DocuDharma – Page 3617 – Blogging the Future

Mar 23 2008

Here’s an idea: nationalise the banks

By Jerome a Paris in Economy

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Suggestions to organise a massive bailout of the banks are being floated by central bankers this week-end:

Central banks float rescue ideas

Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are actively engaged in discussions about the feasibility of mass purchases of mortgage-backed securities as a possible solution to the credit crisis.

Such a move would involve the use of public funds to shore up the market in a key financial instrument and restore confidence by ending the current vicious circle of forced sales, falling prices and weakening balance sheets.

There are more details in that article (including about disagreements between the Fed and the ECB on when the package should be put in place), but two things stand out:

1) the financial crisis is now acknowledged as bad enough to require public intervention;

2) that intervention will require significant injection of public money in bank’s balance sheets.

As we have seen with the last minute bailout of Bear Stearns, both have happened, with the Fed being actively involved in the negotiations over the purchase of BS, and ending up providing $30 billion of guarantees to JPMorgan, to cover potential BS liabilities.

Thus we have a solution which has the following consequences:

1) Bear Stearns shareholders are largely wiped out. This is as it should be;

2) JPMorgan gets the good bits of BS for free; if the BS assets it picked up are bad, it is largely protected from losses by the Fed, but if they are less bas as feared, it gets all the upside. This is a great deal for them;

3) the Fed provides a guarantee which gives it no benefit in any case (beyond saving other banks from BS’s meltdown), but may end up costing it up to $30 billion. Not a great deal.

Now, I was much intrigued by a recent opinion piece in the Financial times, which suggested a pretty sensible solution to the current crisis: Ask the oil producers to rescue Wall Street. The idea is that banks need to be recapitalised, to fill the gaps created by recent losses, and to help rebuild trust. Banks are not lending to one another because of worries about the state of the balance sheet of other banks and are increasingly not lending to the economy because they no longer have anough capital and/or are hoarding cash not to be caught short in the near future. Recapitalising them would help solve both the liquidity and the trust issues. And the authors suggest that the logical entities to do such recapitalisation would be the Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) from oil-exporting (and dollar-rich) countries. It has already happened on a small scale at the end of last year, and the authors suggest that it take place on a larger scale, with an appropriate discount.

in a sense, this is fair. To a large extent, the US has been living on credit from exporting countries, and one of the items bought on credit that way on the largest scale is oil. Now that this credit is shown to be failing, it is only appropriate to pay up using what passes for real assets in today’s economies: corporations, and in particular the sector at the heart of the credit machine: banks.

Paying for oil with banks – what an oddly fitting movement that would be.

:: ::

But if you put together the large amounts of our money that central banks seem willing to put on the table to save the financial system, and the idea outlined above, the solution is obvious:

use central bank money directly to get equity in banks

Why should the central banks only provide debt to struggling credit institutions? They should grab the equity, and ensure that they get an upside if the situation somehow improves.

There was no reason whatsoever to make that $30 billion guarantee free to JPMorgan shareholders. It should have been traded for an option on an appropriate share of JPMorgan capital should things go wrong. Similarly, any new injection of funds in the financial markets should now take the form of equity or convertible loans, rather than be backed only be the worst collateral that the banks can find to dump on the hapless central banks, as seems to be the idea now.

The banks fucked up. If they want help, then they have to give up claims on future profits.

Buy-outs, not bailouts.

Mar 23 2008

US Kakistocracy In The Caribbean: Haiti

By davidseth

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti

This morning’s NY Times has an extremely strange story about Haiti. The premise is that things are now so bad in Haiti, that some Haitians wish they still had Papa Doc or Baby Doc Duvalier back as their military despot:

But Victor Planess, who works at the National Cemetery here, has a soft spot for Mr. Duvalier, the man known as Papa Doc. Standing graveside the other day, Mr. Planess reminisced about what he considered the good old days of Mr. Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, who together ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986.

“I’d rather have Papa Doc here than all those guys,” Mr. Planess said, gesturing toward the presidential palace down the street. “I would have had a better life if they were still around.”

Mr. Planess, 53, who complains that hunger has become so much a part of his life that his stomach does not even growl anymore, is not alone in his nostalgia for Haiti’s dictatorial past. Other Haitians speak longingly of the security that existed then as well as the lack of garbage in the streets, the lower food prices and the scholarships for overseas study.

