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10주년

Three Weeks of Financial Turmoil - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Three Weeks of Financial Turmoil - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Paul Newman Dies at 83: an obiturary

An Enduring Film Star and Social Activist: Paul Newman achieved what most of his peers could not: remaining a major star into charismatic old age. Read @ NYTimes.com

Audio Slide Show: One of the Last Greats. Manohla Dargis looks back at the long and varied film career of Paul Newman. See the slide show @ NYTimes.com

Poor Sarah - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com

This may explain why, on Tuesday afternoon when I went to The Times Web site and saw the photo of Sarah Palin with Henry Kissinger, a funny thing happened. A wave of self-recognition and sympathy washed over me.

That’s right — self-recognition and sympathy. Rising up from a source deep in my subconscious. I saw a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life. I saw this in the sag of her back in her serious black suit, in the position of her hands, crossed modestly atop her knees, and in that “Mad Men”-era updo, ever unchanging, like a good luck charm.

You don’t have to be female to suffer from Impostor Syndrome either — I learned the phrase only recently from a male friend, who puts a darned good face forward. But I think that women today — and perhaps in particular those who once thought they could not only do it all but do it perfectly, with virtuosity — are unique in the extent to which they bond over their sense of imposture.

Real life is different, of course, from Hollywood fantasy. Incompetence has consequences, political and personal. Glorifying or glamorizing the sense of just not being up to the tasks of life has consequences, too. It means that any woman who exudes competence will necessarily be excluded from the circle of sisterhood. We can’t afford any more of that.
Poor Sarah - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com

Palin’s American Exception

America is distinct. Its habits and attitudes with respect to religion, patriotism, voting and the death penalty, for example, differ from much of the rest of the developed world. It is more ideological than other countries, believing still in its manifest destiny. At its noblest, it inspires still.Read Op-Ed Column by Roger Cohen @ NYTimes.com

Online activists rise against the bailout - Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej - Politico.com

Online activists rise against the bailout - Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej - Politico.com

PublicMarkup.org - Treasury's Legislative Proposal From Treasury Department for Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets

PublicMarkup.org - Treasury's Legislative Proposal From Treasury Department for Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets

PublicMarkup.org - Dodd's Legislative Proposal From Treasury Department for Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets

PublicMarkup.org - Dodd's Legislative Proposal From Treasury Department for Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else

Update, September 2008. Hullo there Paul Krugman readers. Yes, I did say "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance", and as a general maxim I wholeheartedly recommend it. I don't necessarily, however, either endorse or whatever-the-opposite-of-endorse the specific use of that maxim in the context of Prof. Krugman's post about the Paulson bailout plan; I don't actually have a fully formed view about that plan. I do, however, wholeheartedly endorse "Development, Geography and Economic Theory", which I think is a terribly underrated economics book, and am at this moment rather starstruck at having one of my essays admired by the nearest modern equivalent to my hero JK Galbraith. Anyway, as you were; by way of context, the post below was written just as a lot of high-profile commentators like Thomas Friedman were abandoning their support for the Iraq War.D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else

Princeton University Economics: Crisis on Wall Street Panel Discussion - Sept. 23, 2008

Slides presented by Hyun Shin - Crisis on Wall Street
Slides presented by Markus Brunnermeier - Thoughts on a New Financial Architecture
Slides presented by Harrison Hong - How We Got Here and Some Lessons?
Slides presented by Paul Krugman - Notes on the bailout
*Alan Blinder did speak but did not use a digital presentation
Follow the discussion

The Buck Stopped Then - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

CRITICS of the administration’s Wall Street bailout condemn the waste of taxpayer dollars. But the taxpayers aren’t the weightiest American financial constituency, even in this election year. The dollar is the world’s currency. And it is on the world’s opinion of the dollar that the Treasury’s plan ultimately hangs.
Read the article @ NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist Bob Herbert - A Second Opinion? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Does anyone think it’s just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Read the article @ NYTimes.com

Makers of Artificial Sweeteners Go to Court - New York Times

Sweetness is about to be the subject of a bitter courtroom fight. In one corner is the artificial sweetener in the blue packet, Equal; in the other is its best-selling rival in the yellow packet, Splenda. The maker of Equal contends that Splenda has been misleading millions of consumers by fostering the notion, through television and print advertising, that Splenda is made from sugar and is natural. Splenda’s maker counters that the process to make the sweetener does indeed start with sugar. While both sides are expected to present phalanxes of neurobiologists and chemists as expert witnesses, the dispute hinges on the role of language in creating and defining the product. “The phrase ‘made from sugar’ may seem simple enough, but it has spawned an epic battle among the parties over proper diction and syntax,” the judge overseeing the case, Gene E. K. Pratter, wrote in an opinion last month. “For example, McNeil claims that ‘made from sugar’ clearly excludes the interpretation that Splenda is sugar, or that Splenda is made with sugar,” she continued. “Made with sugar would mean that sugar is an ingredient listed on the package. Drawing upon an often effective rhetorical device, McNeil asks the question, how could a consumer interpret a product that is ‘made from sugar’ and ‘tastes like sugar’ as actually being sugar?”Kevin L. Keller, a marketing professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, said that the language at issue had “a legal perspective, a marketing perspective and a health perspective.”
Read the article @ New York Times
Follow-up: Artificial Sweetener Makers Reach Settlement on Slogan

