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"Fukuyama keeps up the fight"
  Konrad Yakabuski
  May. 28, 2010

When three American thinkers – an unbowed neo-conservative, a cheeky liberal and neo-conservatism's best-known apostate – gathered in the capital this month to discuss a young French scholar's new “biography” of the neo-con movement, they first had to settle on how to pronounce the author's name.

Francis Fukuyama, the Chicago-born former neo-con, begged the indulgence of Justin Vaïsse for pronouncing his first name à l'américaine.

Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne nodded to his own family's Quebec roots. “I'm a French Canadian, so I love saying Joos-tin,” he jested, pursing his lips.

As for editor William Kristol, whose Weekly Standard remains a safe house for neo-conservative opinion, he was true to its precepts of U.S. supremacy and unilateralism.

“As a neo-conservative, I have to give him the American pronunciation,” Mr. Kristol quipped, before poking his former brother-in-arms: “I'm a little shocked that Frank bowed to such a hegemonic and almost nativist manner of discourse, but that's okay.”

Emotions, apparently, are still a little raw. In 1992, Prof. Fukuyama's celebrated book The End of History and the Last Man helped provide neo-conservatism's intellectual fuel. His 2004 break with the movement accelerated its descent into foreign-policy purgatory.

As he wraps up his nine-year stint at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies – he's headed to Stanford in the fall – Prof. Fukuyama harbours no regrets about slamming the door on the house he helped to build. But neither has he turned his back on all of neo-conservatism's leading edicts.

The theorist, set to speak Monday in Toronto, still thinks democracy promotion should remain a key tenet of U.S. foreign policy. And he fears Barack Obama – for whom he voted – does far too little of it.

REVENGE OF THE REALISTS

“Although he gave a speech in Cairo almost exactly a year ago about the importance of democracy and accountable government in the Middle East, as far as I can tell he has done almost nothing to actually promote this,” Prof. Fukuyama insists in his bright but cloistered office on Washington's stately Massachusetts Ave. “He occasionally makes a nod towards democracy and human rights, but you don't get the sense that it's central to what he wants to accomplish.”

Not that Mr. Obama would get far if he tried. George W. Bush's go-it-alone “freedom agenda” sullied the name of democracy – and America – in much of the world. Neo-cons justified the use of unilateral military force to “democratize” Iraq based on the conviction, expressed a few years earlier by Mr. Kristol, that “American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality.” The rest of the world could be forgiven if it didn't always see it that way.

By comparison, Mr. Obama has been deferential to multilateralism, noting in his first National Security Strategy, unveiled Thursday: “The burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone – indeed our adversaries would like to see America sap our strength by overextending our power.”

Prof. Fukuyama supports the multilateral approach, but criticizes the narrowly “realist” foreign policy that appears to be favoured by many in the Obama administration, which is reminiscent of the Cold War détente of the Nixon era. If the neo-cons seem hopelessly utopian, the realists come off as overly cynical.

“American foreign policy has to be grounded in certain ideals. It's kind of in the American DNA,” argues Prof. Fukuyama, who, incidentally, was born the same year – 1952 – as Mr. Kristol and Mr. Dionne. “It's something we're hypocritical about a lot of the times because we don't live up to [our ideals].

“But creating an open, democratic world order is something that didn't begin with the Bush administration. It's been there from the beginning in terms of American objectives and the world is, on balance, better off for that.”

NEO-CON WARS 2: HISTORY STRIKES BACK

The fissure between Prof. Fukuyama and his fellow neo-cons arose over what he describes as their misreading of his celebrated 1992 bestseller. Its irresistible, if much-oversimplified, idea – that the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War marked the triumph of liberal democracy as humankind's political endpoint – underpinned the neo-con argument that the U.S. should use its opportunity as the world's sole superpower to spread democracy abroad, by force if necessary.

Ronald Reagan, neo-cons argued, had proved that intimidation, not détente, was key to eliminating the Soviet threat and freeing the citizenry of the “evil empire” and its satellite states. It was the failure to respond forcefully enough to Islamic terrorist attacks on Bill Clinton's watch, they reasoned, that led to 9/11.

By then, neo-con hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz had assumed pivotal positions in the Bush administration. And the Bush Doctrine – with its emphasis on pre-emptive strikes and unilateralism – became the motor of foreign policy.

“The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack,” the Bush administration asserted in its 2002 National Security Strategy (a document every president must submit to Congress).

The 2003 invasion of Iraq – to topple Saddam Hussein, destroy his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction and install democracy – marked a neo-con high point.

But barely a year later, watching disaster unfold there, Prof. Fukuyama sent America's salon set into fits of chatter by renouncing his peers in what was then their bible, The National Interest. As he would further explain in 2006's America at the Crossroads, he faulted them for egging on the Bush administration to conclude, wrongly, that “history could be accelerated through American agency.”

The neo-cons did not take it lying down. Robert Kagan, who had helped Mr. Kristol pen the blurb about America's “unusually high degree of morality,” shot back in 2008 with the impertinently titled The Return of History and the End of Dreams. China's inexorable rise, Mr. Kagan argued, had shown that “growing national wealth and autocracy [are] compatible, after all.”

But despite robbing the neo-cons of their argument, history's return has only made democracy promotion an even greater imperative. “It may not come to war,” Mr. Kagan asserted, “but the global competition between democratic and autocratic governments will become the dominant feature of the 21st-century world.”

Prof. Fukuyama has not repudiated his own “end of history” thesis, even if he concedes that China's progress has led many thinkers to cast doubt on the inevitability, much less desirability, of democracy as the ultimate form of political organization. Even Russia, which a decade ago might have looked to the West for guidance, would now rather emulate China.

“The problem with that model is that you have to have good authoritarians,” Prof. Fukuyama counters. “They tend to produce them in East Asia for a number of reasons – historical and cultural. But in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, it's pretty hard to find Lee Kuan Yews.” (Mr. Lee is the iron-fisted ex-leader of Singapore, credited with turning his city-state into an Asian Tiger.)

Like the Soviet Union, China has its own internal contradictions, which, in time, are bound to catch up with the regime. “It is extremely hard to govern that large a country in such a top-down manner without any kind of bottom-up accountability,” Prof. Fukuyama adds. “The question I would really raise is whether, in the long run, that part of the model is sustainable.”
History should take care of China, he argues. Modernization “tends to drive demands for political participation.”

NEO-CON WARS 3: ATTACK OF THE CLONES?

The neo-cons are not so patient. And they have a new bounce to their step. The 2007 troop surge in Iraq – which Robert Kagan's younger brother, Frederick, helped devise – worked. Even Prof. Fukuyama concedes Iraqis now have “a reasonable shot” at establishing a workable democracy.

What's more, isolationists such as Kentucky Republican candidate Rand Paul notwithstanding, the party has pretty much surrendered the formulation of its foreign policy to neo-conservatives such as Mr. Kristol, the Kagans and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.

“If Republicans want to oppose Obama on foreign policy to score political points, they naturally tend to gravitate around neoconservative ideas,” Mr. Vaïsse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes in Why Neoconservatism Still Matters.

Mr. Krauthammer and Robert Kagan “both attack what they consider to be Obama's underlying assumption – America's inevitable decline – as well as his remedy – adapting to a ‘post-American world' by accommodating other great powers (most of them autocracies) at the expense of traditional allies (most of them democracies).”

If Mr. Obama falters – if his attempt to rein in Iran and North Korea by multilateral means fails, if he defers too much to China or Russia – the neo-cons are ready to pounce. Should the Republicans retake Congress this fall or (in their dreams) the White House in 2012, U.S. foreign policy could again come under their thrall.

It would not mark the end of history; just its repetition.

"AIG’s Ex-CEO Greenberg Expects Higher Interest Rates, Inflation"
  Joe Schneider
  April , 2010

Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the investor and executive who built American International Group Inc. into the world’s largest insurer, said the U.S. is heading into a period of high inflation and high interest rates as it attempts to cope with its debt.

That will “lead to a lot of distortion” in the U.S. economy in the years ahead, Greenberg told a business audience in Toronto yesterday. The federal government must cut its military budget to 2 percent of gross domestic product, the measure of the economic output of the country, to reduce its budget deficit, Greenberg said.

“We may not be the policeman of the world going forward,” said Greenberg, the honorary vice chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations.

Greenberg, 84, was forced to retire from AIG in 2005 after state and federal probes into a reinsurance transaction. New York-based AIG nearly collapsed from soured housing market bets in 2008 and was bailed out with $182.3 billion in aid.

Former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued Greenberg in May 2005, alleging he helped mislead regulators and investors. Spitzer dropped portions of the lawsuit in 2006. Greenberg, who has denied any wrongdoing in the New York civil suit, asked a court to dismiss the rest.

Greenberg lashed out at Spitzer and current New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo during his 90-minute presentation at the Grano restaurant in midtown Toronto

‘Same Cloth’

“Cuomo is cut from the same cloth as Spitzer,” Greenberg said. “Cuomo doesn’t want to be attorney general. He wants to be governor.”

Greenberg blamed regulators for the collapse of financial institutions like AIG and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which led to a worldwide economic recession.

“The regulators didn’t do their job,” Greenberg said. “Nobody paid attention.”

The son of a candy-store owner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Greenberg stormed Omaha Beach when he was 19 during the 1944 D-Day invasion of France and earned a Bronze Star in Korea, eventually rising to the rank of captain.

"The economic discontent of Hank Greenberg"
  Boyd Erman
  April 8, 2010

Hank Greenberg, the man who built AIG into the world's largest insurer, doesn't have a whole lot of good things to say about what's happening in the U.S. financial scene.

The rushed reforms that politicians are trying to push through in the wake of the financial crisis are misguided, he says. There's too much focus on writing new rules instead of strengthening the regulators charged with enforcing them. The best he can say about the U.S. economy is “it's somewhat better than it was.” And banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. aren't being completely open about what happened – to mildly paraphrase his views on the subject.

Yet at 84, Mr. Greenberg is still in the game, now running a private insurer and finance company in New York. So he must see some hope for U.S.-style capitalism.

“We're resilient; we change when have to change,” he said in an interview Thursday in Toronto. “Sometimes it takes longer than you'd like. But on the other hand that's what America is. It is a culture that is such that when we have to confront a major problem, we'll do it. It makes no difference if you're left, right or centre. We'll get it done. I haven't lost faith in America. There's been times I questioned whether or not we knew what the hell we were doing.”

The response to the crisis was ad hoc, which gets under his skin; the government should have been better prepared.

The irascible executive, who whisked into Toronto on a private jet Thursday just long enough to give a speech at Toronto's Grano restaurant as part of the Salon Speakers series, falls back on an idea perhaps grounded in his military training.

He fought in the Second World War and in the Korean War, rising to captain and winning a Bronze Star.

“Treasury and the Fed – they could take a lesson from what war planners do – they have a plan for virtually any type of incident that might occur and how they might respond to it,” he argued. “Now, obviously, you're not going to think of every bit of problem, but you could have had a plan to deal with various issues.

“It was not impossible to forecast that the housing market was going to collapse. There were sufficient numbers of people who had been saying so. There were a sufficient number of investment banks that acted on that.”

This, of course, is a reference to the idea that banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. were betting against the market at the same time as they were selling clients investments backed by mortgages. It's something Goldman Sachs took pains to deny in a letter to shareholders this week. “If you believe that, you believe in the tooth fairy,” Mr. Greenberg said.
Of course, he said, there will be those who say: Why should we listen to you? You're the guy who ran AIG.

He said he would never have allowed the company to take so much risk. Many of the troubled credit default swaps AIG sold were deals done after he left the company, and the risk was compounded by the fact that AIG lost its triple-A credit rating amid the accounting questions that contributed to Mr. Greenberg's ouster by the company's board. Without the triple-A rating, AIG had to put up more collateral, which caused the liquidity crisis that forced the company to its knees.

Mr. Greenberg argued that the management team that took over after he left in 2005 was imprudent to sell so many credit default swaps, and regulators should never have let it happen.
In his view, the regulators are the crux of the problem: They just aren't good enough at their jobs. “It's not that there were no regulations. There were plenty of regulations. Where were the regulators?”

But the fix he proposes may not be what Americans want to hear, amid the turmoil over Wall Street bonuses and with unemployment stuck at high levels and wages stagnant for so many people.
“Get better people. How do you get better people? You have got to pay more.” What about the politics of that? “It's a hell of a lot cheaper than what we have now.”

The most important thing, he said, is for politicians to take the time to check all the facts before forging ahead with any big changes. “It's a mistake to try to propose legislation before you know what the hell happened.”

It's up to Congress and the media to get to the bottom of the mess. And if they can't, there's always the courtroom, with lawsuits that force evidence to come to light through discovery and depositions, Mr. Greenberg said.

“We're in a period of time where we're trying to find out what happened,” he said. “It has to happen. There's a constituency – the U.S. public – that wants to know what the hell happened.”