Haiti may have made significant strides since President René Préval, elected in 2006, became the latest leader to pass through the revolving door of Haitian politics. But the changes he has pushed have been incremental, not fast enough for many down-and-out Haitians.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, primarily because of its conceit that Haiti, seething on one end of the island of Hispaniola in the midst of the US sphere of influence in the Caribbean, has developed its present dystopia all by its lonesome self, without any assistance worth mentioning from its gigantic hemispheric neighbor, the United States.

Join me in the Caribe.

The United States has always stirred the pot in Haiti. The first United States occupation of Haiti began on July 28, 1915 and ended almost two decades later in mid-August, 1934. Other US occupations began in 1994 and in 2004, and were conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.

Memory for events in this hemisphere is unbelievably short. Some may recall that four years ago, in 2004, the elected– the 2000 election in Haiti, like the one in the US was disputed– Haitian president Bertrand Aristide left the country in circumstances that are still debated:

On March 1, 2004, US Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), along with Aristide family friend Randall Robinson, reported that Aristide had told them (using a smuggled cellular phone), that he had been forced to resign and abducted from the country by the United States. He claimed to be held hostage by an armed military guard.

Aristide later repeated similar claims, as in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on March 16. He was pressured to resign from office by U.S. soldiers and James B. Foley, U.S. Ambassador to Haïti, on February 29. An aircraft provided by the U.S. carried Aristide and his wife, Mildred Trouillot Aristide, into exile to the Central African Republic. Goodman asked Aristide if he resigned, and President Aristide replied: “No, I didn’t resign. What some people call ‘resignation’ is a ‘new coup d’etat,’ or ‘modern kidnapping.'”

Many supporters of the Fanmi Lavalas party and Aristide, as well as some foreign supporters, denounced the rebellion as a foreign controlled coup d’etat orchestrated by Canada, France and the United States (Goodman, et al., 2004) to remove a publicly elected President. A new book on the subject, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment by Peter Hallward, scrupulously documents the events leading up to February 29, 2004, and concludes that what occurred during the “rebellion” was in fact a modern coup d’etat, financed and orchestrated by forces allied with the US government. /snip

Some have come forward to support his claim saying they witnessed him being escorted out by American soldiers at gunpoint.

Sources close to Aritistide also claim the Bush administration blocked attempts to reinforce his bodyguards. /snip

According to a Washington Times, article of April, 2004

Mr. Aristide, who accuses the United States and France of conspiring to force him out of power, filed a lawsuit in Paris last week accusing unnamed French officials of ‘death threats, kidnapping and sequestration’ in connection with his flight to Africa.

The Bush administration insists that Mr. Aristide had personally asked for help and voluntarily boarded a U.S. plane. ‘He drafted and signed his letter of resignation all by himself and then voluntarily departed with his wife and his own security team,’ Mr. Powell said.

The US have denied the accusations. “He was not kidnapped,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said. “We did not force him onto the airplane. He went on the airplane willingly and that’s the truth.” The kidnapping claim is “absolutely false,” concurred Parfait Mbaye, the communications minister for the Central African Republic, where Aristide’s party was taken. The minister told CNN that Aristide had been granted permission to land in the country after Aristide himself – as well as the U.S. and French governments – requested it.

According the US, as the rebels approached the capital, James B. Foley, U.S. ambassador to Haiti, got a phone call from a high-level aide to Aristide, asking if the U.S. could protect Aristide and help facilitate his departure if he resigned. The call prompted a series of events that included a middle-of-the-night phone call to President Bush and a scramble to find a plane to carry Aristide into exile. He traveled voluntarily via motorcade to the airport with his own retinue of security guards, including some contracted Americans. Before takeoff, Aristide gave a copy of his resignation letter to Foley’s aide.”

Following Aristide’s departure, the first elections were held two years later, on February 8, 2006 to elect a new President. Rene Preval was declared to have won:

Partial election results, released on February 9, indicated that he had won with about sixty percent of the vote, but as further results were released, his share of the vote slipped to 48.7% – thus making a run-off necessary. Several days of popular demonstrations in favour of Préval followed in Port-au-Prince and other cities in Haiti. On February 14, Préval claimed that there had been fraud among the vote counts, and demanded that he be declared the winner outright of the first round. Protesters paralyzed the capital with burning barricades and stormed a luxury hotel to demand results from Haiti’s nearly week-old election as ex-President Rene Preval fell further below the 50 per cent needed to win the presidency. On February 16, 2006, Préval was declared the winner of the Presidential Election by the Provisional Electoral Council with 51.15 percent of the vote, after the exclusion of “blank” ballots from the count.

