No Grounds for Patronizing the Hunza
I was deeply disappointed by the bias against the Hunza of northern Pakistan that was evident in "Fighting the good fight" (The Conflict, Nov. 26). Should it really have escaped your research that the Aga Khan has been weighed in gold by his followers, mostly the Hunza people, so he could amass his tremendous wealth? To speak of him as a benefactor if he spends so little of this fortune for charity programs in the region is the height of irony.
Fifty years ago, no expedition in the Karakorum region was possible without the endurance and surefootedness of Hunza men. At the beginning of the 20th century, no country on earth, regardless of its civilized status, could match the happiness and health of the Hunza. Life expectancy was by far above that of the U.S. or Britain.
Now the Hunza are applauded if they speak flawless English and export some honey or dried fruit to England. What can be said of this state of arrogance and ignorance?
Rolf Schurian
Zankenhause, Germany
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Fighting the good fight
Fighting the Good Fight
The Aga Khan's millions are helping improve Pakistan
Gari Khan is renowned among his neighbors for his moving recitations of the Koran. Regularly, hundreds of fellow Muslims gather to marvel at his performances. Khan, 35, is known for something else, too: His prowess as a beekeeper. Six years ago, he and his wife, Shamin, 28, got loans and technical assistance from the Aga Khan Rural Support Program to raise honeybees. This year, the Khans' Hunza Honey company repaid its loans and raked in $5,000 in revenues. "Our lives have been turned around," says Shamin. "Before, we were traditional people growing our crops. Now we are thinking like business people."
That's an impressive achievement when you consider where the Khans live: in the mountain village of Aliabad, in Pakistan's rugged Northern Area. In this part of the world, people are lucky to scrape together $100 a year. Remote doesn't begin to describe the Khans' hometown, a dot in the Hunza District, one of the most inhospitable and beautiful landscapes on earth, 16 bumpy hours by road from the capital of Islamabad. Until recently, the town boasted few real businesses, infrastructure such as electricity was nonexistent, and its schools were rudimentary. In fact, Aliabad and its neighboring villages were as poor as present-day Afghanistan, just 60 kilometers north.
GRASSROOTS. Today, the grinding poverty endured for centuries is a fading memory in Aliabad and such neighboring towns as Ghulkin and Karimabad. These villages owe their prosperity to the man who helped give the Khans their start, a moderate Shia Muslim living thousands of miles away in France, 64-year old Prince Karim Aga Khan. Since the 1950s, the family of the Aga Khan, who is spiritual leader to some 15 million Ismaili Muslims worldwide, has been devoting its considerable wealth--much of it donated by the Aga Khan's flock--to good works. The Aga Khan Development Network has spent millions over the years, bringing running water and electricity to remote hamlets, teaching farmers entrepreneurial skills, and educating girls.
The successes in such villages as Aliabad are especially important at this point in history, since they have helped curb the spread of radical Islam. Elsewhere in Pakistan--and Afghanistan--poverty has driven young men into the embrace of mullahs who fill their heads with perverse religious notions, press AK-47s into their hands, and send them off to fight holy wars. "If 15 years ago I had no education, health opportunities, or community support," says Ghulkin resident Mujood Ali, "I'd be one of the terrorists, too." Instead, he runs the microcredit scheme in his village.
What makes the Aga Khan's rural development work so effective is its emphasis on grassroots participation in setting development goals, the mobilization of community savings, and the development of civil society. Moreover, it lends aid regardless of religious affiliation. While the group originally focused its Pakistan programs on the 300,000 Ismailis in the Northern Area, it has since expanded them to non-Ismailis. Its grassroots philosophy could be a model as the world seeks to rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Of course, it helps that the Aga Khan continuously pours new funds into his programs, relying on the donations of the Ismaili diaspora. Outside observers note that the progress achieved in the Northern Area is in no way free-standing. Moreover, the Aga Khan Network is the region's largest employer, with 370 on the payroll. "If the Aga Khan Network disappeared tomorrow," says an Islamabad-based U.N. official, "there's a very high risk the whole thing would collapse."
Still, it is hard to overstate the impact that the Aga Khan Network has had in that area. The group has built more than 100 schools for girls, developed dozens of small businesses, and helped construct bridges, irrigation canals, and mini hydropower plants. Its rural support program has introduced new breeds of livestock and better seeds, enabling farmers to increase yields and produce cash crops, such as almonds and dried apricots, that they sell as far away as Britain.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the Aga Khan's contribution more profound than in the schools he builds and finances. They are often the only schools of any kind in remote areas neglected by the government. Recently, the Aga Khan Network has expanded its education program by building elite schools for especially promising students, such as the Aga Khan Girls Academy in Karimabad, the former royal capital of Hunza. Located on a steep mountainside, the school provides a stunning learning environment at 2,450 meters. The stone and concrete facility boasts chemistry labs, a library with daily newspapers flown in from Islamabad, and a computer lab where girls work with Excel and Microsoft Windows. (The community only got phone service last year, and the Internet is still not available.)
ADULT TRAINING. A recent lesson featured a discussion of the life of Mohammed, and what he meant when he talked about jihad, or holy war. "Jihad is a struggle against evil. The best jihad is a fight with ourselves, inner struggle," says 15-year-old Hussun Nawaz. After class, Nawaz and her classmates stress the difference between their education and the dogma taught at fundamentalist madrassahs in other parts of the country. "They're just reciting the Koran in Arabic, a language they don't understand," says Nawaz in flawless English. "Islam preaches to fight against evil, not human life." Fatima Raza, a 16-year-old who plans to become an accountant, nods vigorously: "Nothing in the Koran says we should cover our face or wear a gown from head to foot."
While young people attend school, their elders learn basic business skills from the Aga Khan's local representatives. The training stresses better crop and animal management, and making goods such as carpets that will provide income. Local microcredit facilities, in turn, provide both an incentive to save and a source of credit in regions where banks are nonexistent. From 1982 to 2000, some $2.2 million was lent out in the northern villages.
While the bulk of these loans goes to buy fertilizer, seeds, and tools, more recently the credit has been expanded to support enterprise. A community-owned company called Hunza Threadnet turns out embroidered caps, bags, and carpets, providing jobs for 2,400 women working in their homes. Sales this year, the company says, are expected to reach $50,000. The beekeeping Khans are considered role models of the program. Having paid off their loans, they now plan to boost the number of bee colonies they keep by 50% next year and then start exporting honey as far afield as the Middle East.
Only a generation ago, life in Ghulkin was a daily struggle. Today, the 1,000 village residents enjoy running water, electricity, and English-language schools. About 70% are literate--well above Pakistan's national average of less than 50%. "When I was young, there was only poverty and problems," says Ainul, a woman in late middle age wearing a traditional needlework pillbox crowned by a white scarf. "Now, life is easy." Easy is a relative term, of course. But even the rough level of comfort enjoyed by Ainul and her neighbors wouldn't be possible without the help of their distant benefactor in France, who has helped locals put into practice a moderate, forward-looking Islamic vision.