 Why Martin Amis won't shut up about feminism
  Geoff Pevere
  November 20, 2009

Martin Amis is talking about Sept. 11, 2001, by way of Franz Kafka. Specifically, he's citing one of Kafka's stories – "Josephine the Singer," about a mouse who sings opera – as a way of explaining how the events of that morning redrew the map of his world.

"When she sings," says Amis between sips of espresso, "thousands of mice sit there in silence listening to her. And after a few minutes one mouse in the audience turns to the next mouse and says `Sing? She can't even squeak!'"

He sets cup in saucer. "That's what the writer felt on September the 12th. Sing? We couldn't even squeak."

Amis, who is 61 years old and one of the most famous, articulate and contentious writers in the English language, was in Toronto to deliver a lecture in the Grano Speaker Series on the neither uncontroversial nor atypical subject of "Al Qaeda and Feminism."

In Amis's mind the two concepts are uneasily but inextricably linked. Had the latter not suffered a "loss of nerve" by "demoting itself beneath multiculturalism," the former might have been erased from existence by now.

"It's pathetic that the shadow of the race question mutes everything else," says Amis, whose long-gestating new novel, The Pregnant Widow, allegedly takes on feminism, the sexual revolution and what he calls "Islamism." You might say the boy is asking for it.

"Let's look at Islam and Islamism on purely feminist grounds," he says. "It's self-evident that it's horrible the way they treat women. They have completely different ideas about what a woman is, the status of a woman. So why does the gender issue trump the racial one? The fact is women are not a minority. They're bigger than any nation, bigger than any religion or culture or tradition."

This is where that previously cited feminist "loss of nerve" comes in. It's also the kind of sentiment – at once provocative and thoughtful, reasonable and enraging – that has left Amis open to all manner of intemperate name-calling. He has been called a racist, a misogynist and a hate-mongerer. He has been accused of dilettantish dallying in politics when he should be writing novels. He has been told, perhaps in more languages than he's even been published in, to just shut up.

He sees no reason why he should. Nor does he see any meaningful distinction between his opinions on politics and his profession as a novelist. It's all a matter of inspiration.

"I don't think the writer has any duty whatever to respond to current events," Amis clarifies. "As Nabokov said, if you write about what's going on, by the time the book comes out your preoccupations are revealed as being `bloated topicalities.' But I don't think this is a bloated topicality. I think it's fascinating and horrifying to see irrationality at work on such a scale. And fascinating to see apologists for it among the left."

Here's what the novelist says happened on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. He woke up and his world had changed, and he felt compelled to understand how. But what drove himwas exactly the same thing that makes him pull words from inside and put them on paper.

"I felt no duty to do it," he says. "The throb that you feel when you're thinking about a short story, the desire to write it – you have to have that to write about politics as well. And without that prompting I certainly wouldn't do it."

The throb in this case was the soul-rattling aftershock of something that wasn't supposed to happen. At least not in his time.

"I didn't expect there to be an event of that size in my lifetime," he says. "I was an absolute child of the Cold War. The nuclear race began (on Aug. 29, 1949) four days after I was born. Russia's first test. So I had those four days where I could relax and take it easy. Then I was conscripted, just like everyone else, into the Cold War."

Then, decades later, the thaw: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the complacent quiet of a world that seemed to have finally settled into some kind of peaceful stability. Until that morning.

As shocked as Amis was by events themselves, it was the reaction among intellectuals, mostly but not exclusively on the left, that left him gobsmacked.

"Interesting timing in that it happened after a generation of relativism," he explains. "So that when the event happened there were no sort of rules to discuss it because everyone's so terror-stricken about seeming racist.

"There wouldn't be an argument at all if Al Qaeda originated in Norway or white South Africa or the deep south of America," Amis insists. "There just wouldn't be a debate. Everyone would be perfectly clear how they felt about it."

If Amis is quick to reject any suggestion that his status as a controversial commentator on global politics is motivated by anything other than sincere passion, he is unconditionally dismissive of the idea that he's a cynic.

"Even the darkest writers are in fact lovers of life," he explains. "It's an amorous business, being a writer. Updike said of Nabokov, `His is essentially an amorous style.'

"Put it this way. I have tremendous faith in the human as an individual. It's when they get together that things go wrong. When there's more than one of them, that's when you're in trouble."

"It only takes two to make a mob."

 The Saturday Interview: Amis & al-Qaeda
  Stewart Bell
  November 14, 2009

Martin Amis, the influential British novelist who began his career as the bad boy of British letters, has more recently taken on the controversial subject of the politics of terror. In advance of his Donner Canadian Foundation Lecture in Toronto next Wednesday, the author spoke to the National Post's Stewart Bell about the struggle between feminism and multiculturalism.

Q The title of your lecture is "Feminism and al-Qaeda." Where are you going with this?
A Well, al-Qaeda is used faute de mieux really, because there doesn't seem to be any good name for what we mean, in that "Islamism" is too close to Islam, "Islamofacism" has the letters I-S-L-A-M in it and to certain clockwork minds this is always identified as an attack on Islam. Which it isn't, the slogan being, "We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Mohamed Atta." And there are various other candidates like "jihadism" and "takfirism" for what we're talking about.

Q Qutbism is another, after Sayyid Qutb.
A Ya, there are various candidates but the one that seems to be at least unambiguous is al-Qaeda. There's no one who has a multicultural fondness for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. So it's as neutral a way as possible of referring to the thing we all know is Islamic extremism. And what I hope to do is not go through all the usual marshalling of heavy paragraphs, but talk personally about my relations with, in fact, Islamic girls when I was young and talk about the divide in terms of what we can all understand. And as I see it, we should reprocess the argument about al-Qaedaism in purely feminist terms and then, in my view, it all becomes much clearer and there are things we can agree on from all over the spectrum.

Q You've described the champions of militant Islam as woman haters.
A I want to move slightly beyond that and just say that, you know, you could take the most politically correct person in North America or indeed Europe and say, what are your views on the following subjects: female circumcision; forced marriages of nine-year-old brides, not to nine-year-old boys but old men, as in Iran and Yemen; what do you think of honour killing? And what seemed to go wrong about 10 years ago was that feminism relegated itself beneath multiculturalism. So you had Germaine Greer saying to object to female circumcision is cultural imperialism. But I do object to female circumcision and so does President Obama and presumably there are many feminists who would not agree with him but I agree with him when he said that female circumcision can have no place in our society. What these things I've mentioned have in common is violence towards women, which is a universal tendency. In England, the most common form of death for women between the ages of 16 and 45 is murder by male partner. And it's possible to see the history of civilization as the history of mastering this prehistoric urge to control women, which relies on sheer masculine bulk. We are bigger and stronger, and always have been. And the tendency to give in to that and just assert male physical supremacy is part of all our histories -- Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism. It is the same fight and surely this is common ground. Women are not a minority. Surely the gender question trumps all the others and not the other way around, which is the way that we've been looking at it so far.

Q These are topical issues for Canadians right now. The government just released a new citizenship guide that specifies that honour killings are not tolerated in Canada, and moderate Canadian Muslims have called for a ban on the niqab head covering.
A The trouble with all this is that people think what you're really talking about is immigration and that what you're het up about is sort of putting up barriers around your country and all the rest of it, but immigration is something that I love. People assume that if you have one view that a collection of other views comes along with it because we're used to thinking in blocks. And it's not true. I'm a passionate multi-racialist and a society couldn't be varied enough for me. I mean, I think that's true of all novelists. Variety is their food and drink. But I'm not a multiculturalist and I think multiculturalism is a fraud, and surely there are basic questions we can agree on. And we should be able to realign the debate with the rights of women taking a much higher position in our way of thinking about it.

Q You once wrote about the "global confrontation with the dependent mind." Is that what you're talking about?
A No, I want to get away from all that, this terrible sort of antsy discussion that we have, with everyone poised on the panic button and wanting to shout out "racist." We've been infantilized and stupefied by a generation of this kind of thought and I just want to readjust it as a feminist issue and nothing else.

Q Is that why you chose to write about the sexual revolution in your new book, The Pregnant Widow?
A Yes, because I want to talk about that and I was right in the middle of it and had been thinking about it for years. What actually was it, the sexual revolution? And I think that there are conclusions that can be drawn. In the book, too, there is an Islamic scene. I can't really go into it now but it's actually a harmonial rather than a confrontational scene although it, of course, will be misunderstood. There always were Muslims in our lives and we had no idea of this millennium-old hostility that was brewing that was made apparent to us on September the 11th, 2001. I'm just going back before that to see what relations were like between Muslims and Christians, and there wasn't any inherent hostility as far as I could see.

Q You've taken on subjects like 9/11, al-Qaeda and feminism. Do you think writers are tackling the big topics of our time?
A There's absolutely no reason why they should, I don't think, unless they feel a writerly urge to do so. There are some writers like Nabokov who disdain any kind of involvement of the creative writer with what he calls the bloated topicality. But I don't think this is a bloated topicality. I think it's a tremendously central issue and it's an issue where women should be saying all this. I'm saying it because women aren't. Feminism should have kept its eye on the ball of feminism and not diluted itself by being sentimental about cultural practices.

Q I understand your title, The Pregnant Widow, refers to that time between the death of the old order and the birth of the new one. Is that where you see feminism right now?
A I think it's what Trotsky would have called a permanent revolution. You could say semi-facetiously that it's probably now coming to the end of its first trimester, the pregnancy. But it does in fact turn out to be extraordinarily difficult to get a decent deal between men and women, and we're certainly not there yet. Although it was a marvellous thing, the sexual revolution. It was almost a bloodless revolution, a velvet revolution in at least two or three senses. But it's a work in progress and probably always will be.

Feminism's unlikely ally, and radical Islam's foe
  Margaret Wente
  November 13, 2009

Martin Amis, whose novels include London Fields, The Information and Time's Arrow, has been called “the leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world.” But recently he has been stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy with his attacks on multiculturalism and his detour (as some people see it) into the politics of terror. Critics have accused him of Muslim-bashing, and some say he has turned into a cranky old curmudgeon like his famous father, Kingsley. Mr. Amis will appear in Toronto next week at two events, the Grano Speaker Series and the Donner Canadian Foundation Lecture. Earlier this week, he spoke with Margaret Wente from his home in London.

You'll be speaking here about feminism and al-Qaeda. What's the connection?
Al-Qaedaism is a shorthand term to describe fundamentalist, radical, extremist Islam. And feminism is a tremendously clarifying theme. You can make all kinds of justifications of al-Qaedaism if you want, but no one can say they approve of certain practices – marrying nine-year-old girls off to older men, female circumcision, honour killing. All these practices express violence toward women.

But surely you're not arguing that violence against women is confined to radical Islam?
Violence against women is the great curse of masculinity. But we don't have honour killing. We don't have clitoridectomy and we don't marry nine-year-old girls. I want women to be saying this, but they're not. Germaine Greer disastrously spoke out against trying to stamp out female circumcision. She set feminism back by a generation.

Why are feminists so evasive about these issues?
It's because of the terror-stricken anxiety of seeming racist or anti-multicultural.

You've described yourself as a passionate multiracialist, but a very poor multiculturalist.
I adore multiracialism. There can't be enough immigrants in this country for my taste. I'd like to see immigrants from Mars or Jupiter. But multiculturalism, I believe, is a fraud. We cannot justify these things because they're traditional. The tradition has to go. There should be no indulgence of them. Honour killing has been massively underreported in this country. And what a misnomer: It's dishonour killing. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been saying that sharia law should apply in various parts of the U.K. No! You don't give an inch on that. The law of the land is the law of the land and it is universal.
When you say that, people immediately assume you want to throw up borders and recreate Little England. That's not the case. Everyone is welcome here, but they must live by our laws.

You've said that as a liberal society, we tend to minimize the terrorist threat. One top security official here said recently that Canadians tend to regard radicalized young Muslim men from the suburbs as harmless kids who talk big. Why don't we take these threats more seriously?
It's a tremendous effort of the imagination to put yourself in the place of someone who really does believe in the irrational goals harboured by such movements. There's always a slight sense of unreality when a new ideology appears that is clearly pathological. It's much easier to pooh-pooh it and say, “Oh, they can't mean it because it's so outlandish.” We have also infantilized ourselves with a whole generation of relativism, which declares that no conviction is allowed to stand in stone. This may sound imperialistic or triumphalist, but there is such a thing as universal values.

I wonder if you were as struck as I was by the initial coverage of the shootings at Fort Hood. People rushed to find motives for the Muslim shooter. They speculated about pretraumatic stress disorder and reported that he'd suffered discrimination in the army. There was a lot of dodging around the fact that he was a radicalized guy who supposedly shouted “God is great” in Arabic when he opened fire.
I think a lot of middle-class guilt has bled over into our era. I think we would be much clearer in our minds about al-Qaedaism if it had originated in Norway, or white South Africa, or the Deep South of America. But they've got darker skins than we have and we are rightly drenched in revulsion about singling out people with darker skin. And so we lose sight of the fact that not killing people is better than killing them. Elementary human judgment is put in doubt by this mental habit.
Here's an example: A few months ago, I was at an event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. And I said, “Hands up, those of you who feel morally superior to the Taliban.” And about 30 trembling hands went up. And then I spoke about the Taliban for a bit, about how they black up the windows of the houses to which women are confined. It's a funny moment we're living through. If you don't feel morally superior to the Taliban, then you don't feel morally superior to anyone.

