, its impact so devastating, that we who look away can’t help but quietly resent those whose (self-righteous?) devotion reminds us of our cowardice. Like the slaughter in Sudan or the tsunami in Indonesia, the horror is so huge that to fully confront it would demand a commitment we can’t imagine furnishing. Or so we think.

In fact, the AIDS epidemic is not like foreign massacres or God’s ugliest acts. It is, instead, a public-health issue, one that already draws a significant (though still inadequate) amount of international funding with a mature infrastructure for aid delivery, in addition to a broadly accepted and well-studied set of best practices and effective prevention, treatment, and harm-reduction strategies.

"US may bypass UN on Iran", Reuters
The Bush administration has indicated it is prepared to form an independent coalition to freeze Iranian assets and restrict trade if the U.N. Security Council fails to penalize Tehran for its nuclear enrichment program, The Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.

"The top ten corporate-Democrats for hire", Russ Baker
Lieberman and his defenders have tried to portray his brand of politics as "centrism." But it has little to do with mainstream voters and much to do with the money culture of Washington of which many Democrats have become a part. And yet, Ralph Nader is wrong in his blanket condemnations of Democrats: You still are more likely to find someone willing to stand up to the big money boys among Democrats than Republicans. But the gap is narrowing. Voters sense it.

"Whitewash", Katrina Vanden Heuvel
In June, Robert Jay Lifton, esteemed psychiatrist and author of many books including Crimes of War: Iraq, wrote in Editor and Publisher of the corrupting nature of the occupation and counterinsurgency in Iraq: "To attribute the likely massacre at Haditha to ‘a few bad apples' or to ‘individual failures' is poor psychology and self-serving moralism. To be sure, individual soldiers and civilians who participated in it are accountable for their behavior, even under such pressured conditions. But the greater responsibility lies with those who planned and executed the ‘war on terrorism' of which it is a part, and who created, in policy and attitude, the accompanying denial of the rights of captives (at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) and of the humanity of civilians (at Haditha)."

"No one left for Joe (Lieberman) to lie to", David Sirota
Joe Lieberman is spinning so many lies and so completely embracing the Republican Party establishment its becoming nearly impossible to keep track of it all. In all honesty, I have never seen a politician - any politician - lie so brazenly and with such open disdain for the public he is lying to. Usually, the lies come packaged with the veneer of truth - but in desperation, Lieberman has stopped even pretending he's being consistent or telling the truth.

"Clintonista urges Dems to use caution …", Joshua Holland
There are serious charges against this Whitehouse -- charges that go way beyond lying us into a war -- that need to be addressed, and [Robert] Reich is dangerously close to suggesting that issues like circumventing the 1978 FISA law or international and domestic bans on torture are a matter of ideological or partisan preference not fundamental questions about the rule of law or the separation of powers -- he's saying: "vote for us and we won't choose to spy on you." They have, indeed, become partisan fights, but they never should have been.

Reich might have urged Democrats to pick their fights carefully, and I would have agreed. But at the end of the day, either you're for accountability or you're not. Saying we should let bygones be bygones and look forward is taking a stand against holding officials to account for their actions. We're supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, right?

"Iraq war has Bush Doctrine in tatters", San Francisco Chronicle
Analysts across the political spectrum say the Bush Doctrine -- preventive war, choking the roots of terrorism by planting democracy, and brandishing power to force others into line -- has failed. Bush's lofty goals, shared even by his critics, have been set back, perhaps decades, by the Iraq occupation.

Yet for all the criticism, neither the Democratic Party nor the foreign policy elite has devised an alternative for the post-Sept. 11 world, leaving U.S. foreign policy adrift.