By Frederik Balfour in Hunza, Pakistan
The Aga Khan's millions are helping improve Pakistan
Gari Khan is renowned among his neighbors for his moving recitations of the Koran. Regularly, hundreds of fellow Muslims gather to marvel at his performances. Khan, 35, is known for something else, too: His prowess as a beekeeper. Six years ago, he and his wife, Shamin, 28, got loans and technical assistance from the Aga Khan Rural Support Program to raise honeybees. This year, the Khans' Hunza Honey company repaid its loans and raked in $5,000 in revenues. "Our lives have been turned around," says Shamin. "Before, we were traditional people growing our crops. Now we are thinking like business people."
That's an impressive achievement when you consider where the Khans live: in the mountain village of Aliabad, in Pakistan's rugged Northern Area. In this part of the world, people are lucky to scrape together $100 a year. Remote doesn't begin to describe the Khans' hometown, a dot in the Hunza District, one of the most inhospitable and beautiful landscapes on earth, 16 bumpy hours by road from the capital of Islamabad. Until recently, the town boasted few real businesses, infrastructure such as electricity was nonexistent, and its schools were rudimentary. In fact, Aliabad and its neighboring villages were as poor as present-day Afghanistan, just 60 kilometers north.
GRASSROOTS. Today, the grinding poverty endured for centuries is a fading memory in Aliabad and such neighboring towns as Ghulkin and Karimabad. These villages owe their prosperity to the man who helped give the Khans their start, a moderate Shia Muslim living thousands of miles away in France, 64-year old Prince Karim Aga Khan. Since the 1950s, the family of the Aga Khan, who is spiritual leader to some 15 million Ismaili Muslims worldwide, has been devoting its considerable wealth--much of it donated by the Aga Khan's flock--to good works. The Aga Khan Development Network has spent millions over the years, bringing running water and electricity to remote hamlets, teaching farmers entrepreneurial skills, and educating girls.
The successes in such villages as Aliabad are especially important at this point in history, since they have helped curb the spread of radical Islam. Elsewhere in Pakistan--and Afghanistan--poverty has driven young men into the embrace of mullahs who fill their heads with perverse religious notions, press AK-47s into their hands, and send them off to fight holy wars. "If 15 years ago I had no education, health opportunities, or community support," says Ghulkin resident Mujood Ali, "I'd be one of the terrorists, too." Instead, he runs the microcredit scheme in his village.
What makes the Aga Khan's rural development work so effective is its emphasis on grassroots participation in setting development goals, the mobilization of community savings, and the development of civil society. Moreover, it lends aid regardless of religious affiliation. While the group originally focused its Pakistan programs on the 300,000 Ismailis in the Northern Area, it has since expanded them to non-Ismailis. Its grassroots philosophy could be a model as the world seeks to rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Of course, it helps that the Aga Khan continuously pours new funds into his programs, relying on the donations of the Ismaili diaspora. Outside observers note that the progress achieved in the Northern Area is in no way free-standing. Moreover, the Aga Khan Network is the region's largest employer, with 370 on the payroll. "If the Aga Khan Network disappeared tomorrow," says an Islamabad-based U.N. official, "there's a very high risk the whole thing would collapse."
Still, it is hard to overstate the impact that the Aga Khan Network has had in that area. The group has built more than 100 schools for girls, developed dozens of small businesses, and helped construct bridges, irrigation canals, and mini hydropower plants. Its rural support program has introduced new breeds of livestock and better seeds, enabling farmers to increase yields and produce cash crops, such as almonds and dried apricots, that they sell as far away as Britain.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the Aga Khan's contribution more profound than in the schools he builds and finances. They are often the only schools of any kind in remote areas neglected by the government. Recently, the Aga Khan Network has expanded its education program by building elite schools for especially promising students, such as the Aga Khan Girls Academy in Karimabad, the former royal capital of Hunza. Located on a steep mountainside, the school provides a stunning learning environment at 2,450 meters. The stone and concrete facility boasts chemistry labs, a library with daily newspapers flown in from Islamabad, and a computer lab where girls work with Excel and Microsoft Windows. (The community only got phone service last year, and the Internet is still not available.)
ADULT TRAINING. A recent lesson featured a discussion of the life of Mohammed, and what he meant when he talked about jihad, or holy war. "Jihad is a struggle against evil. The best jihad is a fight with ourselves, inner struggle," says 15-year-old Hussun Nawaz. After class, Nawaz and her classmates stress the difference between their education and the dogma taught at fundamentalist madrassahs in other parts of the country. "They're just reciting the Koran in Arabic, a language they don't understand," says Nawaz in flawless English. "Islam preaches to fight against evil, not human life." Fatima Raza, a 16-year-old who plans to become an accountant, nods vigorously: "Nothing in the Koran says we should cover our face or wear a gown from head to foot."
While young people attend school, their elders learn basic business skills from the Aga Khan's local representatives. The training stresses better crop and animal management, and making goods such as carpets that will provide income. Local microcredit facilities, in turn, provide both an incentive to save and a source of credit in regions where banks are nonexistent. From 1982 to 2000, some $2.2 million was lent out in the northern villages.
While the bulk of these loans goes to buy fertilizer, seeds, and tools, more recently the credit has been expanded to support enterprise. A community-owned company called Hunza Threadnet turns out embroidered caps, bags, and carpets, providing jobs for 2,400 women working in their homes. Sales this year, the company says, are expected to reach $50,000. The beekeeping Khans are considered role models of the program. Having paid off their loans, they now plan to boost the number of bee colonies they keep by 50% next year and then start exporting honey as far afield as the Middle East.
Only a generation ago, life in Ghulkin was a daily struggle. Today, the 1,000 village residents enjoy running water, electricity, and English-language schools. About 70% are literate--well above Pakistan's national average of less than 50%. "When I was young, there was only poverty and problems," says Ainul, a woman in late middle age wearing a traditional needlework pillbox crowned by a white scarf. "Now, life is easy." Easy is a relative term, of course. But even the rough level of comfort enjoyed by Ainul and her neighbors wouldn't be possible without the help of their distant benefactor in France, who has helped locals put into practice a moderate, forward-looking Islamic vision.
By Frederik Balfour in Hunza, Pakistan
Friday, 9 January 2009
Meet Sada Cumber
Meet Sada Cumber
Bush's appointment to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
by Stephen Schwartz
03/06/2008 12:00:00 AM
ON MONDAY, MARCH 3, the first U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which brings together 57 Muslim countries, took up his duties. Named by President George W. Bush, America's new diplomat to Muslims is Pakistan-born Sada Cumber of Austin, Texas. Cumber is the co-founder of an investment and wealth consultancy, CACH Capital Management, and some 10 other enterprises. Cumber's official job at the OIC is "to promote mutual understanding and dialogue between the United States and Muslim communities around the world."
Born in Karachi in 1951, he was educated in Pakistan, came to America in 1978, became a U.S. citizen in 1986, and has been prominent in Texas politics. But these details of his life--even his identification with the president's home state--are of little interest compared with a remarkable fact that does not appear in his U.S. government biography. Sada Cumber is an Ismaili Muslim--a member of a small and historically suppressed branch of Shia Islam.