But still, how worried should we really be about a bunch of guys halfway around the world with roadside bombs? More Americans have drowned in the bathtub than died from terrorist attacks.
I think the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan – Afpak – is hugely magnified by the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power. The next thing on the horizon is the alignment of terrorism and a nuclear device – a weapon of mass destruction. It is coming soon. Iraq was a tragic divagation, but Afpak is combustible. Lots of states also have stockpiles of anthrax. It's not irrational to fear a deadly virus attack. In fact, it's more or less inevitable. You can learn how to do it on the Internet.

You've been called a bit of a nutbar for going on this detour, as some see it, into the politics of terror. One critic has said that you sound “increasingly like the embarrassing uncle screaming at the television.” That's harsh.
I suppose the shadow of my father hangs over me, in that he did become blimpish. But I don't think I've brought to bear anything other than common sense. It's on the other side that ideology is at work. No one is going to blow themselves to pieces because of relativism, but it's still an ideology. I haven't got an ideology. My ideology is no ideology.

Fans of your novels want to know where's the delightful, witty ironist of London Fields? Is he ever going to come back?
Oh yes. They'll enjoy my new novel, which is called The Pregnant Widow. It's longish and set in the 1970s and it's all about the sexual revolution.

Oh, good. Is there lots of sex?
There's a lot of talking about it and thinking about it.

That's how I remember the seventies too. More talking and thinking than doing. So why are you so interested in writing about sex?
Sexual intercourse has two remarkable characteristics. It peoples the world and it is indescribable. There aren't many other things you can say that about.

A terse Taleb speaks of luck in life
  Patricia Best
  September 17, 2009

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of bestseller The Black Swan, spent the anniversary of Wall Street's collapse Tuesday evening pontificating for a group of 100 birds of a feather from Toronto business and political life at a Grano Speakers Series dinner. Burgundy Asset Management's Richard Rooney introduced Mr. Taleb to the crowd, joking, "To err is human, to be paid for it, divine." As it happens, Mr. Taleb ended up giving the shortest talk in the series' history and then opened the floor to questions - which he sometimes answered and more often did not. Perhaps picking up on the evening's theme of randomness (both the book's subject and the style of the author), Bill Downe, CEO of Bank of Montreal, asked a refreshingly un-CEO-like question: "What's the role of luck in life?" Mr. Taleb's answer in a word: huge. "We often mistake it for skill or design."

 Nassim Taleb to President Obama: 'I want my vote back'
 
  September 16, 2009

“I want my vote back,” Mr Taleb told an audience of business people in Toronto, according to Bloomberg.

Mr Taleb said that the US should avoid the 'moral sin' of converting private to public debts, but that "no one has the guts to say let's bite the bullet."

America's budget deficit reached a record $1.38 trillion in the 11 months to August as spending on unemployment rose and the cost of the $787bn stimulus programme was shouldered.
Analysts have warned that a failure on the part of the US to ease the deficit could force long-term interest rates higher and slow a recovery in the world's biggest economy.

Mr Taleb, whose black swan theory contends that history is made up of rare, totally unpredictable events, also said that financial markets are getting overconfident about a recovery.

 ‘Black Swan’ Author Taleb Wants His Obama Vote Back
  Joe Schneider
  September 16, 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama has failed to appoint advisers and regulators who understand the complexity of financial systems, Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” told a group of business people in Toronto.

“I want my vote back,” Taleb, who said he voted for Obama, told the group.

The U.S. has three times the debt, relative to the country’s economic output, as it had in the 1980s, Taleb said. He blamed rising overconfidence around the world. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who was appointed to a second term last month by Obama, contributed to that misperception, Taleb said.

“Bernanke thought the system was getting stable,” Taleb said, when it was on the verge of collapse last year.

Debt is a direct measure of overconfidence, he said. The national debt is $11.8 trillion, according to U.S. Treasury Department figures.

The nation must reduce its debt level and avoid “the moral sin” of converting private debt to public debt, he said.

“This is what I’m worried about,” Taleb said in a speech last night at Grano’s restaurant. “But no one has the guts to say let’s bite the bullet.”

As the founder of New York-based Empirica LLC, a hedge-fund firm he ran for six years before closing it in 2004, Taleb built a strategy based on options trading to protect investors from market declines while profiting from rallies. He now advises Universa Investments LP, a $6 billion fund that bets on extreme market moves.
‘Black Swan’

Taleb wrote the 2007 best-seller “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” which argues that history is littered with rare, high-impact events. The black swan theory stems from the ancient misconception that all swans were white.

In addition to overconfidence, Taleb blamed the availability of instant information for contributing to the collapse of banks in the U.S. and the economy in Iceland.
“Ontario messed up the world with this,” Taleb said, holding up a BlackBerry, the mobile e-mail phone made by Waterloo, Ontario-based Research In Motion Ltd. “You guys bankrupted Iceland.”

In the past, runs on banks took time as people left their homes, drove or walked to a branch and stood in line to withdraw money, Taleb said. Now, a run can be accomplished in seconds via the Internet and phones with Web-browsing capabilities like the BlackBerry, he said.

“In no time, Iceland is history,” Taleb said.

We still have the same disease
  Margaret Wente
  Spetember 13, 2009

On the anniversary of the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of those people who can say, “I told you so.” For the past decade, he's been warning that the global economy has become far more vulnerable to unpredictable events that can cause vast disruption. He famously foresaw the credit crunch that brought the financial system to its knees.

Mr. Taleb is a Wall Street derivatives trader who became an academic specializing in the study of randomness and probability. In May of 2008 he published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It argued that most economists and bankers live in a dangerous fantasy world in which they imagine they can control the future. The book takes its name from the fact that all swans were once believed to be white – until black swans turned up in Australia. He loathes bankers, central bankers, and economists, not necessarily in that order, and thinks that banks should be run like public utilities. “My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously,” he says. He has advised British Conservative Leader David Cameron, and last week testified before the U.S. Congress on the financial crisis.

Mr. Taleb will speak Tuesday in Toronto to kick off the new season of the Grano lecture series. The theme of this season's series is risk and the next global crisis. Margaret Wente caught up with him on Friday to ask him what (if anything) we've learned.

Margaret Wente: Happy days are here again. The central bankers say the recession is over. The markets are buoyant. Can we relax?
Nassim Taleb: Not at all. Central bankers have no clue. In the first place, the financial crisis was not a black swan. It was perfectly predictable. They ignored the phenomenal buildup in leverage since 1980. They acted like airline pilots who'd never heard of hurricanes.
After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.

MW: But aren't those the very problems we're supposed to be fixing?
NT: They're all still here. Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient's symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.

MW: Are you saying the U.S. shouldn't have done all those bailouts? What was the alternative?
NT: Blood , sweat and tears. A lot of the growth of the past few years was fake growth from debt. So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up. I gather you're not too impressed with the folks in Washington who are handling this crisis.
Ben Bernanke saved nothing! He shouldn't be allowed in Washington. He's like a doctor who misses the metastatic tumour and says the patient is doing very well. The first thing I would tell Chinese officials is, how can you buy U.S. bonds as long as Larry Summers is there? He's a textbook case of overconfidence. Look what happened to Harvard's finances. They took a lot of risk they didn't understand, and it was a disaster. That's the Larry Summers mentality.

MW: You argue that globalization and modern technology have made the world financial system far more fragile than ever before. How?
NT: Globalization and the Web create worldwide mass effects, whether positive or negative. We have planetary fads that cause random variables to have bigger spikes than ever before. Variables that used to move 10 per cent now move 30 per cent. The whole planet can pull its money out on the same day. The Internet is what bankrupted Iceland! You in Canada destroyed things with your BlackBerry.

MW: You also say that competition among big companies is the Achilles heel of capitalism. What do you mean by that?
NT: If you make corporations compete, sometimes the one that appears most fit for survival is really the one that is most exposed to the negative black swan. What happens is that if you make $4 a share but you're betting the ranch, like GE, the analysts will love you. But if you make only $2 a share with no risk on your book, they'll say you're not doing well. All the incentives are perverse.

MW: We here in Canada feel pretty good because our banks are in good shape and we've escaped relatively lightly. What's your take?
NT: That's true. You guys are slightly more insulated than others. But there's no way you can escape the mistakes made by others. They'll just cost you somewhat less. But if we wind up with hyperinflation, Canada will be the best place in the world to be. You've got energy and minerals. You're not overspecialized. You're self-sufficient.

MW: Up here our government is promising we can get rid of our deficit by 2015. Any views on that?
NT: Governments never got projections right before, so why should they now?

MW: So if everyone is still on the wrong track, what's the right track?
NT: My whole idea is to lower risk in society by developing a system that can resist human error, rather than one where human error rules. The first step is to make sure that no financial institution is too big to fail. Next, make sure governments don't favour big companies. Governments should also decrease the role of economists – they're no more reliable than astrologers, and they do more damage.

MW: Now that you've painted such a rosy outlook, do you have any advice on how individuals can guard against losing 40 per cent of their money in this extremely risky world?
NT: My advice is that instead of investing in medium-risk securities, you should put most of your money in very low-risk securities, and a little bit in high-risk securities. Then you might get a good black swan. Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

 Exclusive Eateries
  Lia Grainger
  August 22, 2009

A crop of dinner clubs have been popping up around the city, encouraging carefully selected "new friends" to share a meal and a few hours of stimulating conversation. Some of these invite-only events exist so talented chefs can flex their culinary muscles. At others, the veil of secrecy that surrounds the location and organizers of the event has almost overshadowed the delicacies served.

Herewith, a round-up of the city's dinner clubs with buzz.

THE GRANO SPEAKER SERIES

Grano, 2035 Yonge St.

Patrick Luciani and Rudyard Griffiths, two policy advisors and commentators. Both men sit on the boards of many influential local organizations.

Those attending include leaders in business, media, government and academia -- think Jack Diamond, Moses Znaimer and Galen Weston. Those speaking are of the same variety and have included Michael Ignatieff, Paul Volker and Gore Vidal.

Though the focus at these events is the high-profile speakers, the food is still superb. Expect classic Italian.

Do you know Conrad Black? Were you instrumental in the economic restructuring that occurred post-economic meltdown? Are you quoted in university political science textbooks? This event is strictly invite-only.

Since its first night back in 2004, the Grano Speaker Series has been the place to be seen for Toronto's intellectual and business elite.

Got My Own Jet, Thanks
  Patricia Best
  August 6, 2009

Members of Toronto's chattering class recently received their subscription invitations to next year's Grano Salon Speakers dinners, which will explore the notion of risk. "If we have learned anything from the financial upheaval, it is to cultivate a renewed appreciation of risk," reads the invite.

Scheduled to speak to a dinner crowd of about 100 over four dates in the fall and winter are Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan; British writer Martin Amis; geopolitical guru Francis Fukuyama; and Hank Greenberg, former chairman and CEO of AIG.

Series co-founder and co-organizer Rudyard Griffiths tells us that while arranging the details of Mr. Greenberg's talk he told the business bigwig's executive assistant that the organizers would be happy to fly Mr. Greenberg to Toronto on business class using the points provided by Aeroplan, the travel partner to the Grano Series. "She got back to me immediately by e-mail and indicated that while Mr. Greenberg appreciated our offer, his private jet would be landing mid-afternoon in Toronto on the day of his talk and we should meet him at the Sky Service terminal," Mr. Griffiths says. Mr. Greenberg is the first and the only speaker in the series' six-year history to arrive in such style, somehow appropriate given his corporate alma mater.

“The bad-paper trail: Where are the toxic assets?”
  Margaret Wente
  May 2, 2009

  Paul Volcker
  February 18, 2009

The following is an edited excerpt from Paul Volcker's speech at the Grano Salon Speakers Series on Feb. 11 in Toronto.

---

This is not an ordinary recession. I have never, in my lifetime, seen a financial problem of this sort. It has the makings of something much more serious than an ordinary recession, where you go down for a while and then you bounce up. An ordinary recession does not bring into question the stability and the solidity of the whole financial system.

Why is it that this is so much more profound a crisis?

This phenomenon can be traced back at least five or six years. We had, at that time, a major underlying imbalance in the world economy. The American proclivity to consume was in full force. Our consumption rate was about 5% higher, relative to our GNP or what our production normally is. Our spending -- consumption, investment, government -- was running about 5% or more above our production, even though we were more or less at full employment.