How Sweden Solved Its Bank Crisis - NYTimes.com

A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar? It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent. But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing. Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.
Read the article @ NYTimes.com

UNDERSTANDING THE S&L MESS

Bank failure is as American as apple pie. The first American failure took place in Rhode Island in 1809, when a bank capitalized at forty-five dollars issued eight hundred thousand dollars in bank notes, a sum equal to more than seventeen thousand times the resources behind it. The 182 years between have been marked by literally tens of thousands of bank failures. In sharp contrast, Great Britain, whence most of American banking theory and practice comes, has not had a major bank failure in well over a hundred years.

Why should the richest and most productive capitalist economy on earth have such a dismal record in safeguarding a system so central to capitalism? The answer lies in the peculiar nature of the business we call banking, in our national history as a federal republic of sovereign states, and in our politics.
Read the article @ AmericanHeritage.com

For Short Sellers, It Doesn’t Get Much Better - NYTimes.com

As shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac watched their investments plunge in value Thursday, short sellers, who bet against stocks, could count their winnings. Considered smart money by some, short sellers have wagered against Fannie and Freddie in growing numbers as the mortgage crisis has worsened. Many of them have profited handsomely as the companies’ shares have tumbled roughly 70 percent this year.
Read the article @ NYTimes.com

A New Wave of Vilifying Short Sellers - New York Times

To sell short, traders typically borrow assets like stocks and sell them. If the price falls, the trader buys back the shares at a lower price and profits from the difference. Short sellers have always been viewed with suspicion because their style of trading seems to run counter to the essential optimism of the markets. After all, they win when other investors lose.Read the article @ New York Times

Film - Wayne Wang, Bridging Generations and Hemispheres - NYTimes.com

IN Wayne Wang’s first feature, “Chan Is Missing” (1982), two taxi drivers go looking for an absent friend in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As they piece together contradictory testimonials from those who knew the missing man, what emerges is almost a composite sketch of Asian-American identity. But the film, which still feels fresh and insightful after all these years, is a mystery without a solution. Its conclusion, unencumbered by the foggy rhetoric of identity politics, is that identity is hard to pin down, up for grabs, something you make up as you go.Read the article @ NYTimes.com

A Year of Heavy Losses - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

A Year of Heavy Losses - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

[인터뷰-주대환] "뉴레프트가 뭡니까"

이번에 내가 한 것은 민주화 과도기 20년 동안 대립해온 두 입장, 비판적 지지파와 독자후보(정당)파의 경계를 허물어 버린 것이며, 노동조합을 근거로 ‘노동당’을 만들어서 ‘자유당’을 넘어서겠다는 전략의 폐기다. 나는 민주노동당의 분당에 반대했다. 분당은 아주 잘못된 일이다. 분당에도 불구하고 ‘노동당’ 노선을 포기하지 않았다면 나는 민주노동당 당원으로 남아 있었을 것이다. 그러나 마음속으로는 민주노동당은 곧, 10년 안에 (통합 야당에 합류하여) 사라질 것이라고 생각한다. 반면에 진보신당은 장기적으로 유의미한 존재로 존속이 가능하다고 본다. 단, 촛불 시위의 흐름을 타고 녹색당으로 진화해나간다는 것이 전제다. 갈수록 심각해질 기후 변화와 환경 문제, 그리고 무엇보다 한국의 사회경제적 발전 수준으로 볼 때 녹색당의 존립 근거는 충분하다. 이 이야기는 진보신당을 ‘진정한’ 노동자 정당으로 만들려는 분들과는 다른 전망이다.
기사 읽기 @ 레디앙

사라져가는 것들을 필사적으로 불러내는 초혼가, <스틸 라이프> : 영

한 감독은 평생 단 한편의 영화만 만든다. 지아장커야말로 그렇다. <소무>에서 <플랫폼>과 <임소요>를 거쳐 <세계>에 이를 때까지, 그는 늘 변하는 것을 찍으면서 변하지 말아야 할 것에 대해 이야기한다. 지아장커가 만들어내는 단 한편의 영화는 <스틸 라이프>에서 마침내 정점에 올랐다. 이 영화는 완전하다. 그리고 여기엔 장이모와 첸카이거의 요즘 작품들에선 절대로 찾을 수 없는 현실의 중국이 있다.

