The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
The paradoxes of Christopher Hitchens
By Nicholas Wapshott
The views expressed are his own.
By now, Christopher Hitchens, who has died from esophageal cancer after weeks of radiation treatment at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, will know whether there is or is not a God. If there is an after-life, we can expect Hitch to arrive in combative mood. His strident atheism, like many of the views that contributed to his reputation as America’s most gifted polemicist, was in its way a peculiar act of faith.
Hitch was paradoxical to the end. In his final piece for Vanity Fair, the magazine that brought out the best of his artful argumentative style matched to his almost flippant name-dropping erudition, he confessed, between searing pain and narcotic oblivion, to wanting “to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense.” It left some wondering whether he was sharpening his wits to meet God on the other side.
But then Christopher liked to have everything both ways. A bisexual, he enjoyed putting his liberal men friends to the test by kissing them smack on the lips in front of their wives. He lived half his life as a proud and passionate man of the Left before, in middle age, flipping to what he had until then reviled as the dark side of the political spectrum. He was above all, perhaps, an attention seeker, a born contrarian who desperately wanted to become a professional controversialist. In that, he spectacularly succeeded.
But his route to stardom was often at the expense of those who befriended him or had done him enormous favors. It was with great sadness, but little surprise, that friends of Anthony Howard, the distinguished editor of The New Statesman who gave Hitch his first and most important breaks as a writer, read Christopher’s sour demolition of his old and generous mentor, whom he ridiculed for, of all things, his mundane prose style. The intention, it seems, was no more than to take a prominent leftist scalp while showing he owed his success to no one.
from Ian Bremmer:
Prokhorov’s presidential chances are not the point
By Ian Bremmer
The opinions expressed are his own.
After a week full of anti-government and pro-government protests, Russians woke up on Monday to big news. Mikhail Prokhorov, a political novice with billions of dollars—and the New Jersey Nets— to his name, announced his Presidential bid. Alexei Kudrin, a longtime bureaucratic infighter, also declared his plans to re-enter the political arena. These developments were even more significant considering both were ousted in rather public quarrels with the powers that be just months ago. Kudrin said he would support and aid a pro-reform liberal party that would stand as a counterweight to the incumbent United Russia. Prokhorov intends to challenge Putin for the presidency in March 2012 on a platform that would appeal to Russia’s “disenchanted middle class.”
No matter what Kudrin and Prokhorov say in public, they both represent the same thing to Russia and the world: Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on power. As I’ve written before, Putin is the most powerful individual on the planet. To think that either man would risk his freedom or his fortune to oppose Putin’s Kremlin, no matter what their stated reasons are, is just wrong. That said, there are reasons to watch this “race” as it will give some insight into Putin’s inevitable third term as president.
from The Great Debate:
Streep’s shallow take on Thatcher
By Nicholas Wasphott
The views expressed are his own.
When it was announced Meryl Streep was to play Margaret Thatcher in the movie biography “The Iron Lady,” to be released here on December 30 and in Britain a week later, the main topic among politicos and movie buffs was whether the Oscar-winning actress, for all her skills, would do the bossy British prime minister justice. There are no worries on that score. Streep's impersonation is uncannily accurate. With the help of face padding and voice coaching, Thatcher is portrayed as few have ever seen her. And there lies the problem.
Streep plays Thatcher in her lonely dotage, suffering from crippling dementia, patronized by her carers and her daughter Carol, slipping in and out of a living nightmare where her dead husband Denis appears then disappears before her eyes. In flashbacks she recalls the heady days of her premiership, when she championed the removal of trade union privileges, sold off state assets to reduce the size of government, brought to a temporary end the grip the landed aristocrats held over the Conservative Party leadership, and restored British national pride by retaking by force the distant sheep-ridden Falkland Islands from the Argentines.
from Breakingviews:
RBS shows watchdogs need power to stop M&A
By Peter Thal Larsen
The author is a Retuers Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
The failure of Royal Bank of Scotland shows bank reform still has some way to go.
from Lawrence Summers:
It’s time for the IMF to step up in Europe
By Lawrence Summers
The opinions expressed are his own.