You had the opposite in Asia, where the Chinese, for example, were consuming maybe 40% of their GNP, compared to the U. S., where we consumed 70% of our GNP. They had a lot of surplus dollars because they had a lot of exports. Their exports were feeding our consumption and they were financing it very nicely with very cheap money. The money was so easy, funds were so easily available that there was, in effect, a kind of incentive to find ways to spend it. It was a very convenient but unsustainable situation.

When we finished with the ordinary ways of spending money, we developed ways of making weaker and weaker mortgages. The biggest investment in the economy was residential housing. And we developed a technique of manufacturing class D mortgages but putting them in packages which the financial engineers said were class A. There was an enormous incentive to take advantage of this bit of arbitrage -- cheap money and poor but saleable mortgages. It was a period of enthusiasm. Everybody wanted to invest and spend.

This created a bubble, first in the stock market and then in the housing market. There was a big increase in housing prices held up by these new mortgages. It was all fine for a while, but at some point people began getting nervous and the whole process stopped because these people realized the mortgages were no good.

You might ask how it managed to go on as long as it did. I have my own take on this. There were two things that were particularly contributory and very simple: Compensation practices had gotten totally out of hand and spurred financial people to aim for a lot of short-term money without worrying about the eventual consequences. And then there was this obscure financial engineering that none of them understood, but all their mathematical experts were telling them to trust. These two things carried us over the brink.

There was so much opaqueness, so many complications and misunderstandings involved in very complex financial engineering by people who, in my opinion, did not know financial markets. They knew mathematics. They thought financial markets obeyed mathematical laws. They have found out differently now.

This is not an ordinary business-cycle problem. It is much more difficult to get out of and it has shaken the foundations of our financial institutions. The system is broken. So I'd like to consider what we should be aiming for when we get out of the mess. That, in turn, might help instruct the kind of action we should be taking in the interim to get out of it. What I'm arguing for looks more like the Canadian system than the American system.

In the future, we are going to need a financial system which

will not be so prone to crisis and certainly will not be prone to the severity of a crisis of this sort. Financial systems always fluctuate, there will always be crises, but we should be able to avoid a catastrophe that undermines the whole economy. The financial system of the future is going to be different from the financial system that has developed in the last 20 years.

What do I mean by different? I think a primary characteristic of the system ought to be a strong, traditional, commercial banking-type system. Probably we ought to have some very large institutions whose primary purpose is a kind of fiduciary responsibility to service consumers, individuals, businesses and governments by providing outlets for their money and by providing credit. They ought to be the core of the credit and financial system.

This kind of system was in place in the United States 30 years ago and is still in place in Canada, and may have provided support for the Canadian system during this particularly difficult time. Governments will support these institutions, which in turn implies a closer supervision and regulation of these institutions, a more effective regulation than we've had, at least in the United States, in the recent past. At the same time, I think that those institutions should not engage in highly risky entrepreneurial activity. That's not their job. Those institutions should be about stability.

And then we have the other part, which I'll call the capital market system, which by and large isn't directly dealing with customers. They're dealing with each other. They're trading. They're about hedge funds and equity funds. And they have a function in providing fluid markets and innovating and providing some flexibility, and I don't think they need to be so highly regulated. They're not at the core of the system, unless they get really big. If they get really big then you have to regulate them, too. But I don't think we need to have close regulation of every peewee hedge fund in the world.

So you will have a bifurcated financial system that implies a lot about regulation and national governments. If you're going to have an open system, you have got to get much more co-operation and co-ordination from different countries. I think that's possible, given what we're going through. We have got to do something about the infrastructure of the system and we have to worry about the credit-rating agencies.

And we have to look at the accounting system, at the system for dealing with derivatives and how they're settled. So there are a lot of systemic issues. The main point I'm making is that we want to emerge from this with a more stable system. It will be less exciting for many people, but it will not warrant -- I don't think the present system does, either-- $50-million paydays in that central part of the system. Or even $25-or $100-million paydays. If somebody can go out and gamble and make that money, OK. But don't gamble with the public's money. That's an important distinction.

One of the saddest days of my life was when my grandson -- and he's a particularly brilliant grandson -- went to college. He was good at mathematics. And after he had been at college for a year or two I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said, "I want to be a financial engineer." My heart sank. Why was he going to waste his life on this profession?

A year or so ago, my daughter had seen something in the paper, some disparaging remarks I had made about financial engineering. She sent it to my grandson, who normally didn't communicate with me very much. He sent me an e-mail: "Grandpa, don't blame it on us! We were just following the orders we were getting from our bosses." The only thing I could do was send him back an e-mail: "I will not accept the Nuremberg excuse."

- Paul Volcker was the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve from 1979-1987. He is currently the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board

 "Opinion - Praise from Americans gives Canadians a boost"
  Richard Gwyn
  February 13, 2009

It happened during Expo '67. It happened when Pierre Trudeau became prime minister. It's happening now.

What's happening is that Canada, after suffering and surviving such cruel put-downs as "a great white waste of time" and that the winner of any competition for the most boring newspaper headline would be "Worthy Canadian initiative," is getting noticed.

Slightly surprised notice, and still with a trace of condescension in it. But, hell, life's not fair and any attention is not merely better than none, it is, in itself, rather agreeable. It means that we must be doing something right, as Expo '67 most certainly was and as was Trudeau even if economics wasn't his strong suit.

And indeed it's a surprised realization that we really are doing some things right that's causing people to pay attention to us.

The latest example is Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank and one of the most respected public figures in the U.S.

Volcker, who is a financial adviser to President Barack Obama, was in Toronto this week to give a talk in the Grano Speaker Series. He reviewed the current financial and economic crisis and said that what was needed was a two-part banking system in which large commercial banks did all the core business while other financial institutions chased after the risky stuff.

The system he had in mind, said Volcker, "looks more like the Canadian system than it does the American system."

Much the same was said the other day by Fareed Zakaria, former editor of the influential Foreign Affairs magazine. In the regular column he writes for Newsweek magazine, Zakaria noted that the World Economic Forum had recently rated Canada's banking system "the healthiest in the world."

"So what accounts for the genius of Canadians?" wrote Zakaria. His answer: "Common sense." Canadians, he continued, had stuck to "old-fashioned rules on banking."

Zakaria went on to praise Canada's housing policy (no tax breaks to encourage people to buy or build monster houses), its health-care system, (cheaper by far than America's) and its immigration system (it was even now attracting skilled workers from the U.S.).

Zakaria ended by remarking that there was a great deal that the U.S. could learn "from our quiet – okay, sometimes boring – neighbour to the north."

None of this means we're not going to have a hard time during the recession or that there aren't flaws in the policies that Zakaria praised. While our health-care system is indeed "far cheaper," it inflicts far longer wait times on patients.

The truth is that the world is never going to pay that much attention to Canada, even if we were doing everything absolutely right. This isn't because we aren't sexy, it's because people everywhere are only interested in themselves.

And that's the real point of what's happening. Canadians are a self-doubting lot. Probably it's a legacy of colonialism. And living alongside a superpower doesn't help.

Only one sure way exists to get through our protective guard of self-deprecation and diffidence. This is to be able to quote a foreigner saying, "Hey, things aren't so bad there."

Now that some foreigners are actually saying this, watch for Canadians to start saying the same thing about ourselves.

Some of us are already doing this. Spokespeople for the Vancouver Games Organizing Committee are now saying that their aim and expectation for the 2010 Olympics is that Canada's team will end up No. 1 in the medals standing.

For a country that's never won a gold medal in an Olympics on its home turf, that's a really nervy target to set. It's completely and outrageously un-Canadian.

Well, our banking system is rated the best in the world. So why not go for broke in sports seeing that we – unlike most other countries – aren't broke financially.

Richard Gwyn's column appears Friday. gwynr@sympatico.ca

"Praise for the steady"
  Editorial
  February 13, 2009

Canadians should not become complacent upon hearing that Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board - who did more than anyone else to tame inflation in the 1980s - said in a talk on Wednesday at the Grano series in Toronto that a good financial system would look quite like Canada's.

"Canada is relatively less infected," Mr. Volcker said, by the financial crisis than the U.S., Britain and the rest of Europe, "for reasons that are consistent with the direction in which I think the financial markets should go."

This country's comparative financial virtue comes from not having changed: from staying in the same place where the United States and Britain were, only a few decades ago.

Mr. Volcker rightly emphasized the deliberate breaking down of the distinction between commercial banks (called "chartered banks" in Canada), on the one hand, and, on the other, investment banks and various riskier enterprises.

This is one thing that cannot be blamed on George W. Bush and his colleagues. It was accomplished in 1999 by the Clinton administration and Republican majorities in Congress, under the name of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which undid the work of the Franklin Roosevelt-era Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

Commercial banks take deposits from the public and businesses, and make usually prudent loans to the public and to businesses.

The other class of financial enterprises do not, or should not, enter into transactions with consumers. They put together deals, and enter into more speculative ventures than commercial banks.

Mr. Volcker made one of the essential points about the financial crisis, which is that the fusion of these two types of financial entities resulted in "enormous conflicts of interest"; low-risk enterprises give too much help to high-risk ones, when they are in effect divisions of the same company.

The British journalist John Kay made the same point this week, writing of the wholesome "perpetual tension" between banks' "meticulous processing" and the "buccaneer culture" of trading and investment banking.

Even so, the marketing and sale of complex asset-backed commercial paper to Canadian retail investors, because of a gap in this country's securities laws, prove that Canadians are not culturally immune to such follies.

But Canada's chartered banks have not yet needed the federal government's help, which indeed says something in the current climate.

"Maybe He Meant 'Only'"
  Patricia Best
  February 17, 2009

Last week, former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker simultaneously wowed and depressed the heck out of an exclusive Toronto audience at the Grano Speaker Series during a talk about the current economic crisis. But at one point in the Q&A session after his remarks, he revealed a decidedly un-central-banker-like peevishness. Responding to a query that referenced the 10.6-per-cent unemployment rate that occurred during his watch in the late 1970s and early '80s while he was taming inflation, Mr. Volcker smiled and said: “I wouldn't mind if it got to 10.7 per cent this time.” It seemed to listeners he felt that would add further lustre to his time as Fed chief – and take the sting out of criticism levelled at him at the time for his high interest rates.

"All in a day's spending"
  Patricia Best
  February 12, 2009

When Paul Volcker landed in Toronto yesterday ahead of his appearance last night at the Grano Speakers Series, he was greeted by series organizer Rudyard Griffiths, and the former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman wasted no time getting to the topic of the hour - the economic crisis. Mr. Volcker now heads U.S. President Barack Obama's blue-ribbon economic advisory team (dinner series subscribers had been worrying - needlessly, it turned out - that he might be too busy to attend the event). Mr. Volcker began chatting with Mr. Griffiths and asked about deficit stimulus spending in Canada. Mr. Griffiths replied: ''It's $85-billion over four years.'' Mr. Volcker scoffed with mock braggadocio: ''We spend that in a day.''
Obama adviser looks to Canada's financial system

  Tara Perkins
  Feburuary 11, 2009

TORONTO — The United States should emerge from the economic crisis with a two-part financial system that places tighter restrictions on banks, says former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.

To prevent another banking crisis from undermining the economy, the U.S. financial system must turn back the clock to a time when commercial banks were the core of the credit system, Mr. Volcker said. He is chairing Barack Obama's new Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which was unveiled last week and will advise the U.S. President on programs to jump-start the economy.

The system that Mr.Volcker envisions “looks more like the Canadian system than it does like the American system,” he told a Toronto audience Wednesday night.

Mr. Volcker, an imposing 6-foot 8-inch figure who chaired the Federal Reserve for most of the 1980s under former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, said the primary characteristic of the new model must be strong commercial banks whose main purpose is to serve consumers and businesses, and provide credit.

They would be protected by the government, because their failure would pose a distinct threat to the economy. As a result, they would require closer supervision and regulation than has recently existed in the United States. “Those institutions should not engage in highly risky entrepreneurial activities,” Mr. Volcker said.

The second part of the financial system would involve capital markets and include hedge funds, private equity funds, traders and other players who provide fluid markets. Those players would not be dealing directly with customers, and would not need to be highly regulated unless they became extremely large, Mr. Volcker said.

His vision would mark the end of the so-called supermarket banking model, in which a single financial institution dabbles in a range of services from consumer accounts to investment banking.

Mr. Volcker blamed the current crisis largely on compensation practices that “had gotten totally out of hand,” and on “obscure financial engineering.”

“The system is broken,” he said. Fixing it will take “a lot of money and a lot of losses in the banking system.”

At the moment, financial systems in the United States and Britain are being held together in part by the extraordinary actions of the central banks, which are providing credit directly to markets in a way “that contradicts all the traditions and law … that have governed central banking behaviour for 100 years,” Mr. Volcker said.

The Federal Reserve in the United States, and possibly central banks elsewhere as well, will be a different institution when the economy recovers, he said.

“There will be a new look at the Federal Reserve.”

To fix the system, policy-makers must worry about the credit-rating agencies and accounting rules, he said, and there must be greater international co-operation.