When President Bush announced last June that he would send a U.S. representative to the OIC, some observers wondered how an American Muslim would function in a body that has long been dominated by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Having selected an Ismaili for the post, President Bush proved to be astute and adroit. Because Ismailis have suffered discrimination at the hands of Sunnis, and especially Islamist bigots, to draw America's observer at the OIC from their ranks represents a substantial challenge to the radicalism and conformism imposed on global Islam. It affirms the rights of Muslim minorities including Sufis, or spiritual Muslims, as well as Shias, just as America has advocated for the freedom of non-Muslims in Islamic lands. Ismailis have been brutally mistreated in the Saudi kingdom, where they are few but, as elsewhere, well-educated and vocal in demanding respect.
Once the rulers of Cairo, Ismailis are distributed today in small communities across the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. They total about 25 million people, out of 1.2 billion Muslims. Their religious leader is Aga Khan IV, their Imam, a billionaire born in 1936, known for his family's worldly ways as well as his own generosity in public good works. Aga Khan's father Aly Khan was wed in 1949 to the actress Rita Hayworth, who had previously been romantically involved with another larger-than-life figure, Orson Welles. Aly Khan's marriage to the movie star lasted only four years. But Aly Khan also became Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, in 1958, when the Muslim world was less afflicted by fundamentalist extremism.
Ismaili theology is esoteric and almost as difficult to explain to ordinary Muslims as to non-Muslims. In the recent past, Ismailis were often seen as drifting away from Islam altogether, but Shia leaders now perceive a movement in the Ismaili sect back toward an established Shia tradition. Further, Aga Khan IV, as leader of the worldwide Ismaili community, has also demonstrated great intelligence in the use of his fortune. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) operates a system of agencies that finance improvement of education, health, microcredit availability, agricultural technology, historic preservation, and cultural endeavors across Africa and Asia. But AKDN help is not limited to Muslims; rather, it benefits members of all religions who are found to be in need.
In addition to his work within the American Ismaili religious community, Sada Cumber, Bush's OIC appointee, has represented the Aga Khan's humanitarian programs in the southwestern United States. In sending an American Muslim to the OIC who stands for independence in Muslim theology, entrepreneurship as well as social responsibility in the use of Muslim wealth, and a strong pro-Western attitude, Bush has brought another small but positive change to relations between the West and the Islamic world. Throughout history, and especially in crisis zones, minor developments have had great consequences. Perhaps the appointment of a U.S. representative to the OIC in the person of Sada Cumber will prove to be another such decisive and meaningful action.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Bush's appointment to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
by Stephen Schwartz
03/06/2008 12:00:00 AM
ON MONDAY, MARCH 3, the first U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which brings together 57 Muslim countries, took up his duties. Named by President George W. Bush, America's new diplomat to Muslims is Pakistan-born Sada Cumber of Austin, Texas. Cumber is the co-founder of an investment and wealth consultancy, CACH Capital Management, and some 10 other enterprises. Cumber's official job at the OIC is "to promote mutual understanding and dialogue between the United States and Muslim communities around the world."
Born in Karachi in 1951, he was educated in Pakistan, came to America in 1978, became a U.S. citizen in 1986, and has been prominent in Texas politics. But these details of his life--even his identification with the president's home state--are of little interest compared with a remarkable fact that does not appear in his U.S. government biography. Sada Cumber is an Ismaili Muslim--a member of a small and historically suppressed branch of Shia Islam.
When President Bush announced last June that he would send a U.S. representative to the OIC, some observers wondered how an American Muslim would function in a body that has long been dominated by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Having selected an Ismaili for the post, President Bush proved to be astute and adroit. Because Ismailis have suffered discrimination at the hands of Sunnis, and especially Islamist bigots, to draw America's observer at the OIC from their ranks represents a substantial challenge to the radicalism and conformism imposed on global Islam. It affirms the rights of Muslim minorities including Sufis, or spiritual Muslims, as well as Shias, just as America has advocated for the freedom of non-Muslims in Islamic lands. Ismailis have been brutally mistreated in the Saudi kingdom, where they are few but, as elsewhere, well-educated and vocal in demanding respect.
Once the rulers of Cairo, Ismailis are distributed today in small communities across the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. They total about 25 million people, out of 1.2 billion Muslims. Their religious leader is Aga Khan IV, their Imam, a billionaire born in 1936, known for his family's worldly ways as well as his own generosity in public good works. Aga Khan's father Aly Khan was wed in 1949 to the actress Rita Hayworth, who had previously been romantically involved with another larger-than-life figure, Orson Welles. Aly Khan's marriage to the movie star lasted only four years. But Aly Khan also became Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, in 1958, when the Muslim world was less afflicted by fundamentalist extremism.
Ismaili theology is esoteric and almost as difficult to explain to ordinary Muslims as to non-Muslims. In the recent past, Ismailis were often seen as drifting away from Islam altogether, but Shia leaders now perceive a movement in the Ismaili sect back toward an established Shia tradition. Further, Aga Khan IV, as leader of the worldwide Ismaili community, has also demonstrated great intelligence in the use of his fortune. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) operates a system of agencies that finance improvement of education, health, microcredit availability, agricultural technology, historic preservation, and cultural endeavors across Africa and Asia. But AKDN help is not limited to Muslims; rather, it benefits members of all religions who are found to be in need.
In addition to his work within the American Ismaili religious community, Sada Cumber, Bush's OIC appointee, has represented the Aga Khan's humanitarian programs in the southwestern United States. In sending an American Muslim to the OIC who stands for independence in Muslim theology, entrepreneurship as well as social responsibility in the use of Muslim wealth, and a strong pro-Western attitude, Bush has brought another small but positive change to relations between the West and the Islamic world. Throughout history, and especially in crisis zones, minor developments have had great consequences. Perhaps the appointment of a U.S. representative to the OIC in the person of Sada Cumber will prove to be another such decisive and meaningful action.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Friday, 2 January 2009
The Story of Power
The study of power is not only diverting (which Homer and Shakespeare knew), but illuminating. A biography of an ancient human impulse.
Jon Meacham
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 5, 2009
Barack Obama has a good Al Gore story. Sometime after the 2000 election, Obama called on a corporate executive in a big office with a terrific view of midtown Manhattan. The businessman had been an ardent Gore supporter, and the former vice president had recently asked him to consider investing in a startup television venture. "It was strange," the executive told Obama. "Here he was, a former vice president, a man who had just a few months earlier been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn't help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn't Al Gore, former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on." Obama, recounting the anecdote in "The Audacity of Hope," notes: "A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall." And, in Gore's case, the climb back up the cliff, to a Nobel Peace Prize and global eminence. Obama, who is now arguably the most powerful man in the world, understands that power is a fluid thing, and has been since the first caveman threw a rock at another caveman.
In the popular imagination, power tends to be viewed in one of two ways, both extreme. The first is totemic and tactical (how to get ahead at the office, to win friends and influence people). The other is epic and amorphous (the fate of markets, of vast global events and forces that seem beyond anyone's control, but especially yours).
Power is both these things, and more. At heart, it is best understood in terms of command and control. It is either the capacity to make others do as you wish (the command function) or to reorder the environment around you (the control function).
