primus

I may restart it at some point, but work and other interests preclude entries on this blog now.  Thanks for your readership.

Please check out:  www.2nato2.com

Foreign policy expectations that don’t take reality into consideration are doomed to failure, as recent U.S. initiatives clearly demonstrate. Quickly, think police-station in Pakistan, where America is faced with some of its toughest strategic decisions. What do you think a police-station in Pakistan looks like. Does the image in your eye resemble anything like this?

“The federal government really does not want to build a “bad bank” to take toxic assets from America’s largest financial institutions. It has taken a number of measures to avoid it… ”    so says Time, on Jan 17, 2009

Can someone tell me why we need to spend money setting up a new bad-bank?? After all, the government can have its pick from all the bad-banks around the country, couldn’t they? Heck, we could play round-robin and appoint a bad-bank of the month for a year without repeating that honor for the same bank!  What do you think?

Got up at 5 AM today (Monday, January 27, 2009) to catch up with work. Around 6 an email flash announces Sprint-Nextel has laid off 8,000 employees; a half hour or so later another flash announces 20,000 heads roll at Caterpillar; by the time I leave for a meeting at around 10 AM the U.S. economy has lost 35,000 jobs; and when I return at 4.30 PM Home Depot, IBM, and Texas Instruments have joined in the mayhem and over 50,000 Americans have lost their jobs.  By bedtime, global job losses (thanks to Philips, Corus, and ING Bank) exceed 73,000.

Can hardly wait for tomorrow.

  It was around 1.30 PM, Wednesday, November 26 that the first email alerts of the terrorist attacks in Bombay (Mumbai) began flashing on my computer screen. I was at one of my favorite Upper Valley coffee spots-Crow’s Corner Bakery and Cafe in Proctorsville, Vermont-working on my next book, a book of memoirs; as luck would have it I had just finished the chapter on Bombay, where I was born, when the attacks began. That made for a truly surreal experience. I watched my computer screen in shocked silence as the gruesome story developed.

Gunmen attack one of the cities iconic landmarks, the Taj Mahal  Hotel. The Taj is a gorgeous Victorian building that overlooks the Arabian Sea. So the story goes, it was founded over a century ago in a bout of anger by Mr. Jamsetji Tata, founder of one of India’s great business conglomerates, when he was denied admission to Watsons, a “whites-only” establishment.  Next door is the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, yes it still uses “Royal” in its name, by choice, 60 years after India fought for and won its Independence from England. My wife Deborah and I have had many a lazy lunch there in the gloriously sited Sea Lounge where window seats overlook the entire harbor and immaculately clad bearers (never waiters) in white tunics with red shashes serve on gleaming silver platters. Now people are getting killed where we sat and watched Bombay’s unending parade of humanity go by.

Hostages taken at the Oberoi Trident Hotel.  This hotel is at the tip of Marine Drive, a two mile long curve of land that follows the arc of the Arabian Sea here; the Drive begins almost where my parent’s apartment used to be and along it are some of Bombay’s choicest apartment buildings. The Oberoi is situated at the end of the curved drive.  During our frequent visits to Bombay, my wife and I jogged all the way to the Oberoi where we ended our run with fresh coconuts, cut open for us by a coconut vendor who sat on the walkway along the hotel. Nobody ever thought about terrorism just a few short years ago, when Deborah and I were last there. Bombay was as it has always been, sunny, warm, bustling, and virtually a New York on the Arabian Sea-all deal making and rags to riches; outward looking, cosmopolitan. Other places in India may look inward, but Bombay never has since it came into its own as a center of the global trade now four centuries ago.