The difficulty of tackling the massive amount of toxic assets on bank balance sheets, and establishing prices at which they can be bought, is “why you're not getting a clearer picture by the new Treasury after three weeks in office,” Mr. Volcker said.

When the term “toxic assets” was first being bandied about, people were referring largely to complicated investments called collateralized debt obligations, and those CDOs were backed by troubled mortgages, Mr. Volcker said. But the situation has changed in the past six months, and “now a lot of other loans are going bad” because of the recession.

“So even if you took the remaining $300-billion or whatever it is of the toxic stuff, you've got another $700-billion … of ordinary bad loans.”

Mr. Obama named the members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board days before Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the government's Financial Stability Plan, which has been widely criticized as vague and unwieldy.

Mr. Obama modelled the advisory group on Dwight D. Eisenhower's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and expects it to provide an independent opinion on financial issues as he drafts his plan for recovery.

Political observers have been questioning whether Mr. Volcker will see eye-to-eye with Mr. Geithner and other top officials in Mr. Obama's administration.

“He hates to say 'I told you so,' but historian foresaw crisis”
  Margaret Wente
  November 15, 2008

"From the West to the Rest: Niall Ferguson"
  Jessica de Mello
  May 1, 2010

The guest list read like a who's who of Calgary. Among those present were philanthropist Jim Palmer, partner at Burnet Duckworth Palmer LLP; former senator Dan Hays, chairman of MacLeod Dixon; Randy Pettipas, president of Global Public Affairs; investment guru Terry Shaunessy; Leonard Waverman, dean of the Haskayne School of Business at University of Calgary; and Jackie Flanagan, publisher of Alberta Views magazine. Murray Edwards, the media-shy millionaire who co-owns Lake Louise and the Calgary Flames Hockey Club, and is said to have the largest individual stake in the oil sands, is a patron. So is Ron Mathison, who specializes in "corporate turnarounds" and is the CEO of Matco Investments Ltd. Together with their wives, they sat with Deborah Yedlin, the whip-smart business columnist for The Calgary Herald. Also at their table at the final instalment of the Salon Speaker Series at Teatro Restaurant was the evening's honoured speaker, Harvard historian and prolific author Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson began his lecture with a fair warning, "Some of you may be thinking, with a certain dread, that I am going to talk at tedious length about the global financial crises, and use words like leverage, credit default swaps, synthetic collateralized debt obligations squared," he said, "But I'm not. It seems to me we hear all together too much about that. We're so focused on the small print of this financial crisis. From a historian's view, under the gaze of eternity, who really cares?"

Instead, Ferguson widened his gaze and asserted that the current financial crisis ( "Because it ain't over yet," he said) has "accelerated a fundamental shift in the global balance of economic and geo-political power from The West to The Rest."

Speaking for almost 30 minutes with a good dose of humour and without notes, Ferguson held court. The audience of maybe 100 A-list movers and shakers sat in rapt attention, chuckling at his jokes and nodding at his insight. In short, salon organizers Rudyard Griffiths, Peter White and Patrick Luciani had delivered yet another compelling speaker from among the top minds south of the border.

Ferguson pointed to a series of "killer applications" that allowed Western nations to dominate global affairs over the past 1,000 years, and conversely, questioned those which now see "the Rest-erners" rising in power. It was a much more succinct and engaging version of his article on the same subject in The Financial Times earlier this month.

The "killer apps" as he calls them include competition (in the form of market capitalism), the consumer society it produces, the work--and capital accumulation--ethic it demands, medicine (and its effect on life expectancy), law and property rights, and representative government.

Experiment after experiment in the age of industrialization failed, with the sole exception of Japan," he said. "The Japanese did something very interesting. They simply copied everything that The West did. The haircuts, the clothes, naval uniforms ... they even started to brush their teeth like us. They decided to replicate Western society, and you know what? It worked." The "killer apps" are no longer the monopoly of The West, he concluded, and while the rise of The Rest can largely be credited to mimicry, there is one exception: China. The Chinese do not have private property rights or rule of law, he noted, and the question, to his mind, remains whether, despite this, they can become the largest economic and political power in the world.

"U.K.'s 'massive' fiscal crisis"
  Carrie Tait

May 1, 2010Niall Ferguson's resume could put you to sleep. He's a senior fellow here, a professor of this or that there. But despite hanging out with the elbow-patch crowd, this Scottish intellectual and author smoothly blends history, finance and politics into one engrossing package. At times he is humorous, at others frightful. His relationship with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch intellectual who has a death threat looming over her head after she was critical of Islam, also lends him an air of controversy. Mr. Ferguson, whose latest bestseller is The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World, was in Calgary this week as the headliner at the Teatro salon speaker series. He touched on everything from why he thinks the International Monetary Fund will soon be bailing out Britain, to why the United States must now tread carefully around the globe or risk the wrath of China. And he shared his thoughts on money and power and who he thinks will win the U.K. election.

Q What are your thoughts on the U.K. economic situation as it relates to the election?

A The situation of the United Kingdom in fiscal terms is, in fact, worse than the situation of Greece. That may come as a surprise to you, but if you look at the most recent paper on the subject published by the Bank for International Settlements, it is very clear. The trajectory of U.K. public debt over the next 30 years, absent a major change of policy, will take it to a mind-blowing 500% of GDP, which is about 100 percentage points worse than Greece. If Britain had done what many right-thinking people thought it should do and joined the euro, the situation of Britain would be worse than that of Greece today. The only reason that Britain isn't an honorary member of the PIIGS club, along with Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain, is that it stayed outside the eurozone and therefore reserves the right to debase the currency as an exit strategy. I don't know about you, but I don't find that very cheery as a prospect

So, Britain has a massive fiscal crisis that is just about to break. Whoever wins this election...they are going to have a ghastly task on their hands to try to reform a system of entitlements and welfare and state subsidy that has hugely expanded under Gordon Brown since 1997. I think Britain was more ready for Thatcherism in 1979 than it is today, and yet it needs it more today than it did then.

The situation is so unpromising that I would anticipate the International Monetary Fund having to come into Britain as it did in 1976. So there's a great deal of smoke and mirrors about this subject. None of the candidates want to level with the British electorate, but the day after the election we'll start seeing just how dire it is. And it will be a terrible indictment of Gordon Brown's time as chancellor of the exchequer and as prime minister.

Q Now that you think the West has lost its grip, is the East going to dominate?

A It is not quite as simple as that because there's a lag between economic shifts and geopolitical shifts. China might well end up with an economy larger than that of the United States in the next 20 years, but it is hard to imagine it having comparable military power since the gap is much larger in air power and naval power and land power. So, I don't think China will be in a position to dominate, to use your word, the way that the United States was able to dominate substantial regions of the world, and indeed the way the Soviet Union did because of its military capability.

This is a more gradual process. I think it would be more correct to say the world is returning to equilibrium. To a period in which, for centuries, a small group of countries that I call the West had disproportionate power. We just have to get used to a world where, for the first time in centuries, China and India and Brazil are punching not above their weight, not below their weight, but at their weight.

Q How will the West react?

A First, by falling apart. By stopping being the West. And we already see that in the breakdown in harmony between the United States and the European Union on a range of issues, beginning with Iraq, then Afghanistan.

Then there is this kind of slap-in-the-face feeling, for example, the Copenhagen climate summit and the President of the United States arriving to discuss the highly sensitive issues with his Chinese counterpart and finding the Indians are already there, the South Africans are already there, the Russians are already there. It is kind of like: 'Oh, who are you again?'

The President of the United States is no longer indisputably the most powerful man in the world. There is a sense he has to deal with his Chinese counterpart as an equal.

Q Are we there yet?

A I think we're already there. Diplomatically, because of the financial interrelationship between the United States and China, the President cannot treat his Chinese counterpart asanything other than an equal.

Q Do you think China's threats to sell U.S. T-bills to inflict financial pain are real?

A I don't think they are going to pull a lever as harsh as that over Taiwan. I think if the stakes were high enough, they might very well. If China announced tomorrow 'we're selling our treasuries,' the effect on the bond market would be explosive. And it would cost the Chinese because their dollar reserves would be worthless. But you have to remember most of China's wealth is not in dollars, it is in renminbi. So they would lose on their international reserves, but they would gain on every other asset that they own. I think the question is: What issue is big enough to play that card?

Q What would prompt them to play it?

A There would need to be a major breakdown over something. For example, let's conjure up a scenario where the United States finds itself having to support Israeli attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. Now, the Chinese would have some good options there. One would be to just let it play out and watch. Another would be to very publicly seek to [exert] their leverage over the United States by saying, 'No, no you can't do this.' And that would be a very high-risk strategy, but I could imagine how that would work

So, I think at some point, the currency issue and the U.S. debt issue does give the Chinese real power, just as the currency issue and the debt issue gave the United States power over Britain in the 1950s, particularly at the time of the Suez Crisis. So, you have to imagine a Suez Crisis--where the U.S. does something and the Chinese just decide, 'We're not going to support that because by not supporting it we will make many friends.' [T-bills] are a strategic lever and they can be used to deter military and other actions.

Q Is it one of their most powerful levers to deter action?

A Yes.

Q Is China's rise to power a bad thing?

A It is not a bad thing that the most populous country in the world is emerging from grinding poverty and hundreds of thousands of people who were in subsistence agriculture now have better-paying jobs. That can't be a bad thing. The problem is that in the realm of politics, China's [position] is not necessarily benign. They [do not] remotely share our ambitions to improve the quality of governance in Africa. They couldn't care less. And they have a very different political model, which is neither democratic nor based on law in our sense, and if you want to know what Chinese power is about, ask any Tibetan.

Q How does Africa fit into all this?

A In the eyes of the Chinese, it is a place with a lot of commodities and very poor infrastructure, and the Chinese have figured out they can access the commodities if they provide the infrastructure. So, they have a pretty instrumental view of Africa. Given the West has a sentimental view of Africa, which is they want to [help with] water, give it aid, help Africans by giving them free malaria meds. And China, of course, thinks that's absurd. They want to come in and buy stuff, give them highways in return. And right now that model is working better.

Q Working better for China or Africa?

A Working better for Africa. Just look at the growth rate. Africa is enjoying ... rapid growth, and it is mostly on the back of sales of commodities and the improvement of infrastructure. By comparison, we've had 50 years of development aid and achieved less. So [it is] not pretty in the sense that what China does is bolster regimes in Sudan. They aren't really concerned about people being authoritarian. They are authoritarian, why should they worry about governance in Africa? It is not their vision of what matters, and if they can deliver economic growth and raise African living standards, you can't really blame the Africans for saying, 'OK, these people ask less of us [than] the aid agencies of the West and governments in the West.'

Weekend Post - citylife
 March 27, 2010

Weekend Post - citylife
 Nov 28, 2009

"Rosenberg talks 'risk' at Teatro"
  Jessica de Mello
  Nov 28, 2009

David Rosenberg was the guest of honour at the latest Salon Speaker Series event in Calgary. The theme for this season is "risk and the global economy." It's a topic with which Rosenberg, who, earlier this year, left Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in New York to join the Canadian firm Gluskin Sheff & Associates, is intimately familiar.

After a champagne reception and impressive three-course meal at the posh Teatro Restaurant, guests settled in for the main event. Salon speakers are requested to make opening comments, unscripted, for approximately 30 to 40 minutes before taking questions from the audience. The generous portions of lamb with caramelized root vegetables had barely been cleared when Rosenberg launched into his monologue.

Dubbed the "double dip guy" by at least one guest (because of his two-pronged recovery forecast), Rosenberg prompted a rush of murmurs with his opening: "You have to make your bets against the consensus," he proclaimed. "The consensus gets it wrong about 80% of the time. But maybe this year is one of those times the consensus actually gets it right ... right now the consensus is on some sort of V-shaped recovery." He was quick to win over his audience, though, and declare his intentions.

"I am a financial market economist," he said. "I'm a Wall Street guy and I'm a Bay Street guy. I'm here to talk about how to take the economics ... what it means for your investments, and how to stay out of trouble. It's about how much risk you want to take on, in order to get your return."

True to the evening's theme, Rosenberg's talk centered on risky endeavors. First, there was the Obama-Bernanke analysis: Calling the United States economy a "fiscal train wreck," he predicted that the sanctioning of a low dollar would boost their economy, promote exports, and protect balance payments. As for the equities market, Rosenberg claimed, "as a culture, [it] is dead."

Wilf Gobert, a director of Gluskin Sheff and regular Salon Series patron, agrees on both counts. "What he's saying is that people are so focused on equities as the only investment," Gobert said, "but ... there are a lot of different investments available, including gold and bonds. And the attractiveness of alternative investment has grown, as a means of diversification in asset risk." Gobert also said that Rosenberg "can be bullish at times," citing his optimistic perspective on commodities (and therefore commodity equities) but agrees with his assessment of the American dollar. "He's bearish on currency because it's the only major policy lever left in U.S. government to try to stimulate their economy," Gobert said.

