...be giving and just appears to be an angry spoiled-boy character who is not comfortable with himself. Still, the common-man packaging of the American president helped in the early stage of his presidency to lessen the unease among the public which had been prompted by his struggles with the English language and his frequent embarrassingly inappropriate comments. Thanks to this successful fakery Bush can say and do things that would undermine the credibility of other highly placed politicians. When visiting Japan he used the word “devaluation” instead of “deflation” in remarks about what Japan should be doing about its economy, a linguistic confusion that on Feb 18 2002 caused a sudden dip in the value of the yen on exchange markets. The media have been extraordinarily forgiving, as they filter Bush’s actions and speech in such a way that the common-man image of the Dubya character may prevail. The American Right never tires of contrasting its president with the unreliable elitist and immoral Bill Clinton. The fact that George W. Bush was born rich and went to expensive schools is an easily overlooked complication, as is his reputation for laziness in more discerning circles. The fact that Clinton came from...

...of a population that is not at all inclined spontaneously to choose the side of the Westerners, but whose sentiments must nevertheless be respected. Petraeus: “You have to apply it [the U.S. strategy] in a way that’s culturally appropriate. You don’t move into the villages; you have to move to their edge.” “Tough months ahead!” Or tough years? Or tough decades? The British and the Russians have in the days of ‘the great game’ broken their teeth on Afghanistan. The Russians did so once again in the 1980s. It is now the turn of the Americans and their partners to repeat the exercise in a nightmare-like scenario which they have authored themselves. What were heroes for the free world when the Russians were trying to control the area are, today, corrupt political leaders for sale. But the NATO allies are placing their bets on them. Gloomy thinkers – or realists – have warned Pres Obama that Afghanistan could well become the geopolitical quicksand that will suck in and smother his government. The Americans have of course plenty of experience in quicksand territory: Vietnam and Iraq are the examples now frequently pointed at. But it applies also to Pakistan, in whose...

...domination is not feasible, and hence cannot be a serious long term goal. What used to be called the ‘free world’ shows as yet no signs of grasping the obvious fact that a common cause that held it together before the demise of the Soviet Union has vanished. Unending wars do not belong to the aims endorsed by the member states of the European Union, or Japan. So, the fundamental condition of any alliance — shared political purpose — does not obtain. Daily news about Egyptians and Lybians wrestling to free themselves from tyrannical regimes keeps alive imagery of Western values, and of a laudable effort to help along the democracy sought by others. What used to be called the ‘free world’ has not yet awakened to the reality that, with all its professed intention of spreading democracy and the rule of law over the world, the United States itself no longer has the functioning institutional underpinnings to be a democracy on the national level. Or, for that matter, that its legal system does not do the most important thing it is meant to accomplish: to protect common citizens against the rapacity, political priorities and caprices of powerful entities, which...

...as it may be in the way it is applied, is a crucial underpinning of current economic theory, and placing it in proper perspective would mean, as Meadows put it, that quite a few economists would have to return their Nobel prizes. In these days when columnists, economists, and politicians are holding forth on what they believe to be economic fundamentals, it is more than useful to keep in mind the self-censorship that Dr. Meadows correctly believed to be necessary if he wanted to be heard. In the 37 years since then such a need, if anything, has only increased. The moment you deviate from orthodoxy you must expect to be marginalised. Of course the marginalised mavericks enjoy sufficient freedom of speech, and there is at least one publisher specialising in the literature they produce, but hardly anyone pays attention, hardly anyone who could make a difference that is. Full-fledged battles against orthodoxy are kept in a relatively narrow arena of mostly left-leaning criticism, or in the broader anti-globalisation movement that is only taken seriously as a headache by the powers that be. Exceptions like James Galbraith, whose name and reputation and eloquence have resulted in a relatively large public...

...What, actually, is the scandal all about? As in the case of the Recruit scandal, nothing much illegal took place. The Ministry of Finance has confirmed that compensation is only illegal if it has been previously promised. And even though the compensations were expected as a matter of course, everyone can easily say that such promises were never made. So, there is no legal case. But after years of agreeing with the practice of compensations, the Ministry of Finance has now decided that what the security industry did was improper. If that is true, the next question we must ask is: improper by whose standards? Did the security houses violate, in a major way, the rules of Japanese social convention? This question brings us to a subtle, and most interesting point. For the answer is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that many ordinary Japanese think that something is wrong and unfair if only large investors get guarantees in a market in which the public also participates. But the answer must be “no” if we measure the behaviour of the security houses by the conventions of the world in which they operate. After all, their behaviour lived up...

...with the ruckus surrounding Obama’s healthcare plan. Corporatism in its shiniest perfection. His portrait by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker (of July, 2008) that mentioned “the greatest misconception about Barack Obama” of being “some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary” while “every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them” should have tipped me off. A general quality of successful political rhetoric is that it is normally made to sound commonsensical, so that hardly anyone in his or her right mind can be against its pleas. When campaigning last year Obama’s associates from his time in Chicago made a point of lauding him as a great consensus builder, believing that to be a great advantage for getting things done. Belief in consensus as the political grail to pursue would explain Obama’s efforts to achieve a mood of bipartisanship immediately after his inauguration. Since then, ‘working with the opposition’, his ‘outreach’ to a Republican Party that wants to destroy him has baffled many of his supporters. But outreach, bipartisanship, and the adjectives that come with all that, are positive buzzwords in American political discourse. It...