To study it intimately and specifically—how people get power, and how they wield it—is not only diverting (though, as Homer and Shakespeare knew, it is surely that). It is also illuminating, for understanding its accumulation and deployment enables us to learn, possibly, how to change the world around us, and the world at large.
Forgive that last bit of Dawn-of-the-Age-of-Obama hyperbole, but there is real hope behind the hype of the season. The discussion of power makes many left-of-center Americans somewhat uncomfortable, for it can be offensive to democratic sensibilities. Many right-of-center Americans, too, find the conversation unsettling, for it inevitably leads to thoughts of a governing elite, which conservatives in recent decades have chosen to vilify for rhetorical purposes. From Plato forward, philosophers have struggled to define power and, in the act of definition, to delineate it from the other impulses that shape what we do.
The beginning of 2009, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, is a good time to consider the nature of power, and of the powerful, because the world is being reordered in so many ways—broadly by what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest," the emergence of powers such as India, China and Brazil, and specifically by the global recession. The cultural, political and economic consequences of the financial meltdown cannot be overestimated. Unthinking trust in unfettered markets has evaporated, and the concern appears to be more than a temporary fit of worry that will pass when things start to get better. The demise of titans on Wall Street has elevated bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and Beijing and Brussels. And there is one politician in particular whose exercise of power will affect all of us for years to come: the president-elect, whose victory in November and transition—accompanied by the virtual disappearance of President Bush—have marked a resurgence of confidence in America. A senior European diplomat recently marveled to me about the American capacity to change course with rapidity and apparent ease: the shift from Bush to Obama —from the scion of one of America's noblest families to the child of a brief marriage between a young Kansan and a Kenyan academic, who proceeded to see his son exactly once—was simply astonishing.
In the following pages, you will find NEWSWEEK's highly subjective list of the most powerful people who will figure in the era over which Obama will preside. It is arbitrary, but the choices are well considered, and each, we believe, represents a thread in the new global tapestry. Some are utterly surprising; others are not. Perhaps most important, each meets the test of power as we have just defined it: they are men and women who are either in the business of bending others to their will or seeking to rearrange reality in ways they find more congenial. They are in command, or they seek control. There is, naturally, more than a little overlap; the features are not mutually exclusive. (The reprehensible are also here—Osama bin Laden is one example—as an acknowledgment that evil can affect us, too.)
We are not undertaking this to create simply an American list, or to delineate an elite based on wealth, social class or educational credentials. The figures in this issue are global, and they are chosen on merit. Many of the names here, it is true, are well-off, move in what might be considered high circles and went to celebrated schools. But many began life in obscurity (see, for instance, the 44th president of the United States) and have risen to prominence through a combination of determination and good fortune. Part of the promise of this country in particular is that those who work hard will have the opportunity to thrive; it is, along with the proposition that all men are created equal, the promise at the heart of the national enterprise.
In Latin the word for power is imperium, which is largely evocative of the state, and we tend to think of power in political terms—that is, in terms of our relation to one another in the public sphere (power dynamics within families are usually confined to the private sphere, except when those families play political roles—see the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons). Very roughly, political power in America has moved from being the monopoly of the landed elite from the 18th-century Revolutionary era through the 19th-century Age of Jackson, when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. In the 20th century, women and, at long last, African-Americans were included in the mainstream. Now, in the 21st century, the world is turning over yet again. The political energy in the country is being harnessed by a younger and more diverse group than it has been in ages past. This does not mean the millennium is at hand, but it does mean that the face of power is changing.
The worship of power for power's sake is debilitating and disorienting. The central creation myth of the West turns on just that insight. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent is able to seduce Eve and Adam into disobeying the Lord by promising that the fruit of the forbidden tree would turn them into gods—would, in other words, make them more powerful than they were in their innocence.
It is more fashionable to speak of such grasping not as sin but as the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche's 19th-century formulation. "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension," wrote Nietzsche, who elevated power, rather than good, to ultimate concern. "But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ('union') with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on." The moral reply is that some things are more important than power—love and freedom among them. That the security of such virtues often requires the use of force is an inescapable element of reality, but there is a distinction between the pursuit of power for domination and subjugation and the use of power to make possible the journey toward what Winston Churchill called the "broad, sunlit uplands."
Still, the bleak Germanic view has suffused elements of modern life. Resentment of those in charge of the industrialized state in an age of mass media is on vivid display in the work of C. Wright Mills, who published "The Power Elite" in 1956. Mills's vision was one of not-so-quiet desperation: "The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern … But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women." Sarah Palin would probably agree with Mills, at least on the looking-down part.
But power in America and elsewhere is undergoing directional changes that complicate Mills's argument. Yes, there are still cultural arbiters, and yes, presidents and lawmakers and executives obviously exert enormous influence. It is arguable, though, that technology has given us a more democratic culture (if not politics) than the world has seen since perhaps the founding of Athenian democracy. In ways that we are still only beginning to understand, the Internet is changing how power is accumulated and exercised.
This is a subject that Al Gore—who knows a lot about the vicissitudes of fortune—understands well. In Gore's thinking, we are now in the midst of a great turning point in the history of power, a moment akin to the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century. The proliferation of printed information helped fuel the rise of democracy until, in Gore's view, television replaced print as the central political medium. Now the Internet has, like Gutenberg, lowered barriers to information and has given virtually anyone with something to say the means to say it. The Web is not only a source but a stage on which we can engage in the life of the nation and of the world armed with facts we have weighed in the light of reason. "Knowledge is now once again connected to power," says Gore—and that is a kind of power which means all of us belong on a list like this.
The other new factor in the global power game of 2009 is Obama himself. Well read, technologically savvy, politically astute, he comes to the White House in grim times but with high expectations. Whether he succeeds or fails, it will be a close-run thing. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things," said Machiavelli. If Immanuel Kant is to be believed, even Obama's cool intellectualism is risky: "It is not to be expected that kings philosophize or that philosophers become kings, nor is it to be desired, because possession of power corrupts the free judgment of reason inevitably." So much for Plato.
Characteristically, Obama would reject the Kantian formulation as a false choice—one can be a king who rules with the benefit of philosophy. And what, exactly, is Obama's philosophy of power? He is a man with a tragic vision of the world: he knows that while progress is possible, perfection is not, and he comes to the office, it seems, with an appreciation of the limits of politics and the fleeting nature of power. As his story about Gore's old supporter suggests, Obama is a student of such things.
The account of the conversation about Gore's fall from power included Obama's own musings about how Gore may have felt now that his coming by, once an honor, seemed a "chore." "Sitting there … trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have thought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn't align, while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with a condescending smile, could afford to come in second in his business year after year and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the exercise of power," Obama wrote. "It wasn't fair, but that wouldn't change the facts for the former vice president." It is a fact, too, that one day Obama's power will fade, as will that wielded by the others on our list. What they do with it in the meantime will determine how their own story is told.