지아장커는 서른살 무렵에 쓴 글에서 불안정한 자신의 생활을 떠올리며, 영화를 선택한다는 건 뿌리뽑힌 삶을 선택한다는 것이라고 한 적이 있다. 그는 늘 자신의 삶과 영화를 일치시키는 감독이다. <플랫폼>이 그랬고, <세계>가 그랬으며, 이제 <스틸 라이프>가 그렇다. 이 영화엔 무너진 돌들이 있고 뿌리 뽑힌 사람들이 있다.
시네21

<스틸 라이프> 부끄러움을 가르쳐준 영화 : 기사 : 씨네21

싼샤. 1993년부터 시작된 중국정부의 댐 건설로 중국 인민폐 10위안에도 그려진 아름다운 풍광과 2000년의 장구한 역사가 서서히 물에 잠겨가는 곳. 과거는 그렇게 수장되고 현재는 끊임없이 부서지고 미래는 안개로 덮여 보이지 않는 곳. 그곳에서 영화는 시작된다. 여기 두 남녀가 있다. 산밍은 16년 전 자신을 떠난 아내와 딸을 찾기 위해, 션홍은 2년째 소식이 끊긴 남편을 찾기 위해 싼샤의 시간 속으로 들어선다. 이것은 사라져버린 누군가를 찾으러, 사라져가는(허물어지는) 시공간 속으로 들어올 수밖에 없었던 사람들의 이야기다씨네21

기이하고도 슬픈 이야기 <투야의 결혼> : 영화 : 씨네21

“아빠가 둘이라고 놀리잖아요.” 아들 짜야는 엄마의 두 번째 결혼식장에서 싸움을 벌이는 이유를 그렇게 말한다. 투야(위난)는 두 번째 결혼 중인데, 가고 싶지 않은 사람에게 팔려가고 있는 것이며 식장은 난리법석이다. 결국 투야는 홀로 숨어들어 눈물을 흘린다. 그리고 영화는 지금껏 눈물을 흘리지 않고 꿋꿋하게 버텨온 투야의 행적으로 되돌아가 다시 시작한다. 우물을 파다가 허리 불구가 된 남편 바터(바터)를 대신해 살림을 책임지는 것은 투야였지만 그녀조차 조금만 더 고된 노동을 했다가는 남편처럼 될 처지다. 투야에게는 친구가 한명 있는데, 바람기 많은 아내 때문에 늘 골치를 썩이는 인근의 젊은 유부남 썬거(썬거)다. 그들 사이에 우정으로 위장된 사랑의 감정이 오가는 것을 알 수 있지만 그럼에도 투야는 집안의 생계를 위해 남편과 자식을 함께 데리고 살아줄 누군가와 결혼하겠다는 마음을 고쳐먹지 않는다. 씨네21

투야의 결혼

내몽고의 광활한 황무지 한복판. 두 아이와 우물을 파다 불구가 되어버린 남편과 함께 살아가는 투야는 수십 마리의 양떼를 몰고, 먼 길을 오가며 물을 길어 나르는 고된 하루하루를 보낸다. 고된 하루 끝에 집으로 돌아가던 길, 그녀는 사고가 난 이웃주민을 도와주다 자신도 허리를 다치게 되며 힘든 생활고에 한계를 느낀다. 그런 모습을 지켜보며 안타까워하던 남편과 가족들은 이혼을 하고 그녀를 도와줄 수 있는 새로운 남편을 찾도록 권하게 된다. 투야의 결혼 : 영화정보 : 씨네21

주대환 : 민주노동당의 분당 사태와 좌파의 진로

지난 몇 년 동안 민주노동당은 왜 흥하고 망했는가? 한 마디로 겉과 속이 달랐기 때문이다. 겉 때문에 흥하고 속 때문에 망했다. 겉으로는 “무상의료, 무상교육!”, “부자에게 세금을, 서민에게 복지를!”이라고 외쳤다. 이 구호는 원래의 뜻 그대로의 좌파, 그런 의미에서 진정한 좌파의 구호였다. 물론 구체화되고 보다 현실적인 정책으로 다듬어져야 할 거친 구호들이었지만 적어도 시대착오적인 구호는 아니었다.

다시 말해서 자본주의의 발전이 선진국의 턱 밑에 이르고 그로 인한 사회적 문제들과 빈부격차가 극심하여 누구나 양극화를 인정하고 걱정하는 이 시대가 요구하는 좌파의 목소리였던 것이다. 그래서 국민은 이에 대해 공감을 하고 기대를 보냈다. 그러나 속으로는 아직 NL과 PD, 즉 맹목적 민족주의와 혁명적 민주주의를 스스로 벗어나지 못하고 있었다.

2004년 총선에서 국민의 과분한 사랑과 기대를 받아 원내로 진출한 후에 오히려 그러한 속내가 드러났다. 결국 80년대 운동권의 관념과 습관, 그리고 이데올로기를 벗어나지 못했다는 사실을 숨길 수가 없었던 것이다. 대중 앞에서 선거운동을 하면서 하는 말과 당내에서 하는 말이 일치하지 않고 자기 자신과 대중에게 ‘정직하지’ 않은 사고와 언행의 나쁜 습관은 국민과의 만남에서 스스로 변할 수 있는 가능성마저 차단하였다.레디앙에서 전체 보기