And what does this mean for Canada, and more to the point, Alberta? "Like all exporters in Canada, a low U.S. dollar hurts the oil patch," explains Randy Pettipas, president of Global Public Affairs and a regular guest of the Salon Series. "Your expenses are in Canadian dollars and your revenues in U.S. dollars. It's worth noting, though, that, historically, as the U.S. dollar weakens the price of oil rises, providing some compensation."

Other guests at the function included D'Arcy Levesque of Enbridge, John Cordeau of Bennett Jones LLP, Dave MacInnis of Chevron Canada Ltd., Mark Kryzan of Shaunessy Investment Counsel, Jim Palmer of Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP, Wouter Raemdonck of Total E&P Canada Ltd., David Bercuson of the University of Calgary, and Nicholas Kohler, Calgary bureau chief for Maclean's magazine. Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the series, skipped the event to be with his wife and newborn baby in Toronto.

Weekend Post - citylife
  Oct 3, 2009

Saturday interview: NYT's Joe Nocera on the subprime crisis
  Carrie Tait
  Oct 2, 2009

The era of subprime mortgages - the root cause of the financial crisis that started in the United States and rippled around the world - may be over, but governments, banks and consumers are still sorting through the wreckage. Joe Nocera, a columnist at the New York Times, argues the subprime crisis was a result of American culture, in particular the cowboy ways of California, Florida and Arizona. Mr. Nocera, who has a book in the works (co-authored by Bethany McLean) on the crisis, spoke at the Teatro salon speakers series in Calgary this week. He sat down with the Financial Post's Carrie Tait to discuss the crisis and give his surprise take on the villains in the mess.
----------------------------
Q Are there countries with rules that, if they had been used in the United States, would have prevented the crisis?
A It is hard for us to model ourselves against someone else. What country has gotten through this the best? The answer is China. One reason China got through this is because they don't have to worry about the messiness of democracy. If they want a stimulus package, they just wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, we're going to have a stimulus package.' And they can spend it and direct it however they want to spend it and direct it. India has a wonderfully vibrant democracy, but it is a country that can barely build a bridge. They have terrible infrastructure problems.
I think the way the United States does it is a pretty good way. Every two or three generations, people lose their minds. It is just what happens. My grandparents lived through the Depression, so they were always scared of debt, and they lived very frugally. My generation, two generations later, we didn't fear debt. We embraced it. And our life experience has been debt is a good thing. So, the memory of the Depression has faded and now we have a new memory of what can happen if you forget about the dangers of debt.
So, rather than think of this as us versus some other model in the world, it is more like us versus us two generations ago. And hopefully, what will come out of this is we'll become a society that takes more sensible risks, rather than the nutty risks we were taking.

Q Who do you think has been treated unfairly throughout this?
A This is going to sound weird, but I think Dick Fuld [Lehman Brothers' chief executive at the time of its collapse] is a scapegoat. I don't think he did anything criminal. I just think he happened to be the guy who ran the firm that was next in line when the government decided they needed someone to fail. It could have been Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns, it could have been John Mack at Morgan Stanley, it could have been John Thain at Merrill Lynch, but it happened to be Dick Fuld. He drew the short straw.

Q Do you think we're through the worst of it?
A I don't think I would have said ‘yes' six months ago, but now I'm thinking we probably are through the worst of it. But I would make this distinction: I do think we're through the worst of the crisis, but there is still a larger economy out there, and because of the crisis and the way it has caused banks to become paralyzed with fear, it is going to make getting out of this recession even more difficult than it would normally because banks are afraid to lend. The country is really starving for credit. And that is the most worrisome thing. Indeed, in the reforms that are coming, everything you do to reform the banks is going to make it harder for them to lend because higher capital standards means less lending.

Q So do we just have to accept that?
A Yes. It would be nice if the banks were not publicly held corporations and didn't have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and then they could lend without worrying about making profits, but that's not how it works. Another classic Catch-22 that comes out of this crisis is on one hand, you need consumer spending to bring back the economy, but on the other hand, the reason we got into this mess in the first place is because our entire society was spending beyond its means.

Q Who are the bad guys in your story?
A I have a couple of people who are going to be a surprise, so I don't want to unveil them. I tend to think a lot of this isn't really black and white. I think it is going to be very hard to put anyone in jail over this. It was much easier with Enron to put people in jail because their criminality was so clear. In this case, everybody did the same thing - everybody did things they thought was going to put money in their pockets or the pockets of their companies.
There may be some criminality at the level of mortgage-originators luring people to buy homes they couldn't afford, but in the large scale, this is not an example of collective criminality. It is an example of collective madness. So, the bad guys tend to be people like Dick Fuld, who stood atop an empire that crumbled and really couldn't do anything about it. Does that make him a crook or does that make him someone who was unprepared for the violence of the crisis?
Alan Greenspan stands out, certainly. Even he said: ‘I was wrong; my thesis about how the world works turned out to be wrong.' His fundamental thesis was markets are self-correcting, that risk was manageable. He was extremely reluctant to do anything in terms of regulating subprime, the banks, derivatives and risk-taking in general.

Q What else should have been done to ease the pain of the crisis?
A What hasn't been done well is dealing with the crisis at the grassroots level. There are still too many foreclosures in the United States, and the efforts to modify mortgages so people can stay in their homes has been a dismal failure. That was true in the Bush administration, and it is still true in the Obama administration. They could have chosen to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages, but the Democrats lost their nerve on that and they pulled it back. Certain banks are wards to the state, so you'd think the government would have more persuasion in getting them to modify mortgages, but they haven't done much of that either. They are trying to both shame and pressure mortgage servicers, but the servicers are ill-equipped and don't want to do this. So, again, it has been like pulling teeth.

"Bob Woodward: 'chronicler of our time'"
  Jessica de Mello
  May 9, 2009

Last week, Calgary's cultural elite and intelligentsia gathered at Teatro Restaurant for the last of the season's Salon Speaker Series. Famed investigative journalist Bob Woodward was the guest of honour; he spoke on "The Race to the White House and Beyond."

Renowned for uncovering the Watergate scandal, and introduced by Rudyard Griffiths as a "chronicler of our time," Woodward focused his remarks on the role of journalism in a democracy and his personal recollections of the Bush administration. But he began with a different race to the Oval Office -- to when Al Gore was a contender.

"Having dinner with Al Gore is unpleasant," Woodward said dryly. There was laughter and the clink of glasses as the audience took another swig of Tegrino Vin Santo. "There is not one pleasant thing about it," he confirmed. "It is taxing. He is absolutely sure he knows everything about every subject." Yet, there was some wisdom Woodward did accept at face value: Gore told him that only about 1% of what goes on in the White House becomes public knowledge. Years later, it was clear that little more than that became even executive knowledge, when George W. Bush told him he did not attend many of the early meetings on the Iraq war.

"We've seen a staggering increase in the level of violence in Iraq -- almost incomprehensible--and George Bush was out there asking if we were winning, not for months but for years!" Woodward charged. "The idea that the commander-in-chief would absent himself from those meetings ... I felt sick, sick for my country. The president had lost control. He didn't know what was real; he didn't have a grasp on it."

And thus began his treatise on the role of the press in a liberal democracy, complete with a mea culpa on the coverage of the Iraq war. "Media drives them toward accountability," he said.

The questions ranged from ironic -- Tom Flanagan asking about barriers to accessing Canadian politicians -- to the cheeky -- Carlo Bellusci asked, "Isn't it true that if governments weren't so secretive, you'd be out of a job? And don't people want to just kind of tune all this out and go to the cottage?"

Woodward took it all in stride, concluding on a truly diplomatic note: "Obama thinks he's restored moral authority to the White House, just as Bush thought he'd restored dignity. I say, we'll see. You can be so sure of something, then time passes, you do your homework, and things look very different."

Guests dined on Alberta beef tenderloin, preserved-lemon risotto and a dainty selection of pastries. Among those who attended were Murray Edwards, University of Calgary's Barry Cooper, Greg Forrest, John Cordeau of Bennett Jones, Randy Pettipas of Global Public Affairs, Dina and George Honke, energy analyst Wilf Gobert, and Timothy Hamilton, managing partner of Hamilton Hall Soles/ Ray & Berndtson Inc.

The Salon Speaker Series at Teatro will resume in the fall.

“An Inconvenient Dinner?”
  Patricia Best
  May 5, 2009

What's it like to have dinner with climate change czarAl Gore? "Not pleasant," according to American journalism giant Bob Woodward. That's what Mr. Woodward said after promising "an evening of candour" a few nights ago to the audience at the $1,000-a-ticket Teatro speaker's series in Calgary, the last of four such events. The attending lawyers, academics, government relations people and business heavies such as Murray Edwards and Ron Mannix were all ears. Mr. Woodward, who along with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein broke the Nixon-Watergate story in the 1970s, expanded upon dining with the former U.S. vice-president by saying: "There is not one damn thing that's fun about it." He said he asked Mr. Gore how much is contemporaneously known about what goes on in the White House. Mr. Gore's answer: 1 per cent.

"Truth's chronicler: Bob Woodward"
  Kevin Libin
  May 2, 2009

Bob Woodward has no trouble engaging a crowd of a certain age. He helped unearth one of the biggest scandals in U. S. history, aborting Richard Nixon's presidency; he has privileged access like no other reporter to the highest levels of world power; and he was lucky enough to have been played in All the President's Men, the story of his work in uncovering the Watergate scandal, by a leading hunk of Seventies cinema.

But speaking at Calgary's Teatro restaurant last week, the Washington Post veteran reporter had the crowd more than just interested and admiring. They were astounded. Astounded at the way he described the casualness with which he is able to access government sources, high level and low, as if it were only a matter of tenacity; at the vast patience granted to him by the world's most powerful men, the reporter having spent more than seven hours interviewing former president George W. Bush for his book on the decision behind launching the Iraq War; and astounded at the very possibility that a mere journalist could get his hands on volumes of top secret documents, internal memos, and minutes and notes from Washington's most sensitive briefings.

Mr. Woodward's methods, as he explained them, were not much beyond the basic, shoe-leather reporting work taught at every journalism school in North America. To hear him report that these methods actually worked at exposing the backstage of government was, to the ears of his audience, as if he were describing another culture entirely. In a way, he was.

"Your career in Canada would be inconceivable," Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political science professor and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former chief of staff marvelled. "No prime minister in Canada would give you seven minutes, let alone seven hours. And the thought that you would get all these hundreds of interviews with underlings, and meetings, it just wouldn't happen. There's like light years of difference between Canada and the United States."

Mr. Woodward told me he was passingly aware of this.

"From the evidence I have," he said of Canada's reputation for poor transparency, "I think that's true." There is something in the U. S. culture that may not be here, some "national character trait," he suggests. Perhaps it is America's revolutionary history, or its reverence for liberty and rights instilled at the youngest ages. Maybe he had something to do with it: that Americans had caught their leaders in cover-ups before--"because of things like Vietnam and Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal, and Clinton"--and have learned better than to trust them.

Mr. Woodward, author of 15 bestsellers, is a reporter from the old school -- he has been at the Post since 1971--and he sticks, publicly at least, with a neutrality that feels quaint in today's world where many journalists tacitly or overtly take sides.

He is, to hear him describe it, a straightforward chronicler, dedicated, he says, to showing how the "sausage" of policy "is made," so voters can have "transparency in the process and hopefully ... debates about these things."

Surprisingly, for an investigative reporter, he comes off more credulous than suspicious: discussing President Barack Obama's promise to return moral authority and transparency to the White House, he says without any trace of distrust, "We'll see." If not, he says, "We're going to find out. And that's fine." He concedes that "Obama love" infests newsrooms across the United States, and he is no fan of it, but is convinced there are enough sober reporters to hold this presidency to account.

To the political operatives, lawyers, journalists and everyday news-consumers gathered to hear Mr. Woodward at the Salon Speakers Series, the idealistic belief that truth will, inevitably, out, strikes as rather alien. Many here know well that in Canada, government functionaries and politicians are generally petrified to speak off-script, let alone share sensitive documents; trials are routinely hidden by publication bans; government information, on the rare occasion when it can be pried loose, often comes heavily redacted and nearly useless; journalists are compelled by courts to reveal sources; and reporters following government's trail have had their homes and offices raided by police.

"We have a judicial commission appointed to investigate things that Brian Mulroney did in the final years of his administration 15 years ago and we still don't know the truth, and we probably won't know the truth even after this commission is finished," Mr. Flanagan tells him. "I imagine in the United States, the truth would have been published at the time on the front page of the Washington Post."

More than $100-million in lawsuits were launched after inquiries into Mr. Mulroney's Airbus involvement, notes Harvey Cashore, a senior editor with CBC's The Fifth Estate, which investigated the story. Canada's libel laws are that much more powerful than those in the United States, where malice must be proven. "After that, even reporters who wanted to cover the story would have thought twice," Mr. Cashore says.