Shots fired at the Victoria Terminus train station.  Another famous Victorian edifice of Bombay. Built in 1878 during the height of the British Raj, it is about a mile from the Taj Mahal Hotel. British military units would land near the Taj, get into formation and march up to the VT-as the station has forever been known-to go “up country” or to the “moffusil” as the English called the rest of India outside Bombay. A million  commuters come through VT every day. It is always packed. Multiply Grand Central Terminal in New York at rush hour by 50 and you might get close to visualizing the crowd of people walking through  VT. The idea of terrorists loose in its vast gothic inside with assault rifles and grenades is mind numbing and the stuff of horror movies.

Reports of gunshot injuries at the Metro Cinema. The Metro cinema is less than a mile from VT, and is around the corner from St. Xavier’s High School where I studied. During my student days theatres in Bombay were exclusive to a distributor, the Metro was the place to go for  MGM films. I remember seeing Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in The Long Hot Summer there in the late fifties.

Taxi blown up on causeway to airport. This explosion would have been around fifteen miles from the Oberoi. Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport is almost at the northern fringes of the city. Flights from the West usually land in Bombay in the middle of the night. This causeway separates the huts and campfires of the destitute that ring the airport from the beginnings of urban Bombay. So the terrorists were determined to create panic throughout the great city.

Terrorists in rubber boats, grenades, hijacked police cars shooting at civilians, American and British citizens being hunted down in the hotels, Army and Navy commandos and snipers shooting into luxury hotels, panic in the teeming city of 17 million. Incredibly, almost 20 hours after it began hostages still being held at the Oberoi. A wonderful, vibrant, ancient city has been turned on its head. My closest friend from boyhood days writes: “Terrible times. Glad we have only fifty years to go,” referring to our expected lifetimes.

It will be a sober Thanksgiving today as we join friends in Reading, Vermont. We will think of other friends across the world that are not carving turkeys, but ducking bullets, burying the dead, and lamenting a Bombay that has slinked away at the blink of an eye.

 And, Yes we did…

A good friend from Holland told me this morning one of his Dutch friends believes Senator Barack Obama, should he win the U.S. Presidency, will refuse to take the Presidential oath on the Bible. He will ask for the Koran instead.

This Dutch gentleman who spoke to my friend is part of the fringe and diminishing extremist Christian crowd that will never believe what the rest of the world know as fact—-Sen. Obama is a Christian and has never been anything else. His statement is part of the bigoted diatribe that has been levelled against Senator Obama from the beginning of the Obama candidacy. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of Americans are far too sensible to believe these scare-mongering rumors, as the impending Obama victory on November 4, 2008 will demonstrate.

But, and this is an important but, I’d like for everyone to know that the “swearing in” of the American President is not a religious event. The American constitution is quite clear about what is required to begin acting as the U.S. President. It is specified in Article 2, Section I, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution:

Clause 8:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:–”I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Note that even the word “swear” is optional. The new President can simply say “affirm.”

Finally, the misguided Dutch gentleman might be interested in knowing that Theodore Roosevelt (of Dutch origin himself), the President who is the hero of most other Presidents and aspirants to the position, did not use the bible for his swearing in!

The following anecdote caught my eye. It graphically describes how, in the world of global financial regulations, the world doesn’t look to the West any more; the old order changeth giving way to the new.

 The extract is from an op-ed in the Financial Times of October 28, 2008, titled, Why Asia Stays Calm In The Storm,  by Kishore Mahbubani.

In the past, Asian governments expected western counterparts to be role models of good governance. One story illustrates how times have changed. This year, a European banker consulted the Reserve Bank of India to learn how to get a banking licence in India. He was briefed on the conditions and told that the Indian authorities would also assess his regulator. The European banker smiled and said: “No problem. We have excellent regulation.” The Indian officer replied: “After subprime, we are not sure of US regulation; after Northern Rock, British regulation; after Société Générale, French regulation and after UBS, Swiss regulation.” In short, the gold standard that the west assumed it had in the field of regulation has vanished. Asians realise that they must forge their own standard.

