When financiers fail

Liaquat Ahamed, author of The Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, writes from within the "great men" school of historical narrative. He chronicles the work and foibles of the central bankers who set the course for finance in Great Britain (Montagu Norman), Germany (Hjalmar Schacht), France (Emile Moreau) and the United States (Benjamin Strong) in the period between the end of World War I and the great Depression of the 1930s.

For those of us who seldom imagine that powerful financiers are also just people, this gossipy history is amusing and slightly disconcerting. Yes -- these guys apparently were just as myopic and unimaginative as my more censorious assumptions would have predicted. And Schacht did end up a Nazi. But by telling his story through personalities, Ahamed does make developments in the decade that set the stage for the Great Depression accessible to an ordinary, marginally economically literate, general reader.

And yes, the only major economic thinker who comes out of this narrative looking pretty well is John Maynard Keynes.

I was particularly struck by Ahamed's description of the process when the Bank of England went over the brink, ending all pretense of being the financial center of the world:

As the world financial system ground to a halt [in the summer of 1931] the City of London, with tentacles that stretched into every corner of the globe, found itself especially vulnerable. ...

During London's heyday as a financial center, British industry and British banking had complemented each other. The large export surpluses generated by what was then "the workshop of the world" had provided the funds to finance Britain's long term global investments and underpinned London's status as banker to the world. After the war and the return to the the gold standard, Britain's manufacturing capacity had stagnated. Throughout the 1920s, however, London, determined to maintain its primacy in global finance, continued to lend [billions in current dollars] to foreign governments and companies. But because Britain was unable to generate the same export surpluses as before the war, the City had to finance its long-term loans by relying more and more on short term deposits.

That is, Britain was borrowing money expensively in order to be able to continue to loan money, often cheaply, in order to continue a pretense to a world empire that had been undermined by the costs of World War I and subsequent international blundering.

I have to wonder, will someone someday write the same sort of story about Messrs. Geithner, Bernanke and Summers? Is the contemporary financial bailout just a last gasp attempt to defend and pretend to a U.S. financial primacy, rapidly being undermined by rising resource costs and new national productive giants? I can't say I know the answer to that question, but I think it is the right one to be asking.***

Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

Green Jobs for a Green Future

Van Jones, an old friend, got a job as the Green Jobs evangelist for the White House. It's a great fit for him. Learn all about it. [3:25]



He said he wouldn't go inside the system, but I'm glad he did. If we're serious, we need to go where we can to get things done that need to get done.***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

What's a circus without a sideshow?

The title was offered by a wise observer of the proceedings.

For more on the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, visit Integrity's GC Portal.

Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor was a Harvard neuroanatomist when a blood vessel malformation inside her head blew out, flooding the left hemisphere of her brain with blood, a toxin to her neurons. My Stroke of Insight is the story of that brain trauma, how it felt as it happened, how she recovered, and what she learned. From within the belief system of a person of faith, what she acquired is no less than an ability to separate out and describe, as a witness, the physiological processes by which we know the Unknowable.

When I experienced the hemorrhage and lost my left hemisphere language center cells that defined my self, those cells could no longer inhibit the cells in my right mind. ...My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right [brain] hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feelings of deep inner peace. ...

The consciousness of our right mind appreciates that every cell in our bodies ... contains the exact same molecular genius as the original zygote cell that was created when our mother's egg cell combined with our father's sperm cell. My right mind understands that I am the life force power of the fifty trillion molecular geniuses crafting my form! (And it bursts into song about that on a regular basis!) ...

Freed from all perceptions of boundaries, my right mind proclaims, "I am a part of it all. We are all brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place."...

My left mind is responsible for taking all that energy, all that information about the present moment, and all of those magnificent possibilities perceived by my right mind, and shaping them into something manageable.

To a person who approaches the Unknowable through the Christian paradigm, she's saying that this cellular dance is how we know Jesus. Heretical? Well, the mystery is supposed to be about Incarnation, isn't it? Worth contemplating and digesting!***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

What to wear

This is a postscript to Tidbit of Tutu: the gender of God. One of the very good ways that the Episcopal Church, whose General Convention I'm working at, has confronted this conundrum has been (in very modern times) to admit women into all the roles of sacramental, priestly leadership. Heck, we not only have women priests and bishops, we have a woman as Presiding Bishop -- that's a sort of elected leader of the bishops.