European leaders will meet today for yet another “historic” summit at which the fate of Europe is said to hang in the balance. Yet it is clear that this will not be the last convened to deal with the financial crisis.
If public previews from France and Germany are a guide, there will be commitments to assuring fiscal discipline in Europe and establishing common crisis resolution mechanisms. There will also be much celebration of commitments made by Italy, and a strong political reaffirmation of the permanence of the monetary union. All of this is necessary and desirable, but the world economy will remain on edge.
from The Great Debate:
Is Burma the next Mexico?
By Federico Varese
The opinions expressed are his own.
Hillary Clinton had many "hard issues" to tackle during her recent visit to Myanmar. Yet there was no mention of one of the most, if not the most, difficult issue Burma faces: their lucrative drug trade.
Northern Burma is the home of the “Golden Triangle,” a hub for opium production and the location of hundreds of heroin and amphetamine refineries. So how do political leaders and the international community plan to tackle this problem in the event that Burma truly becomes a democratic country?
from The Great Debate:
The abyss and our last chance
By Carlo De Benedetti
The opinions expressed are his own.
In a magnificent book published a few years ago Cormac McCarthy imagines a man and a child, father and son, pushing a shopping cart containing what little they have left, along a back road somewhere in America. Ten years earlier the world was destroyed by a nameless catastrophe that turned it into a dark, cold place without life.
There is no history and there is no future. But there is an objective: to head south toward the sea. Mythical places, only vaguely perceived, where there might be salvation. The father is getting older and is ever more weary. But he has the child with him. And he has his objective. He wants to take him southward to the sea. Toward a future that may still be possible.
We need to rethink the next steps to tackling climate change
By Lord Julian Hunt. The opinions expressed are his own.
The main aim of the UN climate summit at Durban, which began on November 28 and runs until December 9, is to produce an agreement about targets for emissions by developed countries, and longer term targets from developing countries. But with sudden switches in energy policies, environmental regulations and accidents such as Fukushima, plus increasing financial fragility, national governments, especially here in Europe, are increasingly aware how policy in these areas impacts on everyone’s lives as well as the economy.
Decision-makers thus have a great responsibility and a very difficult task to pursue long term objectives at the same time, especially about climate change. The key question is how best to do this, and should this involve only regional, national and city-level policies, or are binding global agreements also necessary?
The euro is on life support, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
The short term solution to the problem of how to manage the euro zone crisis may now be right there in front of us. The central issue, as far as Germany is concerned at least, is how to reconcile bailing out the other member countries with keeping up the pressure on them to put their fiscal house in order. Quietly, without any official recognition of the fact, the ECB has taken charge of the situation and is now effectively running fiscal policy for most of the euro zone by simply buying enough Greek, Italian, Spanish and maybe French bonds to keep yields from going too high, but not buying so many as to reduce yields to anything like comfortable levels.
Moreover, treasury officials in every country will be only too well aware that what the ECB giveth, the ECB can take away. Any relaxation in austerity regimes can always be countered by an end to ECB purchases or even by ECB sales in the secondary market, driving yields back up in the space of a few minutes to 7%, 8% and beyond. In short, most of the euro zone members are now on a life support machine, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt.
Rating agencies as powerful as ever
By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.
Some people assumed that after the debacle over the 2008 mortgage-backed security crisis in the U.S., the credit rating agencies would be discredited. However, here we are three years later and the focus is still on the same rating agencies, waiting with bated breath to see whether they move the ratings of some of the world’s most important economies.
Within the last six months rating agencies have played a big part in shaping the direction of financial markets. First, there was Standard & Poor’s downgrading of the U.S. at the start of August, which caused a wave of risk aversion and turmoil on financial markets. Europe has also been the focus of concern.