Jon Meacham
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 5, 2009
Barack Obama has a good Al Gore story. Sometime after the 2000 election, Obama called on a corporate executive in a big office with a terrific view of midtown Manhattan. The businessman had been an ardent Gore supporter, and the former vice president had recently asked him to consider investing in a startup television venture. "It was strange," the executive told Obama. "Here he was, a former vice president, a man who had just a few months earlier been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn't help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn't Al Gore, former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on." Obama, recounting the anecdote in "The Audacity of Hope," notes: "A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall." And, in Gore's case, the climb back up the cliff, to a Nobel Peace Prize and global eminence. Obama, who is now arguably the most powerful man in the world, understands that power is a fluid thing, and has been since the first caveman threw a rock at another caveman.
In the popular imagination, power tends to be viewed in one of two ways, both extreme. The first is totemic and tactical (how to get ahead at the office, to win friends and influence people). The other is epic and amorphous (the fate of markets, of vast global events and forces that seem beyond anyone's control, but especially yours).
Power is both these things, and more. At heart, it is best understood in terms of command and control. It is either the capacity to make others do as you wish (the command function) or to reorder the environment around you (the control function).
To study it intimately and specifically—how people get power, and how they wield it—is not only diverting (though, as Homer and Shakespeare knew, it is surely that). It is also illuminating, for understanding its accumulation and deployment enables us to learn, possibly, how to change the world around us, and the world at large.
Forgive that last bit of Dawn-of-the-Age-of-Obama hyperbole, but there is real hope behind the hype of the season. The discussion of power makes many left-of-center Americans somewhat uncomfortable, for it can be offensive to democratic sensibilities. Many right-of-center Americans, too, find the conversation unsettling, for it inevitably leads to thoughts of a governing elite, which conservatives in recent decades have chosen to vilify for rhetorical purposes. From Plato forward, philosophers have struggled to define power and, in the act of definition, to delineate it from the other impulses that shape what we do.
The beginning of 2009, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, is a good time to consider the nature of power, and of the powerful, because the world is being reordered in so many ways—broadly by what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest," the emergence of powers such as India, China and Brazil, and specifically by the global recession. The cultural, political and economic consequences of the financial meltdown cannot be overestimated. Unthinking trust in unfettered markets has evaporated, and the concern appears to be more than a temporary fit of worry that will pass when things start to get better. The demise of titans on Wall Street has elevated bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and Beijing and Brussels. And there is one politician in particular whose exercise of power will affect all of us for years to come: the president-elect, whose victory in November and transition—accompanied by the virtual disappearance of President Bush—have marked a resurgence of confidence in America. A senior European diplomat recently marveled to me about the American capacity to change course with rapidity and apparent ease: the shift from Bush to Obama —from the scion of one of America's noblest families to the child of a brief marriage between a young Kansan and a Kenyan academic, who proceeded to see his son exactly once—was simply astonishing.
In the following pages, you will find NEWSWEEK's highly subjective list of the most powerful people who will figure in the era over which Obama will preside. It is arbitrary, but the choices are well considered, and each, we believe, represents a thread in the new global tapestry. Some are utterly surprising; others are not. Perhaps most important, each meets the test of power as we have just defined it: they are men and women who are either in the business of bending others to their will or seeking to rearrange reality in ways they find more congenial. They are in command, or they seek control. There is, naturally, more than a little overlap; the features are not mutually exclusive. (The reprehensible are also here—Osama bin Laden is one example—as an acknowledgment that evil can affect us, too.)
We are not undertaking this to create simply an American list, or to delineate an elite based on wealth, social class or educational credentials. The figures in this issue are global, and they are chosen on merit. Many of the names here, it is true, are well-off, move in what might be considered high circles and went to celebrated schools. But many began life in obscurity (see, for instance, the 44th president of the United States) and have risen to prominence through a combination of determination and good fortune. Part of the promise of this country in particular is that those who work hard will have the opportunity to thrive; it is, along with the proposition that all men are created equal, the promise at the heart of the national enterprise.
In Latin the word for power is imperium, which is largely evocative of the state, and we tend to think of power in political terms—that is, in terms of our relation to one another in the public sphere (power dynamics within families are usually confined to the private sphere, except when those families play political roles—see the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons). Very roughly, political power in America has moved from being the monopoly of the landed elite from the 18th-century Revolutionary era through the 19th-century Age of Jackson, when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. In the 20th century, women and, at long last, African-Americans were included in the mainstream. Now, in the 21st century, the world is turning over yet again. The political energy in the country is being harnessed by a younger and more diverse group than it has been in ages past. This does not mean the millennium is at hand, but it does mean that the face of power is changing.
The worship of power for power's sake is debilitating and disorienting. The central creation myth of the West turns on just that insight. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent is able to seduce Eve and Adam into disobeying the Lord by promising that the fruit of the forbidden tree would turn them into gods—would, in other words, make them more powerful than they were in their innocence.
It is more fashionable to speak of such grasping not as sin but as the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche's 19th-century formulation. "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension," wrote Nietzsche, who elevated power, rather than good, to ultimate concern. "But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ('union') with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on." The moral reply is that some things are more important than power—love and freedom among them. That the security of such virtues often requires the use of force is an inescapable element of reality, but there is a distinction between the pursuit of power for domination and subjugation and the use of power to make possible the journey toward what Winston Churchill called the "broad, sunlit uplands."
Still, the bleak Germanic view has suffused elements of modern life. Resentment of those in charge of the industrialized state in an age of mass media is on vivid display in the work of C. Wright Mills, who published "The Power Elite" in 1956. Mills's vision was one of not-so-quiet desperation: "The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern … But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women." Sarah Palin would probably agree with Mills, at least on the looking-down part.
But power in America and elsewhere is undergoing directional changes that complicate Mills's argument. Yes, there are still cultural arbiters, and yes, presidents and lawmakers and executives obviously exert enormous influence. It is arguable, though, that technology has given us a more democratic culture (if not politics) than the world has seen since perhaps the founding of Athenian democracy. In ways that we are still only beginning to understand, the Internet is changing how power is accumulated and exercised.
This is a subject that Al Gore—who knows a lot about the vicissitudes of fortune—understands well. In Gore's thinking, we are now in the midst of a great turning point in the history of power, a moment akin to the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century. The proliferation of printed information helped fuel the rise of democracy until, in Gore's view, television replaced print as the central political medium. Now the Internet has, like Gutenberg, lowered barriers to information and has given virtually anyone with something to say the means to say it. The Web is not only a source but a stage on which we can engage in the life of the nation and of the world armed with facts we have weighed in the light of reason. "Knowledge is now once again connected to power," says Gore—and that is a kind of power which means all of us belong on a list like this.
The other new factor in the global power game of 2009 is Obama himself. Well read, technologically savvy, politically astute, he comes to the White House in grim times but with high expectations. Whether he succeeds or fails, it will be a close-run thing. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things," said Machiavelli. If Immanuel Kant is to be believed, even Obama's cool intellectualism is risky: "It is not to be expected that kings philosophize or that philosophers become kings, nor is it to be desired, because possession of power corrupts the free judgment of reason inevitably." So much for Plato.
Characteristically, Obama would reject the Kantian formulation as a false choice—one can be a king who rules with the benefit of philosophy. And what, exactly, is Obama's philosophy of power? He is a man with a tragic vision of the world: he knows that while progress is possible, perfection is not, and he comes to the office, it seems, with an appreciation of the limits of politics and the fleeting nature of power. As his story about Gore's old supporter suggests, Obama is a student of such things.