The writer, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), has just published ‘The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East’

I came to the United States in the mid- sixties, when segregation was rampant and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) had become the lightning rod for integration advocates. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy had ordered U.S. marshals to escort James Meredith (an Air Force veteran, by the way) so that he could register for classes, thereby becoming the first black person to enroll at Ole Miss.

Ultimately, it would take not just the Federal marshalls, but Mississippi National Guardsmen and regular U.S. Army troops to enroll Mr. Meredith. A number of people were killed in the process by armed white supremacists who were inspired by Mississippi’s then racist governor, Ross Barnett.

These memories from the sixties are hard to erase for anyone, and even though more than four decades had elapsed since those awful events, they were on my mind as I walked into the campus of Ole Miss for the first Presidential Debate in September.  See my blog on this below.

In the welcome package provided all of us was a surprise. A self-guided walking tour titled: Remembering the Events of 1962 on the University of Mississippi Campus. It detailed all the horrible events with a timeline and this message: This self-directed waling tour provides a guide to the campus locations where those pivotal events occured.

It was not fair of me to recall events that had taken place over 40  years ago. But such is the searing damage done by awful events. I cannot tell you how much that brochure meant to me. One can talk all one wants about coming to terms with what one does, but Ole Miss has put it out there, on the line, for all to see. It wants you to know it recognizes what it did was unacceptable, and it wants you to know it has nothing to hide, because the Ole Miss of today is simply not the Ole Miss of the sixties.

That one brochure paid put to any lingering thoughts I had about the sixties. So, bravo Ole Miss, a great American Public University. You’ve done yourself proud. I expect to visit again soon, with great pleasure.

Here is a virtual tour, I’d encourage you to take it!

General Colin Powell is living testimony to the American dream and the American promise to all its citizens: you can be whatever you want to be.

 Incredibly talented brave and far-sighted, corageous, and loyal Republican to a fault. Yet,  to many of us who count ourselves as Republicans General Powell ceased being a leader and role model when he did not speak up against the headlong, neoconservative-driven rush to the unnecessary war in Iraq.  In my opinion, there is no way the American people would have tolerated an Iraqi invasion if General Powell, then Secretary of State, had led the charge against it. But he didn’t and the rest is history.

Which is why his endorsement this morning of Senator Barack Obama for President was so important. Not just the endorsement, but the detailed dossier that he laid out as to why he had reached the decision he had. I was especially struck by his hitting hard at the extremists within the Republican party who have narrowed the vision of their party and who, for narrow political gain, seek to transform America into a bigoted, exclusionary country.

 Here is part of what he said:

Powell  said he was troubled that some Republicans — he excluded McCain — continue to say or allow others to say that Obama is a Muslim, when he is a Christian. Such rhetoric is polarizing, he said.

“He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America,” Powell said. “Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?” (emphasis mine)

Even more touching and thoughtful was Powell’s tribute to Muslim-American war hero Kareem Khan who joined the Army after 9/11 and was killed August 6, 2007 in Baqubah, Iraq.

Wow! Thank you General Powell, all Americans thank you today, and to me, with your endorsement of Sen. Obama and with your well deserved criticism of the Republican party, you have redeemed yourself from the stain of not attempting to stop the Iraqi misadventure. I particularly appreciated your observation that an Obama Presidency will set the stage for a new generation of American leaders.

Watch out world, with any luck, come January 2009, America the world’s leader and role mode is coming back. With a vengance.

You may also want to check out:

Powell endorses Obama, chides McCain campaign tone 

BBC NEWS | Americas | Colin Powell backs Barack Obama

Colin Powell endorses Obama, says Palin unqualified, defends …
Los Angeles Times, CA - But Powell is the first high-profile leader to raise a larger question, to wonder what would be disqualifying if Obama were a Muslim-American. …
Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama New Yorker

Colin Powell condemns the ugliness of the Republican Party Salon

Colin Powell Salutes Muslim Americans in Obama Endorsement OpEdNews

Movement in America to hug Hussein
Calcutta Telegraph, India