And what did Preval do right after being declared the winner? Upon his taking office he immediately signed an oil deal with Venezuela and traveled to the United States, Cuba, and France. But it’s the economic connection of impoverished Haiti with Venezuela that may be upsetting to the present United States government:

Haiti under Preval has been cooperating diplomatically and fraternally with its fellow countries of Latin America. The slowly-stabilizing country has seemingly benefited in a rather solid economic partnership with Venezuela. This recently-forged friendship between Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the Haitian president has resulted in various economic agreements. 4 power plants (a 40 megawatt, a 30 megawatt, and two 15 megawatts) are set to be constructed in Haiti. An oil refinery is also scheduled to be installed in the country, with a production capacity of 10,000 barrels of oil per day. Venezuela’s assistance to Haiti is founded upon a historic act where the newly-independent Haiti welcomed and tended to Simón Bolívar and provided military power to aid Bolivar’s cause in liberating much of South America. Haiti’s Latin American alliance provides the country with much of its needed aid. Fidel as well as Raul Castro and other Cuban diplomats such as Vice President Esteban Lazo Hernandez have thanked Haiti for consistently voting in the United Nations General Assembly against the United States embargo against Cuba.

And so, despite long term United States occupation and repeated military involvement, Haiti has begun to reach out to its wealthy southern neighbor and forge bonds with Venezuela. And just as the United States is upset by Chavez’s alliances with Bolivia, and Chile, and Nicaragua, and Cuba, so too an alliance of Haiti with Chavez marks a loss of US influence in its own backyard.

Is that why the New York Times is today talking to its readers about the potential return of Duvalier? Is that why the Times claims that changes in Haiti aren’t proceeding quick enough for the poorest of the poor and implying that a rightwing military despot might be a better choice?

Mar 23 2008

Café Discovery

By Robyn in Teaching

If I have seemed preoccupied the last week or so, that has been because I had homework that required doing. I mean, I got to choose whether or not to do the assignment, but it was still homework. A student at the University of Central Arkansas asked if she could interview me via email as background for a paper she’s writing. She’s an Honors College student there.

Anyway, answering the ten questions she sent me became a task. I have completed that task and sent her my answers.

But it was a bit more emotionally taxing than I expected it to be, so I have decided to share it here as well.

Pain shared is lessened. Joy shared is increased.

It is also possibly the case that some of this is news to some of the membership here at Docudharma. One never knows. If you’ve not heard it before, it’s new to you.

What follows is what I sent her, with some html formatting added.

Upfront admission:

I try not to think about the days in which I transitioned much, because they are not fond memories. Investigating what I believed and how I perceived what was happening versus what other people thought about me or perceived to be happening is bound to be painful.

It is also the case that I was 44 then and now turn 60 eleven days.

I will therefore strive to write brief answers as dispassionately as I can maintain.

1. What was the mathematics department’s response to your decision?

The thing was that I was only allowed to “speak” officially by addressing the chair at the time, Chuck Seifert. Absolutely no direct communication with the administrators was allowed. I thought that was quite off-putting.

I was required to write a letter to my colleagues in the department. One of those colleagues decided that letter should be shared more widely, first to all faculty and staff at UCA, but shortly thereafter to the local churches and through them the local newspaper I did not perceive any of that to be a friendly gesture.

Here’s an essay I wrote about coming out: Coming Out…Way Out.

2. Do you have a copy of the letter/notice you sent to your colleagues that notified them of your decision?

October 3, 1992

[Note: As I look back, I notice that I would not use some of the phrasing in this letter if I were to write it today. It reflects my lack of knowledge about and understanding about what it really means to be transsexual. Hence it is rather full of clichés. I didn’t know any better.]

Dear Colleague:

Most of you have already noticed some major changes in my personality during the past year or so. I have overheard comments from some sources that have been nothing more than poor guesses at my condition (“He’s gay.” “He’s crazy.” “He’s got AIDS.”) I would like at this time to explain why this has occurred in my life and what will likely occur in the future.