The account of the conversation about Gore's fall from power included Obama's own musings about how Gore may have felt now that his coming by, once an honor, seemed a "chore." "Sitting there … trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have thought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn't align, while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with a condescending smile, could afford to come in second in his business year after year and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the exercise of power," Obama wrote. "It wasn't fair, but that wouldn't change the facts for the former vice president." It is a fact, too, that one day Obama's power will fade, as will that wielded by the others on our list. What they do with it in the meantime will determine how their own story is told.
NYT Review of Nial Ferguson's Ascent of Money
December 28, 2008
Follow the Money
By MICHAEL HIRSH
Skip to next paragraph
THE ASCENT OF MONEY
A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
Illustrated. 442 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95
Niall Ferguson, it is fair to say, is a one-man book factory. In fact, if the American economy cranked out goods as prolifically as Ferguson does histories, we might not be in half the fix we are in right now. But then Ferguson wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about. The onetime enfant terrible of the Oxbridge historical establishment, Ferguson specializes in finding fault with great powers, especially the way they mismanage their empires. Ferguson first came to notice a decade ago with “The Pity of War,” a revisionist tour de force arguing that Britain made a world-historical error by entering World War I (and thereby destroying its empire) when it should have simply waited out the swift German conquest of Europe and remained a superpower, with Europe the better for it. More recently the Scottish-born Ferguson, who now spends half the year teaching at Harvard and the other half at Oxford, has turned his attention to the prodigal young heir to the British imperial crown, the United States. In “The Cash Nexus” (2001) and “Colossus” (2004), he urged Americans to emerge from their self-denial and fulfill their obvious destiny as the next “liberal” empire spreading the light of democracy and Anglo-Saxon legalism across the globe. “The greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century,” Ferguson concluded in “The Cash Nexus” (published in the opening months of the Bush presidency), is that “the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Ferguson later supported the Iraq war as evidence that Washington had finally gotten up its courage, imperially speaking.
Whatever one thinks of his arguments, it’s impossible to ignore Niall Ferguson. He’s like the brightest kid in the debating club, the one who pulls all-nighters in the library and ferrets out facts no one thought to uncover. And in his latest book, “The Ascent of Money” — humbly subtitled “A Financial History of the World” — Ferguson takes us on an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money. “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man,” he writes, making a conscious reference to the BBC production he loved as a boy, Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man.” (In fact, like Ferguson’s three previous books, “Colossus,” “Empire” and “The War of the World,” “The Ascent of Money” was written as a companion to a TV documentary series.)
“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-collateralized bonds. Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not. Similarly, the French Revolution was made all but inevitable by the machinations of an unscrupulous Scotsman named John Law, whom the deeply indebted French monarchy recklessly placed in charge of public finance. “It was as if one man was simultaneously running all 500 of the top U.S. corporations, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System,” Ferguson writes. Law proceeded to single-handedly create the subprime mortgage bubble of his day. When it collapsed, the fallout “fatally set back France’s financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations.” Wilhelmine Germany, meanwhile, came up short in World War I because it “did not have access to the international bond market,” Ferguson writes. Every one of these episodes sounds like a warning shot: Will America be the next great power to fall because of unsound finance?
The question is particularly pressing in the midst of what is widely seen as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And Ferguson’s conclusions are troubling. Only a few years after accusing Washington of “imperial understretch” for failing to flex its muscles — and without any hint of irony — Ferguson now argues that the United States may be succumbing to financial overstretch. Deeply in debt to the rest of the world, it has become part of a “dual country” that he calls “Chimerica.” “In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America,” he writes. Until the current global financial crisis, this seemed to be a fairly reliable relationship. American consumers over-bought goods and over-borrowed from China, and the Chinese in turn accumulated huge dollar surpluses that they plowed back into Wall Street investments, thereby supplying profligate Americans with the financing we needed to consume and sustain ourselves as the lone superpower. “For a time it seemed like a marriage made in heaven,” Ferguson writes. “The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending.”
Suddenly, however, it’s looking more like a marriage made in hell. According to Ferguson, much of the current crisis stems from this increasingly uneasy symbiosis. It turns out “there was a catch. The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow.” This cascade of easy money, he argues, “was the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. . . . And Chimerica — or the Asian ‘savings glut,’ as Ben Bernanke called it — was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.” Going forward, the system seems likely to be increasingly unstable, as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson suggested recently when he warned that unless fundamental changes are made, “the pressure from global imbalances will simply build up again until it finds another outlet.”
Previous periods of global stability and peace had relied on judicious mechanisms like the Congress of Vienna or the Bretton Woods agreements. Now the international system — and America’s position within it — has come to depend on what looks more like a global Rube Goldberg machine running on hot money. And though Ferguson doesn’t come out and say it, the Chinese may now have the upper hand in this chimerical Chimerica. While so far it’s worked in Beijing’s interest to underwrite America’s rampant consumerism — because we buy so many of their goods — the Chinese also have the option of recycling some of their surplus billions into their own huge population. We, on the other hand, don’t have the option not to borrow from them. Indeed, it’s no secret on Wall Street and in Washington that the real targets of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout plan were the foreign funds, including “sovereign wealth funds,” that keep America’s financial system afloat. Unless these foreign financiers — principally China and Japan — get reassurance that the global financial system can function properly again, America’s long period of growth and power may be coming to a close.
Perhaps, then, the conclusion should be that Americans need to flex our muscles less as an empire and fight a little harder for fiscal sobriety and balance in our foreign policy. To be fair, Ferguson was early in seeing that America’s fiscal problems were serious. In “Colossus,” he warned presciently of America’s increasing reliance on Chinese capital, although he argued then that we should be mainly worried about domestic entitlements like Medicare and Social Security — indicating that he, like the Bush administration, seriously underestimated the ultimate cost of the Iraq war.
As with Ferguson’s three previous documentary efforts, “The Ascent of Money” sometimes feels as if it were laid out like a shooting script. Ferguson will depart from an exegesis on the 17th century or the Great Depression to pop up in post-Katrina New Orleans or Memphis (for a report on bankruptcies), and we surmise it’s to record another on-scener for PBS. The book, whose main text comprises a scant 360 pages (a light effort for Ferguson, especially considering the ambitious subtitle), is also reductionist at times. Is it really fair to say Chimerica is mainly at the root of our current problems? (A lack of oversight and regulation of the subprime mortgage market here at home had a lot to do with it as well.) China’s backwardness between the 1700s and 1970s was largely due to its dearth of financial innovation, he suggests, but other historians have pointed equally to the absence of technological innovation of the kind that arose in Europe’s close-quartered patchwork of states because of repeated wars.