Having all this woman leadership naturally leads to that always challenging question as women break into the professions: what should they wear that conveys the seriousness of their roles and satisfies their desire to be recognized as womanly. I've noticed that many women priests (and academics) solve this problem by wearing colorful "ethnic" jackets over whatever else they wear. Having walked around the marketplace at General Convention, I now know where they get them.



Priests also have issues of fit in their professional garb and there are offerings for them.



One could wish that the issue of what women should wear in order to be both taken seriously and feel attractive might lessen over time, but we aren't there yet.

Tidbit of Tutu: the gender of God

Archbishop Tutu writes:

I refer to God as He in this book, but the language is offensive to many, including to me, because it implies that God is more of a He than a She, and this is clearly not the case. Fortunately in our Bantu languages in South Africa we do not have gendered pronouns and so we do not face this problem.

... It is a liability of many languages that they are gendered and therefore we must speak of God as a He or a She but rarely both. There is something in the nature of God that corresponds to our maleness and our femaleness. We have tended to speak much more of the maleness, so we refer to the Fatherhood of God, which is fine but incomplete. We have missed out on the fullness that is God when we have ignored that which corresponds to our femaleness. We have hardly spoken about the Motherhood of God, and consequently we have been the poorer for this.

God Has a Dream

That would be easier. Do read the book. ***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

The future of human rights advocacy

Irene Khan, Amnesty International Secretary General:

One of our goals is to bring the two top nations of the world, the United States and China, to develop a common basis. We want the U.S. to sign up to the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and we want China to sign up to U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Der Speigel via Salon, June 1, 2009

I'd say they'd bracketed what the world needs nicely, wouldn't you? I'd also say, it's nice to encounter such a strategic vision for a more just future.***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

Talking about marriage in the church

We sent this [9:58] to all the people who have votes at the Episcopal Church's General Convention. For more on Ubuntu, see the previous post.



"It's not the gender of the couple, it's the quality of the relationship." Yes. ***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

Ubuntu: interdependence and cultural appropriation

The theme of this event I'm attending is Ubuntu. The Episcopal Church website explains:

The Trinitarian design depicts God the Creator in the bright center, God the Son in the cross formed by the longitude and latitude lines and God the Holy Spirit, swirling around the Father and the Son. The swirl is comprised of dancing figures, male and female, with faces of many colors, who symbolize the interconnectedness of humanity.

It's graceful, but I need more explication.

Fortunately, retired Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu has explained in his wonderful little book God Has a Dream.

The first law of our being is that we are in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God's creation. In Africa recognition of our interdependence is called ubuntu in Nguni languages, or botho in Sotho, which is difficult to translate into English. It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness: it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.

You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life. And so we must search for this ultimate attribute and reject ethnicity and other such qualities as irrelevancies. When we Africans want to give high praise to someone, we say "Yo u nobuntu"; "Hey, so and so has ubuntu." A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons. ...

The truth is, we need each other. ... In our world we can survive only together. We can be truly free, ultimately, only together. We can be human only together...

According to ubuntu, it is not a great good to be successful through being aggressively competitive and succeeding at the expense of others. In the end, our purpose is social and communal harmony and well-being. Ubuntu does not say, "I think, therefore I am." It says rather: "I am human because I belong. I participate. I share." Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum -- the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of the good.

Africa has a gift to give the world that the world needs desperately, this reminder that we are more than the sum of our parts: the reminder that strict individualism is debilitating. The world is going to have to learn the fundamental lesson that we are made for harmony, for interdependence. If we are ever truly to prosper, it will be together.

That's not an easy teaching for self-regarding, anxious North Americans.

When I heard of the Convention theme, I was reflexively a little anxious about our adoption of it. The Episcopal Church is not an institution which, by and large, understands that mostly white, mostly privileged people ought to consider carefully before they wax enthusiastic about concepts and activities derived from other peoples' cultures.

There's a reason that most of the world thinks Americans are grabby and arrogant. We see something attractive, we think we can have it. Why shouldn't we get a piece, or even take over, what is so obviously a good thing?