Nearly everyone knows or knows of someone that was born with a genetic disorder or defect. It is my personal belief that I was born with one also, although the medical community really has no clue to what causes my disorder. I suffer from “gender dysphoria:” roughly speaking, I born with the wrong physical body for my psychological gender. In the late ’50s I entered puberty and realized that the interior feelings I had didn’t coincide with the societal role my body was going to force on me. My parents, and society at that time, could not or would not accept someone with this problem. For the next 33 years I had to live a lie: I had to behave as if my interior self was not in any way at odds with my visible gender. I played sports, I dated, I did boy/man things. Later I met Becky and did more man things: I married and had a daughter. These last 24 years with Becky have been often painful, sometimes joyful, but ultimately frustrating. Becky is my best friend. There were times when she was my only friend. I regret that I could not be honest with her before we married, but that is the nature of denial, even culturally induced denial.

The older generations of my family have passed on and I no longer feel the oppressive burden of trying to please them. I must now try to please myself in the time I have left. I wish to be comfortable with myself in my remaining years. Therefore I plan to undergo hormonal therapy and have gender reassignment surgery to become physically female.

Some of you will be terribly uncomfortable with this decision. You may not be able to accommodate it into your world view, religion, or philosophy. I don’t wish to impose my problems on any of you. At the same time, I live to teach. I happen to believe that I’m a damn good teacher. Teaching is my means of affecting the lives of others. I don’t want to give up this career. The chances of obtaining employment elsewhere in a “new” position seem remote while I’m going through this process. It is a very expensive process (the major surgical procedure costs $10,000 to $12,000 and it is not likely to be covered by insurance). So I have to work. Since I have tenure here, I’ll work here unless or until other arrangements are made with the administration. Since all my friends live in this area, I don’t choose to leave it at this time.

Please try to understand that gender and sex are not the same thing. This has nothing to do with homosexuality (although that community has been supportive of me), nothing to do with pornography (although much of the information I can get on the subject has been classified as such), nothing to do with perversion. I have a medical problem that is going to be corrected. If any of you want to talk about this, feel free to drop by and see me.

(signed {new name})

[name]

To my female colleagues: One of the steps in the overall process is that I must live for a year “as a woman.” If anyone can explain what that means in today’s society, I would be interested in hearing your views.
——————————————————————

3. According to the University’s sexual harassment policy practiced at the time of stay at U.C.A., were there any problems/issues or concerns with fellow faculty members or staff or students?

I believe that for most people who did have a problem, the problem was one of a religious nature. I tried to remember that. It was difficult to do on those occasions when my physical safety became an issue.

4. Were there any complaints made by you or fellow colleagues and how were they followed up?

Most of the complaints I heard were made by members of the community and or off-campus groups that used our facilities, especially FBLA and Boys State. My complaints against some of these people might be shown in this essay I wrote: These were the bad old days….

What hurt more than anything was my colleagues not offering to lend a hand to protect or defend me.

5. Were colleagues or student’s negative comments addressed?

I took whatever opportunities that were presented to tell my side of events. That mostly consisted of speaking to student groups and the occasional class (honors and psychology, mostly). Other than the teachers of those classes and maybe a dorm supervisor or two, I don’t recall seeing any faculty or staff show up to one of my presentations or performances.

It is my belief that if my employer had made any comment whatsoever in support of me, my life would have been a lot better. But Win Thompson was president and there was a concerted effort not to employ GLBT faculty at the time.

6. Were any unwritten policies practiced regarding your use of women’s restrooms?

Since my office was on the top floor of Main, I was thereafter allowed to use the women’s restroom on that floor…and all women employees were warned that I would be doing so.

7. How is a transgender person’s experience in the workplace different from another person’s?

Employment Discrimination: Where do we go from here?

I’ve spent a huge amount of effort since I transitioned trying to make sure the conditions I endured would not be repeated elsewhere. It is not up to me to judge whatever success there might have been in that or what my contribution to that success might have been.

8. Did your decision affect your job duties or ability to do your job?

I don’t believe transitioning altered my ability to teach. Other people who had never observed me teaching apparently disagreed.