And in the end, as Ferguson himself seems to acknowledge, the scope of the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today calls into question the book’s premise — that the “trajectory” of finance through history, while “jagged and irregular,” is “unquestionably upwards.” Our increasingly sophisticated finance clearly contains self-destructive tendencies, and its very complexity may have become our undoing. Ferguson wonders whether the cruel realities of biological evolution are the model for what is happening now. Contemplating the financial Armageddon that has devastated Wall Street and set back globalization, he asks: “Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world — one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Here we thought we were making all this progress as a species, and suddenly we find our supposed innovations lumped with Tyrannosaurus rex. Doesn’t sound like much of an ascent to me.
Michael Hirsh is Newsweek’s national economics correspondent and the author of “At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.”
Follow the Money
By MICHAEL HIRSH
Skip to next paragraph
THE ASCENT OF MONEY
A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
Illustrated. 442 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95
Niall Ferguson, it is fair to say, is a one-man book factory. In fact, if the American economy cranked out goods as prolifically as Ferguson does histories, we might not be in half the fix we are in right now. But then Ferguson wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about. The onetime enfant terrible of the Oxbridge historical establishment, Ferguson specializes in finding fault with great powers, especially the way they mismanage their empires. Ferguson first came to notice a decade ago with “The Pity of War,” a revisionist tour de force arguing that Britain made a world-historical error by entering World War I (and thereby destroying its empire) when it should have simply waited out the swift German conquest of Europe and remained a superpower, with Europe the better for it. More recently the Scottish-born Ferguson, who now spends half the year teaching at Harvard and the other half at Oxford, has turned his attention to the prodigal young heir to the British imperial crown, the United States. In “The Cash Nexus” (2001) and “Colossus” (2004), he urged Americans to emerge from their self-denial and fulfill their obvious destiny as the next “liberal” empire spreading the light of democracy and Anglo-Saxon legalism across the globe. “The greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century,” Ferguson concluded in “The Cash Nexus” (published in the opening months of the Bush presidency), is that “the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Ferguson later supported the Iraq war as evidence that Washington had finally gotten up its courage, imperially speaking.
Whatever one thinks of his arguments, it’s impossible to ignore Niall Ferguson. He’s like the brightest kid in the debating club, the one who pulls all-nighters in the library and ferrets out facts no one thought to uncover. And in his latest book, “The Ascent of Money” — humbly subtitled “A Financial History of the World” — Ferguson takes us on an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money. “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man,” he writes, making a conscious reference to the BBC production he loved as a boy, Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man.” (In fact, like Ferguson’s three previous books, “Colossus,” “Empire” and “The War of the World,” “The Ascent of Money” was written as a companion to a TV documentary series.)
“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-collateralized bonds. Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not. Similarly, the French Revolution was made all but inevitable by the machinations of an unscrupulous Scotsman named John Law, whom the deeply indebted French monarchy recklessly placed in charge of public finance. “It was as if one man was simultaneously running all 500 of the top U.S. corporations, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System,” Ferguson writes. Law proceeded to single-handedly create the subprime mortgage bubble of his day. When it collapsed, the fallout “fatally set back France’s financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations.” Wilhelmine Germany, meanwhile, came up short in World War I because it “did not have access to the international bond market,” Ferguson writes. Every one of these episodes sounds like a warning shot: Will America be the next great power to fall because of unsound finance?
The question is particularly pressing in the midst of what is widely seen as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And Ferguson’s conclusions are troubling. Only a few years after accusing Washington of “imperial understretch” for failing to flex its muscles — and without any hint of irony — Ferguson now argues that the United States may be succumbing to financial overstretch. Deeply in debt to the rest of the world, it has become part of a “dual country” that he calls “Chimerica.” “In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America,” he writes. Until the current global financial crisis, this seemed to be a fairly reliable relationship. American consumers over-bought goods and over-borrowed from China, and the Chinese in turn accumulated huge dollar surpluses that they plowed back into Wall Street investments, thereby supplying profligate Americans with the financing we needed to consume and sustain ourselves as the lone superpower. “For a time it seemed like a marriage made in heaven,” Ferguson writes. “The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending.”
Suddenly, however, it’s looking more like a marriage made in hell. According to Ferguson, much of the current crisis stems from this increasingly uneasy symbiosis. It turns out “there was a catch. The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow.” This cascade of easy money, he argues, “was the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. . . . And Chimerica — or the Asian ‘savings glut,’ as Ben Bernanke called it — was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.” Going forward, the system seems likely to be increasingly unstable, as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson suggested recently when he warned that unless fundamental changes are made, “the pressure from global imbalances will simply build up again until it finds another outlet.”
Previous periods of global stability and peace had relied on judicious mechanisms like the Congress of Vienna or the Bretton Woods agreements. Now the international system — and America’s position within it — has come to depend on what looks more like a global Rube Goldberg machine running on hot money. And though Ferguson doesn’t come out and say it, the Chinese may now have the upper hand in this chimerical Chimerica. While so far it’s worked in Beijing’s interest to underwrite America’s rampant consumerism — because we buy so many of their goods — the Chinese also have the option of recycling some of their surplus billions into their own huge population. We, on the other hand, don’t have the option not to borrow from them. Indeed, it’s no secret on Wall Street and in Washington that the real targets of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout plan were the foreign funds, including “sovereign wealth funds,” that keep America’s financial system afloat. Unless these foreign financiers — principally China and Japan — get reassurance that the global financial system can function properly again, America’s long period of growth and power may be coming to a close.
Perhaps, then, the conclusion should be that Americans need to flex our muscles less as an empire and fight a little harder for fiscal sobriety and balance in our foreign policy. To be fair, Ferguson was early in seeing that America’s fiscal problems were serious. In “Colossus,” he warned presciently of America’s increasing reliance on Chinese capital, although he argued then that we should be mainly worried about domestic entitlements like Medicare and Social Security — indicating that he, like the Bush administration, seriously underestimated the ultimate cost of the Iraq war.
As with Ferguson’s three previous documentary efforts, “The Ascent of Money” sometimes feels as if it were laid out like a shooting script. Ferguson will depart from an exegesis on the 17th century or the Great Depression to pop up in post-Katrina New Orleans or Memphis (for a report on bankruptcies), and we surmise it’s to record another on-scener for PBS. The book, whose main text comprises a scant 360 pages (a light effort for Ferguson, especially considering the ambitious subtitle), is also reductionist at times. Is it really fair to say Chimerica is mainly at the root of our current problems? (A lack of oversight and regulation of the subprime mortgage market here at home had a lot to do with it as well.) China’s backwardness between the 1700s and 1970s was largely due to its dearth of financial innovation, he suggests, but other historians have pointed equally to the absence of technological innovation of the kind that arose in Europe’s close-quartered patchwork of states because of repeated wars.
And in the end, as Ferguson himself seems to acknowledge, the scope of the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today calls into question the book’s premise — that the “trajectory” of finance through history, while “jagged and irregular,” is “unquestionably upwards.” Our increasingly sophisticated finance clearly contains self-destructive tendencies, and its very complexity may have become our undoing. Ferguson wonders whether the cruel realities of biological evolution are the model for what is happening now. Contemplating the financial Armageddon that has devastated Wall Street and set back globalization, he asks: “Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world — one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Here we thought we were making all this progress as a species, and suddenly we find our supposed innovations lumped with Tyrannosaurus rex. Doesn’t sound like much of an ascent to me.