Well -- because it is someone else's culture. Theirs not ours. If we blithely assume we can just take up somebody else's concepts, we're not only being happily imperialistic, we're also being shallow and foolish. Cultural mores are the habits of a life time, lived into, not easily put on like a pretty new shirt.

And yet, and yet -- our human species is interdependent. We do live more and more in a global culture. Part of what that gives us is a chance to understand that other people do know things our culture misses. Not all goodness is Made in America. And people like Bishop Tutu do generously (and prudentially) want to share what they know of how people can live in harmony. Learning from each other, with each other, has always been part of how cultures change and grow. So there we are, back to Ubuntu.***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

Robert McNamara's lessons

I've had the movie "The Fog of War" sitting around for a month without having found time to view it. I now wish I had done so before the news of the death of former Secretary of Defense [War] Robert McNamara.

I'm old enough to remember McNamara as the "corporate genius" who was going to streamline the Pentagon in the early 1960s. Under Donald Rumsfeld's tenure, I sometimes thought I was hearing echos of that long-ago hubris so brutally derailed in South East Asia. No management expertise can make war predictable and clean -- especially if the political calculations that lead to the war are not brutally honest.

Over at Hullabaloo, dday -- who has seen the movie -- lists the lessons that McNamara took from Vietnam. They are overwhelmingly worth reading. Here's just one:

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

President Obama, listen up. You and your smart operatives are following former Secretary McNamara's prescriptions for failure in Afghanistan. Stay on that course and you'll certainly derail the train of hope that got you elected.

Birthday thoughts

Sixty two years ago, a couple -- not so young -- brought home a baby. They look a little bemused by what they had wrought -- at least my father does. Mother's delight was less ambiguous.

They remained bemused for the rest of their lives, but never doubted I was a good, even wonderful, addition to the world. Naturally, I came to believe that the world itself is good and wonderful. Love makes a feedback loop.

What's this General Convention?

Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment.

I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal.

I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for everyday, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.

To get this time started, here's a video [3:11] about the General Convention. H/t to Jim Dela, President of Episcopal Communicators by way of The Lead.



This thing is big -- Episcopal News Service has used this boilerplate to describe it:

The Episcopal Church’s General Convention, held every three years, is the bicameral governing body of the church. General Convention, the second largest legislative body in the world, is comprised of the House of Bishops, with more than 200 members, and the House of Deputies, with clergy and lay representatives from 110 dioceses in 15 nations, at over 700 members.

Wish us luck.

Irony is dead

This day of celebration of historic U.S. freedoms, the New York Time email news summary includes this item:

Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The Iranian government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners, often subject to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, rights groups say.

My emphasis, obviously. Do these people read their own newspaper? Or perhaps they have consumed too much of that euphemistic pablum that passes for reporting in their own pages -- have a little harsh interrogation, anyone?

Pismo Beach patriotism

The patriotic angel in the previous post seemed to me "camp," a tongue in cheek display. This one spotted yesterday seemed more serious.

Can anyone enlighten me about this (unfamiliar to me) cultural iconography?

Our national day

It's just not fair to say we don't celebrate patriotism in San Francisco. Check out this display!***

San Francisco writer Tamim Ansary explains what it means to him to be an American in West of Kabul, East of New York.

Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the earth. If the cultures are far apart -- like those of Afghanistan and America -- one feels an urge to get entirely over to one side or the other. ... I ... tried to straddle the fault line, although, to be sure, I shifted my weight quite definitively over to my American foot. ...And I wonder why.

... being an Afghan among Americans made me no less American. After all, most Americans are something else, as well. America's characteristic flavor is made of the otherness we all bring to this stew.

Can we remember our otherness as well as our common culture?***
Until July 18, I'll be working my butt off at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, trying to move us closer to full inclusion of all baptized people, including LGBT people, in all the life of the Church. This time is what we political junkies call "campaign mode" -- the crazy, exhausting 18 hour days of frenetic activity that sometimes win changes we seek and sometimes lead only to deep disappointment. I'm hopeful about how this project will work out. If you are curious about how we're doing, you can follow all the General Convention news at the LGBT advocacy group Integrity's GC portal. I don't expect to blog during this time except perhaps a few photos, but I've got at least a rudimentary post set up for every day, many of them more reflective than the time-sensitive political commentary I often write here. Enjoy.