When a person is suddenly treated with hostility by people, by her friends, family, coworkers, or community. there are bound to be profound effects. She may not be able to step back and analyze the situation with a balanced perspective.

9. Was your competence as a professor judged?

I tried for several years to relocate to a less hostile environment. But there seemed to be little interest in a transsexual algebraist of my age and ability set.

10. You mentioned in one of your blog entries that your story reached the newspaper articles of several states. Does this include Arkansas newspapers and do you know the dates of those publications and/or happen to have copies of them?

I was told that the article was reprinted in whole or in part in other newspapers, but did not observe that myself. I found it much safer to avoid local news. But I received phone calls from people in quite a few different bordering states, some supportive and some quite aggressive, who told me they heard about me through the news.

The Demozette published a version just a couple of days after the LCD, I was told. Almost immediately every transsexual woman in Arkansas was asked if they were me…which was rather uncomfortable. The story also became the subject of drive-time radio, I was told. I didn’t tune in.

People also told me in the following years that my transition was reported in gay newspapers in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. I never searched to see if that was true. I basically thought it would be better if I did not know what was being said.

Mar 23 2008

Renewal

By NLinStPaul

Its Easter today and spring came this week – or so says the calendar. I’m not a Christian, so I’m not celebrating Easter. But I do love the messages associated with this time of year… renewal, rebirth, light from darkness.

This last week has felt confusing to me as we observed the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq followed almost immediately by the advent of spring. It felt like the darkest of nights was pressed too close for comfort against the possibilities of a new day. Emotionally I haven’t been able to move that fast. And just to underscore the point, we’ve gotten 5-6 inches of snow where I live in the last two days and it is snowing again this morning as I write. Indeed old man winter is fighting to give way to the coming of spring.

For many of us this winter has been a long one. And I’m not just talking about the weather. The worst of it started 7 and a half years ago when the Supreme Court declared George Bush to be president. That was all followed closely by 9/11, Afghanistan, then Iraq. And things have just grown darker since then.

There are times I play with fantasy and wonder what might have happened differently. What if we had a leader that responded to 9/11 as we would have wanted her to? How would we have scripted something different? I know many felt that moment right after the event when, in all the shock and grief, it seemed as if the whole world came together and was ready to help with the healing. But we all know that moment was squandered by those who took us to war and told us to go shopping.

Is renewal still possible after those fatal errors? There are certainly some wounds that will take more than a lifetime to heal. And we need to honor those wounds in our lives and memories with the respect they deserve.

But the capacity of the human spirit is an amazing thing. I was just reminded of that when RUKind posted a link in a comment to Nightprowlkitty’s essay Friday about the film Beyond Belief.

Susan Retik and Patti Quigley are two ordinary soccer moms living in the affluent suburbs of Boston until tragedy strikes. Rather than turning inwards, grief compels these women to focus on the country where the terrorists who took their husbands’ lives were trained: Afghanistan.

Over the course of two years, as they cope with loss and struggle to raise their families as single mothers, these extraordinary women dedicate themselves to empowering Afghan widows whose lives have been ravaged by decades of war, poverty and oppression – factors they consider to be the root causes of terrorism. As Susan and Patti make the courageous journey from their comfortable neighborhoods to the most desperate Afghan villages, they discover a powerful bond with each other, an unlikely kinship with widows halfway around the world, and a profound way to move beyond tragedy.

From the ruins of the World Trade Center to those of Kabul and back, theirs is a journey of personal strength and international reconciliation, and a testament to the vision that peace can be forged… one woman at a time.

Here again are the words from the trailer:

Beyond tragedy

there is hope.

Beyond hatred

there is compassion.

Beyond our borders

two women discover we are all connected.

Beyond belief.

But it’s not “beyond belief.” These are two real women who are acting in the real world. They are demonstrating for all of us what the true spirit of renewal can be…even in the wake of terrible tragedy. What if their way of responding was the expected course? This is not outside the bounds of what the human spirit is capable of. Certainly it is the more difficult path. Much easier to feed into hate, revenge and violence (in word and deed). But if we ever needed an example of the folly of that way, we’ve seen it demonstrated clearly over the last few years.

So today, on this spring day, I want to claim the path of renewal as demonstrated by Susan Retik and Patti Quigley for myself… and someday for my country.