Peter Krupa

In The Crash of 2008 and What it Means, George Soros makes the most eloquent critique of globalization that I’ve ever read.

In a nutshell, he argues that starting in the 70s, rich countries forced Washington consensus austerity measures on poor (“periphery”) countries, while at the same time reserving for themselves the right to enact countercyclical measures to keep their own markets stable and attractive for investment.

The status of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency coupled with this globalization of financial markets allowed the more attractive markets of rich countries (in particular the United States) to suck in the savings of the less-stable “periphery” markets, generating large current account deficits – that is, we borrowed heavily to spend beyond our means and fuel our prosperity.

This finally catches up to the rich countries. A series of government bail-outs starting in the 1980s coincided with the rise of “market fundamentalism,” the result being broad deregulation of financial markets coupled with a massive, throbbing moral hazard.

Now, the super-bubble has popped, and your average American is screwed. In addition, Soros predicts a prolonged move away from the dollar as a global reserve currency, ending the unlimited line of global credit that the United States has enjoyed over the last 30 years.

The “market fundamentalism” that Soros refers to is the orthodoxy that unregulated financial markets tend toward equilibrium. He places it alongside several other fundamentalist philosophies that ultimately ended badly: communism, national socialism, and  fascism.

He might have a point. We’ll see.

Jorge Castañeda published a nifty little piece in Foreign Policy on why Mexico’s drug war is ill-advised and unwinnable:

The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous myths. Calderón has deployed everything from distorted statistics to bad history as weapons to convince the country, and the world, that the war must be joined.

Fair enough, but that being the case, now what? You can’t just say, “Never mind” and withdraw the troops. The cartels are broken up and at war with each other, some $30 billion in illegal cash is crossing the border every year, and Americans are still hoovering up vast amounts of ski, recession and bonus reductions notwithstanding.

It’s only a matter of time before the extreme violence honed in Mexico crosses the border. In some cases it already has. (Did you know when they dissolve a body in acid, Mexican gangsters call it a pozole? Ha!) I don’t have any answers. Violence just has a way of spreading.

If you needed any further proof that “sponsors of terror” now simply means “on U.S. shit-list:”

TSA also named 10 “countries of interest” –  Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — as well as four nations known to be sponsors of terrorism — Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Yes, Cuba, that hotbed of sex tourism, rum, booty-shaking, and Islamic extremism. The Council on Foreign Relations helpfully points out that Cuba “continues to ‘publicly oppose’ the war on terror” and may have provided “limited support” to international Islamic extremist Basque separatist group ETA.

Hope you Miami Cubans enjoy getting your cavities searched on the way back from visiting all your mosques or whatever.

I had assumed Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo would focus on the clandestine U.S. goons hunting down Pablo Escabar. It did, partly, and of course we all love reading about the extra-legal international escapades of the United States of America. But Bowden dedicated the far greater and more interesting portion of his book to the Colombians.

This part was deeply unsettling. Not the fact of the violence, necessarily, but the image of a society that could not respond to it. Dismantle a lab? He kills five cops. Arrest him? He sets of a car bomb. Indict him? He kills the public prosecutor. Bring him to trial? He kills the judge, the next judge, and the next judge’s family. Then he gets acquitted. This all gave me bad dreams.

In the end, the only way to stop a guy like Pablo was to use his tactics against him – that is, go vigilante, burn his stuff, and kill all his associates, including family members. The irony in the whole thing (irony?) is that Pablo never would have become so powerful if he didn’t have so much money, and the source of that money – extremely lucrative cocaine smuggling – was made possible by U.S. anti-drug policy.

Oh, and cocaine prices haven’t really gone up in 20 years (PDF). Meanwhile, the body count has.

Happy New Year/Decade. And here’s something to think about. During the last 10 years – the decade of 9/11, the decade of terrorism and wars there-on – your odds of dying in a terrorism-induced plane crash were 1 : 10,408,947. So, not too great. I mean, I wouldn’t have bet on it.

Then again, lots of people might have. Consider that the odds of winning the pick-six Illinois Lottery are about the same – 1 : 10,179,260 – and tons, nay, thousands of math-challenged voters/high school graduates play. One can only assume they think they might win.

So it stands to reason that if someone almost bombs a plane bound for a country populated by people who play the lottery and watch 24, the natural, entirely predictable reaction will be: WE MUST INVADE YEMEN BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.

See, I think the terrorists knew this. And I bet they don’t play the lottery.