And for what risks news organizations here do take, the public is rarely appreciative, says William Kaplan a Toronto lawyer who has written two books about the Airbus matter. "We don't have an ingrained tradition of investigation of journalism that's celebrated," he says.

Nor is there anything here with the weight of Congressional hearings or crusading special prosecutors, he adds. In Canada, governments dictate parameters for the public inquiries that would investigate them, as former prime minister Paul Martin did for the Gomery hearings.

To Mr. Woodward, this picture is unsettling. In Washington, he admits, the White House, under former presidents Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush, became increasingly guarded, but never impenetrable. He mentions a meeting he attended with officials so powerful that "if you knew who they were and what they did you wouldn't believe me;" he insists this is something any U.S. reporter -- not just celebrities like him -- can do, with persistence.

"What I worry about is secret government. If a group of people can seize the government and control it in a secret way, then you're not going to have the rights that are inherent in our constitution and in yours," says the man who helped expose the criminal actions of a president. "Democracies die in darkness."

From this stems his unshakable confidence that journalism, despite the grave troubles it faces today (even Washington Post Co. lost US$54-million in the last quarter,) must still thrive. "At age 66, I remain very bullish on the news and information business." He agrees with his former editor, Ben Bradlee, that while the media of delivery may evolve, "there will always be a group of people ... who gather information about what's going on and broadcast and publish what they believe the truth to be. I believe that to the bottom of my toes," he says. The press's role is "too important" to lose, and he is certain this is enough to guarantee its endurance.

January 21, 2009
 City Life

"Can Obama make liberalism a fighting faith?"
  National Post
  January 27, 2009

All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009 marked the end of a conservative era in the United States.

Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not -- and more often than liberals --about most of the important issues of the day: about communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked -- insofar as any set of policies can be said to "work" in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

They also have some regrets. They'll have time to ponder those as liberals now take their chance to govern.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it's worth recalling that conservatism's rise was decisively enabled by liberalism's weakness. That weakness was manifested by liberalism's limp reaction to the challenge from the New Left in the 1960s, became more broadly evident during the 1970s, and culminated in the fecklessness of the Carter administration at the end of that decade.

In 1978, the Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield diagnosed the malady: "From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism .... Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?"

Over the next three decades, it was modern conservatism, led at the crucial moment by Ronald Reagan, that assumed the task of defending liberty with strength and confidence. Can a revived liberalism, faced with a new set of challenges, now pick up that mantle?

The answer lies in the hands of one man: the 44th president. If Reagan's policies had failed, or if he hadn't been politically successful, the conservative ascendancy would have been nipped in the bud. So with President Obama today. Liberalism's fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we're in a new political era. If not, the United States will be open to new conservative alternatives.

We don't really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama's speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

Obama appealed to the authority of "our forebears," "our founding documents," even--political correctness alert!-- "our founding fathers." He emphasized that "we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense." He spoke almost not at all about rights (he had one mention of "the rights of man," paired with "the rule of law" in the context of a discussion of the Constitution). He called for "a new era of responsibility."

And he appealed to "the father of our nation," who, before leading his army across the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, allegedly "ordered these words be read to the people: 'Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.' "

For some reason, Obama didn't identify the author of "these timeless words" -- the only words quoted in the entire speech. He's Thomas Paine, and the passage comes from the first in his series of Revolutionary War tracts, The Crisis. Obama chose to cloak his quotation from the sometimes intemperate Paine in the authority of the respectable George Washington.

Sixty-seven years ago, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, at the close of a long radio address on the difficult course of the struggle we had just entered upon, another liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also told the story of Washington ordering that The Crisis be read aloud, and also quoted Paine. But he turned to the more famous -- and more stirring -- passage with which Paine begins his essay:

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

That exhortation was appropriate for the Second World War. Today, the dangers are less stark, and the conflicts less hard. Still, there will be trying times during Obama's presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under FDR, a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

All rights reserved. ©2008 CanWest Global Communications Corp.

 

"Obama's glimmers of neo-conservatism"
  National Post
  January 24, 2009

The man credited as the godfather of neo-conservatism famously described its believers as former liberals "mugged by reality." William Kristol, son of that pioneering neo-con thinker, Irving Kristol, cannot shake the sneaking suspicion that sometime between when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and today, someone got mugged. Because, despite Mr. Obama's fierce campaign attacks against Republican policies, the ecstasy from the far-left fringe (among others) at his victory, and some conservatives' fear that they were witnessing the second coming of Jimmy Carter, today's neo-con standard-bearer feels increasingly at ease.

"The big story is that Barack Obama, who ran as the candidate of hope and change, who was the more liberal of the two democratic finalists ... has moved pretty dramatically to the centre," says Mr. Kristol. And while he's cautious to call it a stretch, there are certain things shaping up in Mr. Obama's White House that might even reflect a glimmer of-- would you believe? --neoconservatism.

It isn't quite in his interest to concede this. For right-wing media, including his Weekly Standard, the Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine that Mr. Kristol founded and edits, a Democratic sweep can be Christmas for journalists, with no shortage of figures to skewer and policies to shred. Not only did he enthusiastically back John McCain in his columns (he also writes for The New York Times), he served as foreign policy advisor to the Republican's presidential campaign. Mr. Kristol was an ardent supporter of that administration, its wars and the bulk of its domestic policies (he served in Bush Sr.'s administration, as the vice-president's chief of staff, and later, as an architect of the GOP's congressional revival).

Yet, he seems remarkably optimistic under the circumstances. "Europeans who thought Obama was going to make America a more European country are going to be disappointed," Mr. Kristol smiles over his coffee in a hotel lounge in Calgary, where he visited to address the Teatro salon speakers series. His cheeky choice of tie is embroidered with donkeys: all in the spirit of bipartisanship, he chuckles.

This was the day after inauguration. And throughout the address, and elsewhere, Mr. Kristol has noticed that the man preaching "change" intends, in many cases, to follow the lead of the previous administration, the most neo-conservative since the term was coined. Spotting them sometimes requires understanding the nuances of the neo-conservative "persuasion" -- father Irving always rejected the "ideology" label -- as distinct from the traditional variety: Neo-conservatism comes with a cheery outlook; the acceptance that big public-spending is inevitable, popular, and not necessarily bad, and looks to advance liberty and democracy abroad.

In Mr. Obama's address, there were repeated appeals to founding principles, to "the ideals of our forbears, and ... our founding documents." He spoke vigorously of the need to stand for, even spread American values, while fighting terror: "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense."

There was talk, not of cutting spending on principle, but eliminating waste. He even, Mr. Kristol notes, "had a nice word to say about free markets."

Even before this day, Mr. Kristol was warming. He was invited to a recent dinner Mr. Obama had arranged with top conservative columnists: "It

caused a big ruckus," he says. "He's not going to change his mind having dinner with ten conservatives, and we're not going to change our mind after one dinner either, but I think it did show a genuine attempt to at least cultivate some bipartisan spirit."

On certain domestic policies, he says, the President leans unquestionably leftward: such as universal health care and judicial activism. But he considers Mr. Obama above all "ambitious" and determined to be "a successful president." Pragmatism has moved him almost in line with Bush-era thinking, on defence strength, Afghanistan, the Iraqi withdrawal timeline, and Iran. His Cabinet picks testify to the stay-the-course approach hinted at in his rhetoric. Other neo-cons, including Robert Kagan -- dubbing him "Obama the interventionist" -- have noticed, too. Tax cuts are reportedly high on Mr. Obama's stimulus priority list.

Still, it's one thing to believe such things. Where "the rubber hits the road," Mr. Kristol emphasizes, is whether the new president can stick to his guns, against world opinion, the UN, or even his own Congress, where the lure of pragmatism is less urgent and few Democrats, having won bigger than Mr. Obama, feel obliged to him.

"I think he'll end up fighting Democrats in Congress as much as Republicans," Mr. Kristol says. With no record of executive decision-making to go by, he isn't sure if the president can remain as conservative-friendly as he may like.

But the simple fact that the new President would gravitate rightward on so many issues, Mr. Kristol believes, is enough to prove the success of his father's ideas: vindicating the free markets as the fuel of growth; a muscular stance as the agent of peace.

A generation ago, a born and bred liberal commander would have cut defence spending, softened against enemies, and cranked taxes.

"I don't think Obama's blind to the last 25 years," Mr. Kristol says. That Americans tired of his favoured Republicans was to be expected after controlling the White House or Congress, or both, for 26 of the past 28 years, he shrugs. That so much of the new President's agenda looks familiar consoles him that no matter who runs Washington, as long as reality lurks in dark corners, the case for neo-conservatism persists.

All rights reserved. ©2008 CanWest Global Communications Corp.

January 21, 2009
 City Life

A big-government generation
  Michael Barone
  November 12, 2008

The following is an edited excerpt from author and political analyst Michael Barone's recent speech at the Teatro Salon Series. The series brings internationally acclaimed speakers to Calgary to talk about the pressing issues facing Canada and the world. The National Post is its media partner.

One possible consequence of Barack Obama's election is a substantial change in the relationship between government and the private sector in the United States. There have been inflection points in this relationship every 40 years or so. The last two times they have been a response, not just to momentary problems, but to long-lasting experiences, which sunk deep into the lives of ordinary people.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, the breadlines that formed then, convinced Americans to oversimplify somewhat that markets didn't work and government did. A whole series of public policies followed that judgment. The stagflation of the 1970s, the gas station lines, produced the opposite inflection. Americans began to oversimplify and decided that government didn't work and markets did.

The latter experience has been dispositive for much of U. S. politics and public policy in the years since, because people who remembered the 1970s were averse to big government. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by saying, "Hey, I'm not going to be a big-government Democrat, I'm going to be a new Democrat." But when he seemed to be governing contrary to that -- the Clinton health care plan -- the Republicans were swept into Congress. President Clinton and the Republican congress compiled a record that can reasonably be described as a new Democratic record, respectful of markets, including things like the conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993.

Back then, politicians were dealing with an electorate where almost everybody remembered the '70s. This year it was different. The median-age voter was born around 1963-65. The median-age voter never sat for an hour in a gas line waiting to fill up. The median-age voter never paid family bills out of a cheque book with declining real income, paying inflationary bills and wondering how they would make it. He or she never had to try to get a mortgage at 18% or 21% mortgage rates like those in the late '70s and '80s.

They're more open-minded on whether we need bigger government or not. They're more open to Barack Obama. And you know the reaction of some of the younger votes among whom Obama has done terrifically is: "Oh the government will provide me with health care, health insurance, cool. Hey, there's no problem with that."

That's the sort of reaction you get, because people are formed by their experiences. Political scientists are always trying to make internal rules about political behaviour and I think it's a failing venture, because human beings make decisions based on the things they know. And the things you know if you experienced the 1930s or the things you know if you experienced the 1970s are different from those who did not have those experiences.

Not many people study history so intimately or so vividly that it affects them in the ways that people who actually lived through those times were affected. I still hear from my mother who's 89 years old about going to bed hungry in the 1930s. And when her father used to buy a lot of houses and rent them out to people and lost all his houses because he couldn't pay the taxes and the mortgages -- that's still a vivid experience for an 89-year-old voter.

The good news for Republicans [now looking to rebuild after Obama's victory] is that there aren't that many 89-year-old voters; the number's not going to go up. But the bad news for Republicans is that the number of people who remember the 1970s is not going up either.

-Michael Barone is a senior writer at U. S. News and World Report and principal author of The Almanac of American Politics.

"Clever Talk At The Club"
  Karen Mazurkewich
  November 1, 2008

Christopher Hitchens, the loquacious and opinionated writer, was in Montreal in September exciting and insulting a select audience of the city's elites at Ex-Centris, a hip media centre on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. The event, which drew the likes of billionaire investor Stephen Jarislowsky and Daniel Langlois, founder of Softimage Inc., kicked off the 357c Speakers Series in Montreal.

On a crisp autumn night, another salon was born.

The concept of a "salon" to discuss the issues of the day dates back to ancient Greece when influential people met in an egalitarian environment, to create stimulating dialogue and generate great ideas and movements, according to Benet Davetian, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Prince Edward Island.

The French Revolution may never have occurred if not for France's rich salon culture. The United States had the legendary Algonquin Round Table.

But with television and the Internet, the notion of community has diminished as we take on virtual lives. The current renaissance of the conversation salon is evidence of a desire to reconnect.

"They offer an opportunity to hear intelligent, informed, thoughtful people speak about issues and ideas," says author Ann Shortell.

Four years ago, when Rudyard Griffiths and Patrick Luciani kicked off the first Grano Speakers Series in Toronto, with U. S. political analyst William Kristol, they had no idea just how popular the event would become.

Now, not only are they able to land such high-profile names as Paul Volker, the former head of the U. S. Federal Reserve Board, who will be speaking in Toronto in February, but they have also lined up such heavyweight patrons as Galen Weston, Joseph Rotman and Calgary financier Murray Edwards. The Grano series has now extended its brand to Calgary and Montreal, along the way forging media partnerships with the National Post, Globe and Mail and La Presse.

