Good news of the day: Georgia and Ukraine

Nato has reaffirmed that Ukraine and Georgia will eventually join the alliance, without offering them formal roadmaps towards membership.

Instead, Nato foreign ministers meeting in Brussels said the two nations should pursue reforms needed to join the bloc, without giving any timetable for entry. -BBC

Last week, Rice attempted to make a final push to force NATO to accept Georgia and Ukraine before Bush steps down. I did not think she would succeed and thankfully, she did not. It seems European countries have a better understanding of the danger of accepting nations lead by unstable and unpredictable leaders bent on confronting Russia.

Obama also claims to back Georgia and Ukraine entry in the alliance, but at least we know that Bush did not manage to make it happen in his last months. We will have to wait and see what Obama does once in power, but we can sleep safe for a few months.

Update on last Sunday's "attack" on Georgian and Polish presidents

Remember the attack on the motorcade of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili who was visiting the border with South Ossetia with his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski last Sunday? The Georgian public relation machine immediately blamed the Russians, with "unconfirmed reports" claiming South Ossetians border guard had been seen shooting near the motorcade.

Well, here's an update. The Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) came to the conclusion that the incident was more than likely staged by the Georgians:

The daily “Dziennik” cites an Internal Security Agency (ABW) report saying that the shooting incident in Georgia involving Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Georgian President Saakashvili was most likely staged by the Georgians.

According to the daily, ABW head Krzysztof Bondaryk sent the report to the top sixteen people in Poland. The report states the shots fired near the presidential motorcade were most likely fired by Georgians as a provocation and propaganda tool.

If confirmed, add this to the long list of reasons why Georgia should never be given NATO membership. Saakashvili has proved to be dangerous and manipulative; if given membership he could cause real trouble by attempting to force confrontation with Russia. This would be disastrous because NATO members could be forced to side with Georgia against Russia. Let's not get sucked into a mutual defense pact with this madman.

Georgians are trying hard to portray themselves as the poor victim of evil Russia, even though they started the conflict this summer. The MSM in the U. S. is largely buying this narrative, and my instinct tells me that this report will not change this situation; in fact I'm fairly sure it will be largely ignored by the MSM.

Hat tip: Paul Wells

Mark Ames on Russia

Interesting interview of Mark Ames, the author of an article on the American media framing of the Russian-Georgian conflict in The Nation, on the subject of the Russian-Georgian conflict, Russia-American relations and topics in Russia's sphere.

I talked about the conflict previously, pointing to a NY Times article which showed that the way the media framed the conflict was totally wrong. But as Ames said, the NY Times was one of the worst offender on pro Georgia bias during the conflict. There is a strong lobby in the United States that wishes to portray Russia as irrational, dangerous and a threat to world stability; they are trying, and largely succeeding, to impose their narrative on the mainstream of American politics. This is dangerous because they tell only one side of the story, they totally misunderstand Russia internal politics and they ignore or don't understand long term demographic trends which will limit Russia to being only a regional power. As Ames says in the interview, Russians are extremely sensitive to how the west see them and very angry when they think they are being treated unfairly. So the narrative could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the west treat Russia as if they were the "bad guys", they will start acting like it out of a lack of confidence in the west.

Here's an analogy. In psychiatry there is a defense mechanism called projective identification, which is often unconsciously used by people with borderline personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder. It is a mechanism whereas person A project an emotion on person B and will unconsciously act to make person B feel and act that way to confirm his own mistaken belief. Here is an example. If a patient is angry because his doctor is going on a vacation and he feels abandoned (that would be typical of a borderline personality disorder who are also prone to attempt suicide), he will project his anger to the doctor; he does not recognize that he is angry, he believes that it's the doctor who is angry. Then he will say, upon leaving the office, "See you after your vacations doc... if I don't kill myself". The goal is to make the doctor angry to confirm his own pathological belief. This allows the patient to avoid taking a look at himself, he can blame others instead.

This is a similar kind of behavior we are seeing in regard to USA relation with Russia. If you look at it from Russia's point of view, its relationship with the USA has been far from positive since Yelstin such as the disastrous western backed privatization, NATO expansion after promising not to do it, messing with Serbia and Kosovo without Russian support, support of Putin enemies in former Soviet Union Republics, some of whom have been in the Russian Empire for 4 centuries and Bush backing off the ABM treaty among many others humiliations. Yet the Russian point of view is never mentioned in the mainstream media, all we hear about is a totalitarian and irrational dictator bent on destroying its neighbours. Let's stop the projective identification. Go listen to Ames.

Lawrence Summers?

Since I am too young to have followed politics closely in the 1990s, all I knew about Lawrence Summers was the 2005 controversy over his comments on women which made him resign from his job as Harvard's president. I still think he has been unfairly criticized for his comments on why certain jobs are disproportionately occupied by men. I think his arguments are sound hypotheses, I've defended them several times and I managed to convince everyone I talked to that they made sense; but I'll readily admit that they're easy to misinterpret (and making them probably showed poor judgment given his political aspirations).

But I have a hard time defending this:

The aside was leaked to the press and stated that, developed countries ought to export more pollution to developing countries because these countries would incur the lowest cost from the pollution in terms of lost wages of people made ill or killed by the pollution due to the fact that wages are so low in developing countries. The aside went on to state that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

There's a time when an economist should realize when what might be economically optimal doesn't make sense from a moral perspective. He failed that test.

He was chief economist of the World Bank from 1991-1993. Given the disastrous results of his policies in the region, and his support of the disastrous World Bank policies of the 1990s, I have a hard time taking this man seriously. Maybe he learned from his mistakes and maybe he is the best economist for the job now, I do not know since this isn't my field. I do like his opinion that increasing wage discrepancy is a problem, but I am troubled by his "successes" and his judgment.

Here's a view on the result of his policies in Eastern Europe and Russia:

He turned to America’s great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments. In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country’s economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers’s first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania’s suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania’s economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so–even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let’s-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic “rescue” of Russia’s crisis-ridden economy. It’s a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia’s GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world’s biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism. -Mark Ames