Michael Hirsh is Newsweek’s national economics correspondent and the author of “At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.”
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Coming soon: the 21st Century
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe's 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call "The Sixties" in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year's election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
It comes as we face parlous economic conditions and a slew of new threats. Nonetheless, we should view this as an opportunity to embrace the words of one of Barack Obama's favorite presidents. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew," Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862. "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
For all the chatter about the world changing decisively after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our reaction to the attacks was conditioned by 20th-century assumptions.
Instead of seeing the spasm of violence as representing something entirely new, President Bush's administration, aided by thinkers sympathetic to its approach, resolutely forced events into the interpretive boxes fashioned in previous decades.
Reactionary terrorists whose actions reflected the weakness of their position were raised up to world-historical status. They were "totalitarians," which suggested that they represented a threat as powerful as those embodied by Hitler and Stalin. They were "Islamofascists," a sobriquet that credited them with battling under the banner of a coherent, modern ideology when in fact they were inspired by a ragtag jumble of ideas rooted in the medieval past.
Osama bin Laden's commitment to reviving the power of the old Islamic "caliphate" was taken to be as real as the danger of Soviet troops pouring across the old East German border or of Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia. The new "global war on terror" was endowed with the same coherence as the old Cold War.
It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions. Our battle with the terrorists is difficult precisely because it doesn't fit into the familiar categories. It grows out of struggles within Islam over which we have little control -- between Shiites and Sunnis, between modernizing and reactionary forces, between old regimes and new contenders for power.
It involves the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, as the battle in Gaza shows, always threatens to fly out of control. But it also involves the struggle over Kashmir, as the attacks in Mumbai demonstrated, and the fears of Iranian-Shiite power in the Gulf.
None of this makes our situation easier, and it will certainly not make the danger of terrorism go away. But it does highlight the urgency of disenthralling ourselves from dated ideas.
So, too, does the rise of a new architecture of power in the world with the emergence especially of India and China. Fareed Zakaria says his book "The Post-American World" is not "about the decline of America," even if its catchy title suggests otherwise, but he's right to think anew about American influence.
What should fall is another illusion, the idea that the United States is the world's "sole remaining superpower." This notion weakened us because it suggested an omnipotence that no nation can possess.
By shedding this misapprehension, the United States could restore its influence. We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.
Nowhere is the need for a new understanding more obvious than in economic matters. Capitalism will not disappear, but the current crash has destroyed a series of damaging myths.
Those brilliant financiers were not so brilliant after all and certainly did not deserve the outsized rewards our system showered upon them for three decades. They did not understand that the financial instruments they created contained time bombs that would eventually rip apart the very system from which they so profited.
The market cannot operate without significant regulation, and dreaded government turns out to be the only institution with the capacity to repair things when market actors are routed from the field and sit, petrified, at the sidelines.
Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe's 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call "The Sixties" in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year's election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
It comes as we face parlous economic conditions and a slew of new threats. Nonetheless, we should view this as an opportunity to embrace the words of one of Barack Obama's favorite presidents. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew," Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862. "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
For all the chatter about the world changing decisively after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our reaction to the attacks was conditioned by 20th-century assumptions.
Instead of seeing the spasm of violence as representing something entirely new, President Bush's administration, aided by thinkers sympathetic to its approach, resolutely forced events into the interpretive boxes fashioned in previous decades.
Reactionary terrorists whose actions reflected the weakness of their position were raised up to world-historical status. They were "totalitarians," which suggested that they represented a threat as powerful as those embodied by Hitler and Stalin. They were "Islamofascists," a sobriquet that credited them with battling under the banner of a coherent, modern ideology when in fact they were inspired by a ragtag jumble of ideas rooted in the medieval past.
Osama bin Laden's commitment to reviving the power of the old Islamic "caliphate" was taken to be as real as the danger of Soviet troops pouring across the old East German border or of Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia. The new "global war on terror" was endowed with the same coherence as the old Cold War.
It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions. Our battle with the terrorists is difficult precisely because it doesn't fit into the familiar categories. It grows out of struggles within Islam over which we have little control -- between Shiites and Sunnis, between modernizing and reactionary forces, between old regimes and new contenders for power.
It involves the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, as the battle in Gaza shows, always threatens to fly out of control. But it also involves the struggle over Kashmir, as the attacks in Mumbai demonstrated, and the fears of Iranian-Shiite power in the Gulf.
None of this makes our situation easier, and it will certainly not make the danger of terrorism go away. But it does highlight the urgency of disenthralling ourselves from dated ideas.
So, too, does the rise of a new architecture of power in the world with the emergence especially of India and China. Fareed Zakaria says his book "The Post-American World" is not "about the decline of America," even if its catchy title suggests otherwise, but he's right to think anew about American influence.
What should fall is another illusion, the idea that the United States is the world's "sole remaining superpower." This notion weakened us because it suggested an omnipotence that no nation can possess.
By shedding this misapprehension, the United States could restore its influence. We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.
Nowhere is the need for a new understanding more obvious than in economic matters. Capitalism will not disappear, but the current crash has destroyed a series of damaging myths.
Those brilliant financiers were not so brilliant after all and certainly did not deserve the outsized rewards our system showered upon them for three decades. They did not understand that the financial instruments they created contained time bombs that would eventually rip apart the very system from which they so profited.
The market cannot operate without significant regulation, and dreaded government turns out to be the only institution with the capacity to repair things when market actors are routed from the field and sit, petrified, at the sidelines.
Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.
Monday, 3 November 2008
The imminent election of Obama as US president.
Monday 3rd November 2008
The four great transformations driving Obama's victory
Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas?
Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night – unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been – the era of President Barack Obama will begin.
It’s hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama – but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.
Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.
This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes – but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?
This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote – a 47 percent lead.
Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn’t be President; he wouldn’t even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.
Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said “the era of big government is over” and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income – while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking “the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” and argued for the state to “spread the wealth around”. The era of limp, passive government is over – at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.
Transformation Three: The Palin’ of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of “elitism!” from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.
Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with – or even listen to – a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can’t fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.
But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world’s largest empire. Obama’s grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama’s policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?
He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country’s foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.
But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy – from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren’t strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama’s foreign policy – but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.
But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: “We are better people than the last eight years.” The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically – but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet… I won’t be sure until I watch Obama’s acceptance speech through salty tears – and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.
The four great transformations driving Obama's victory
Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas?
Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night – unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been – the era of President Barack Obama will begin.
It’s hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama – but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.
Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.
This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes – but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?
This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote – a 47 percent lead.
Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn’t be President; he wouldn’t even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.
Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said “the era of big government is over” and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income – while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking “the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” and argued for the state to “spread the wealth around”. The era of limp, passive government is over – at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.
Transformation Three: The Palin’ of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of “elitism!” from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.
Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with – or even listen to – a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can’t fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.
But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world’s largest empire. Obama’s grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama’s policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?
He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country’s foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.
But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy – from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren’t strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama’s foreign policy – but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.
But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: “We are better people than the last eight years.” The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically – but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet… I won’t be sure until I watch Obama’s acceptance speech through salty tears – and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.
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