In an Ipso Reid poll of 1,073 adults conducted in March, 77% of respondents expressed concern over a lack of substance that has crept into public discussion, while 79% complained Canadians are too reserved in tackling the issues of the day.

Donna Dasko, senior vice-president of Environics Research, attends a number of speaker series each year. The reason? "I'm a political junkie," she says. Ms. Dasko, who attended several of the Grano speakers dinners in Toronto last year, including the night U. S. political pundit James Carvelle hit the stage. "I don't like platitudinous speakers on a big stage. I like speakers of substance," she adds.

For all the high-brow ideas and lively discussions, salons have also become the place to see and be seen. "It's a socializing element; people want to live a life that gives credence to critical thought," says Mr. Griffiths, adding his Grano dinner series is becoming a "schmooze" event, and he has been forced to cap the invited crowd at 100.

Not surprisingly, salon fever is picking up steam across the country. While institutions like the Canadian Club of Toronto and the Empire Club have provided a platform for speakers for more than 100 years, there was a fatigue with the large "rubber chicken" conference style.

In addition to Grano, a handful of new speakers series and debates have taken root -- some of which charge participants big bucks to attend, while others have cultivated corporate sponsors.

Last May, Peter and Melanie Munk kicked off their international debate series at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The Fraser Institute has launched two series in the past two years, the upscale Illuminismo/Dialogues dinner series in three cities (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal) and the hipper Behind the Spin cocktail series, which targets younger audiences in five cities. The Ottawa chapter was launched last week.

The growing number of clubs and lecture series has led to some healthy competition and inevitable rivalry. On the upside, success has meant the Grano Speaker Series could upgrade the wine at dinner to a good Amarone. But when organizers were forced to cull the guest list by almost one-third to keep the event intimate, a few noses were out of joint at the snubbing, particularly those who had supported the series during its lean years.

All rights reserved. ©2008 CanWest Global Communications Corp.

October 30, 2008
 City Life

Brain Food on the Menu
  Eric Volmers
  October 26, 2008

In the past few years, Calgary has welcomed an increasing number and variety of speakers for discussions, lectures, debates and readings.

Some -- like Bill Clinton, Christopher Hitchens, and Mia Farrow -- are famous. Others are simply experts in their fields. Some events are populist in nature, some are aimed at the city's elite, while others are meant to spur grassroots activism. But all of them have that common agenda of turning conversation -- in all its low-tech, brainy glory -- into entertainment.

"All of us have nostalgia about university, about getting outside of our work and thinking and talking about things that are not just a means to an end," says Rudyard Griffiths, co-director of the Salon Speaker Series, which recently expanded to Calgary for intimate events at Teatro. "This is a painless, if not somewhat luxurious, way to get back to university four times a year. Instead of a lecture hall with uncomfortable seats and a professor who will check your homework, you get a great glass of wine and a lovely meal."

Last year, 100 invited guests paid $1,000 to watch four speakers throughout the year -- including mercurial intellectual and author Christopher Hitchens -- untangle issues surrounding U.S. foreign policies on the Middle East. This year, the topic is "the race to the White House" and will feature journalist Bob Woodward and Weekly Standard founder William Kristol, among others. The series has long since sold out, although there is a waiting list, Griffiths says.

Many may know Kristol as the grinning right-winger who valiantly attempts to match wits with Jon Stewart during frequent appearances on The Daily Show. But Griffiths says the Teatro series does not have a political agenda. It's simply about offering speakers and thinkers of all political stripes to a select group of Calgarians in an intimate setting.

"We are not grinding any ideological axes," he says. "We don't have any interests other than trying to find relevant, engaging and influential speakers."

Rooting against Obama
  Kevin Libin
  September 24, 2008

Shelby Steele and Al Sharpton don't agree about much. In fact, Steele has few complimentary things to say about the reverend or his cronies, like Jesse Jackson, in what Steele considers America's racial "shakedown" racket, good for little more than exploiting white complexes to extract money and power. But when the two -- Sharpton and Steele -- recently spent an evening together, they discovered a shared worry: that a Barack Obama victory might actually turn out badly for American race relations.

"His point was: 'What if he gets elected and he's a lousy president? We [blacks] are finished for another generation,'" Steele recalled on a visit last week to Calgary, where he addressed the Teatro Speakers Series. "And I think if he gets elected," said Steele, "there's a guarantee of disappointment."

Steele, an author, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and one of America's foremost thinkers about race (like the Democratic presidential candidate, his father was black -- though Steele grew up not in Hawaii but in South Side Chicago's segregated schools), has spent much time pondering Obama's rise. Last year, he released his book: A Bound Man. Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. He's no longer sure about that last bit. "I thought white guilt wouldn't be strong enough to get him over the top. That may have been a mistake."

But Steele does believe that, for the sake of America's soul, it would be best if Obama lost. His concerns differ from Sharpton's -- not surprising, since Steele has spent a career defying the neocivil rights movement and its view of America as an irreparably racist state (he opposes affirmative action, for instance). Steele isn't worried Obama will make blacks look bad by being a bad president: He has no idea what kind of president he'll be.

That's the problem.

"He has no individuality. Nobody knows who he is, least of all him," Steele explains. "He's flip-flopped on more political issues than any candidate, I think, in history ... You see a candidate like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, you know who they are. She's a '60s, big government, feminist liberal. Take it or leave it. McCain is really into national security, and has paid a price for it in many instances. I know these people have convictions. But with Barack Obama you just don't have a clue."

Obama's policies are "mundane, unremarkable" and when challenged -- on gun control, NSA wiretaps, faith-based initiatives and more ("there are about 13 or 14 flip-flops," Steele says) -- he works to come up with the most accommodative stance possible. "You ought to know, particularly as a constitutional lawyer, what your position on the second amendment is," Steele says.

The man who voted "present" 130 times as an Illinois legislator even cops to his own hollowness and his followers' inevitable disillusionment, Steele points out. Opening a notebook, Steele locates a wrinkled scrap of newsprint. Unfolding it, he recites a favourite quote from Obama's own memoir, The Audacity of Hope:

"I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them"

This is unhealthy, Steele argues -- for Obama and America. A cipher hardly represents, as supporters claim, a new era for racial relations. He is, rather, a product of a society still clearly obsessed with race; a phenomenon not because of who he is, but of what his pigmentation symbolizes: namely, the ability to absolve America's sins of slavery and segregation (Steele maintains American racism was expunged long ago, lingering only in white shame promoted by Sharpton and Jackson).

Obama would not be a good pick for president, so much as an opportunity for Americans to "document their innocence"; Obama can scarcely be a post-racial figure when it is precisely race that has brought him so far, so fast.

"Young people, particularly, say 'Don't you know we're a new generation, and that's why were in love with Obama? And you're from this old generation and you guys got hang-ups and we've now transcended race. We don't care about it,'" says Steele. "My answer to that is, if you have transcended it, why aren't you critical of Barack Obama? You can only worship him. You seem like a worse guilt-ridden generation than mine."

If voters were genuinely over racial neurosis, they would view Obama skeptically, he believes, seeing through his vacant mantras and repudiating him as they would any vapid white candidate. And "I'd be very proud of America, because they would indicate they're able to be critical, they're able to pass by all this illusory stuff that's 'change' and 'hope' and 'yes we can' -- all that emptiness. It would be a very good sign about the confidence that Americans had in the progress they've made."

His assessment of Americans' post-racial capacity having been wrong before, he's not sure they will. But until Obama is judged on the content of his character (to borrow a phrase) and not the colour of his skin, Steele worries that after November, a new chapter in America's race drama will remain (to borrow another) a dream deferred.

 

Behind Barack's Mask
  Shelby Steele
  September 24, 2008

This is an edited excerpt from Shelby Steele's speech at the Teatro Salon Series last week. The series brings internationally acclaimed speakers to Calgary to talk about the pressing issues facing Canada and the world. The National Post is its media partner.

The cultural features that explain the Barack Obama phenomenon are bargaining and challenging. When minorities move into the mainstream, they're not going to come forward and say, "Hi, this is who I really am." They're going to wear a mask designed to offset the power differential between themselves and the mainstream.

The two most common masks are bargaining and challenging. The bargainer looks at whites and says, "I am going to believe that you are not a racist. I am not going to waste time rubbing America's ugly history of racism in your face. I'm going to see you as a decent human being. What I want in return is for you not to hold my colour against me."

Whites love this bargain because they live under the threat of being stigmatized all the time. They welcome a minority who is saying, "With me, you can relax."

Louis Armstrong was a bargainer. Armstrong had to say to whites who he knew were racist, "I am not going to presume to be your equal if you will let me entertain you." It was a denigrating circumstance, but the only alternative was to do nothing. So he made the deal and became successful. Barack Obama is the first black American to try to turn that bargain into votes.

Challengers are people on the other side who say: "As a white, you are a racist. Until you do something to prove that you're not a racist, I'm going to assume you are." But if you give me the things I want -- e. g., racial preferences --I will give you absolution.

Barack Obama is a bargainer. He is becoming successful by saying, "I'm going to trust that you are not a racist." And oomph, you have this great phenomenon of Barack Obama, who, if you look at his actual policies, is unremarkable.

The Achilles heel of the bargainer is that in order to be a good bargainer you have to make yourself invisible. If you begin to tell us who you really are, then suddenly we know you went to Reverend Wright's church for 20 years.

That revelation has made Obama look like a closet challenger, somebody who is pretending he trusts you, but in fact every Sunday, he's in this church hating you. Michelle Obama has made comments that she's only recently come to be proud of America. Americans do not want a black challenging woman as first lady.

When bargainers let you know what they really think, they lose their magic. Bill Cosby was one of the great bargainers in the eighties. In the last few years, Cosby has said, "Here's what I really think." He's told blacks: Our problems are ours, and the only way they can be fixed is for us to do it.

Suddenly no one wants to stand next to Bill Cosby. Whites don't want to because they'll be seen as racist. Blacks don't want to because they'll be seen as Uncle Toms. And so Bill Cosby walks a lonely path.
I'm going to read you a comment. I want you to tell me who said this. "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them."

That's Barack Obama.

-Shelby Steele is an American author and columnist. His most recent book is A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, published by HarperCollins.

September 17, 2008
 City Life

"Salon or mosh pit? Grano opts for more elbow room"
  Patricia Best
  July 9, 2008

This week, the always-thinking minds behind the Grano Speakers Series are sending out their coveted invitations for next year, along with the program of speakers they've lined up. And bad news, Bay Street hopefuls: They have cut the list to 100 tickets because of uncomfortable overcrowding last season. Clearly a case of excess success.

The Toronto salon's organizers, Rudyard Griffiths and Patrick Luciani, hit pay dirt last year with their bet on the U.S. election, attracting beyond-capacity audiences to evenings with James Carville and David Gergen and others. (Indeed, even with Toronto's biggest snowstorm hitting the night of Mr. Carville's appearance, the crowd was at capacity.) This season's series of four schmooze-nosh-and-listen evenings will focus on the future of the global economy and will feature talks by some big names (and they are asked not to speak from notes) in an intimate restaurant setting. The speakers? historian Niall Ferguson, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, and economists Hernando de Soto and Martin Feldstein.

Last year, the crush of attendees from Toronto business, academic, political and media circles made the predinner reception and the scramble for the dinner's open seating something of an extreme sport even for boldface biggies like Gerry Schwartz, Hal Jackman and Hilary Weston. "We cut back this year on our numbers in order to create the kind of atmosphere our members like and not turn it into a kind of mosh pit," Mr. Griffiths says.

Guests aren't the only ones clamouring for admittance. The organizers have also expanded their sponsors' group because of eager approaches by aspiring supporters. Long-time backers Peter and Melanie Munk, Sandra and Joe Rotman, law firm Bennett Jones, the DelZotto family's Tridel and financial firms Burgundy Asset Management and Gluskin Sheff are moving their chairs over to make room this year for Genuity Capital, TD Bank and law firm Torys.

But just in case the fires need further fanning, Mr. Griffiths and Mr. Luciani are planning to put one Series ticket, with a sticker price of $1,000, up for auction on eBay tomorrow. Bidding will close at 1 p.m. EDT Friday. The inspiration for this stunt came from a Speakers Series ticket they donated as a charity auction item for the Stratford Express in May. (That's an annual fundraiser held by the Stratford Festival involving well-heeled Torontonians boarding a train at Union Station and riding to Stratford, Ont., while dining, imbibing and bidding on a silent auction, then seeing a show before returning by train later in the evening.) The Grano ticket, worth $1,000, went for almost four times its face value at $3,700 - purchased in the silent auction by a partner from law firm Borden Ladner Gervais.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali : salle comble
  April 15, 2008
  Le Bulletin Des Membres du 357c

Deuxième conférencier de la SERIE 357c : Bernard Henri Lévy
  December, 2008
  Le Bulletin Des Membres du 357c

Vero Beach, FL
  April 23, 2009