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Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts

Thursday 16 August 2012

America’s deadly love affair with guns

BARELY a month after the deadly shooting in Colorado which killed 12 people, six more lives were lost to another maniac with a gun, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Yet, like the earlier shootings, the whole episode is destined to quickly recede into the background.

For all its greatness, America is a nation that is easily distracted by the trivial at the expense of the critical, a nation that can barely hold its collective attention much beyond the 30 second sound bytes of its newscasters.

It is one of the many paradoxes of America.

Consider, for example, that the death of 3,000 people on 9/11 became the jumping-off point for more than a decade of war that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, whereas the 140,000 or so lives lost to gun violence since then has elicited no corresponding outrage or demand for action.

I suppose it’s always much harder to confront the enemy within than the enemy without, easier to go after strange men in far away places than face an ugly truth closer to home.

Besides, the gun culture is so much a part of the American fabric that to confront it is to challenge the way America thinks about itself.

Almost all of America’s great heroes were gunslingers or men who cut their teeth in war.

Guns are so much a part of society that pastors preach about the right to bear arms while banks give them away to good customers.

Even the courts have let stand the so called “Stand Your Ground Law” which basically gives citizens the right to use deadly force when confronted by an assailant even when such force is unnecessary.

Talk about a licence to kill.

Perhaps, there is a certain fatalism as well; a resignation that such senseless killings are the necessary price Americans must pay for their cherished right to bear arms.

What is incomprehensible, though, is the frequently used argument that a well-armed population is the best protection against government encroachment of individual freedom. It might have been an appropriate response in the aftermath of their war of independence 236 years ago, but it makes no sense today.

The gun culture is largely sustained and promoted by the all powerful gun lobby and the arms manufacturers who fund them.

Guns are a US$31bil (RM96bil) industry that brooks no interference.

Their power to destroy anyone who challenges them is legendary. Even simple calls for more stringent background checks on prospective gun buyers are enough to send them on the offensive.

Unsurprisingly, most politicians go out of their way to avoid offending the gun lobby, especially in an election year.

President Obama, for example, has offered communities affected by recent gun violence the sympathy of his heart but not the power of his office.

Even his prospective Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, one of whose signature achievements as governor of Massachusetts was a ban on assault weapons, has been cowered into silence.

And so they talk endlessly about the need for better mental healthcare for troubled young men or promise to begin a “conversation” about guns in America instead of actually taking the bull by the horns.

It is escapism and denial on a staggering scale.

The gun lobby, meanwhile, continues to push the asinine argument that it is not guns but people who kill.

Society has long recognised that cars, for example, can kill and maim if not used properly and have come up with stringent regulations replete with a licencing system to control and regulate its use.

No such rules apply to guns which can be bought legally by just about anyone and carried just about anywhere. And not just handguns but assault rifles and other military-type weapons.

There’s also no limit to how much weaponry a citizen can amass.

It is estimated that there are more than 300 million privately owned guns in the US (population 314 million), making it the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. Most Americans, however, do not own guns; the numbers are skewered because most gun owners tend to stockpile them.

And perversely, every time there is another mass shooting, gun sales actually explode, as people rush out to buy yet more guns. Indeed, gun sales rose 40% in the aftermath of the recent Colorado shooting.

The other thing about such shootings is that it shines a spotlight on the deep alienation of a rootless and disconnected generation brought up on video games, movies and music that glorify gratuitous violence and anti-social behaviour. When unstable young men, to whom killing is probably just another video game, have unlimited access to the most lethal weapons, can there be any doubt that carnage is inevitable?

We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, to see more and more heavily armed gunmen emerge from the shadows of their dark and dreary lives to carry out mass murder as the ultimate thrill, the final expression of their banal existence.

Until Americans are willing to confront the power of the gun lobby and demand that their leaders show some political courage on the issue, America will remain a killing field.

DIPLOMATICALLY SPEAKING 
By DENNIS IGNATIUS

Saturday 19 May 2012

Stop the banks from gambling!

The JPMorgan Chase debacle is ample reminder that banks are dangerously risking money on dubious bets with dire consequences if they are not stopped. 





US giant financial services group JPMorgan Chases trading debacle which has already lost US$2bil and which threatens to raise losses to double that, will likely put pressure for greater regulation of the banking industry, not just in the United States but around the world.

That is as it should be for despite the 2008 financial crisis which resulted from bankers structuring complex and questionable credit derivatives which few understood but many bought because they believed the rating assigned them by unknowledgeable credit rating agencies, the lessons dont appear to have been learnt.

With massive US government help, many banks which were on the brink of failure were rescued and the memories of those tempestuous times when the future of not just the banks but the worlds financial system was in jeopardy seems to have faded away from public consciousness.

Until now that is.

JPMorgans debacle is but a stark reminder that little has changed since the 2008 world financial crisis in terms of how banks operate and that the world is still held to ransom by rogue traders and others who risk shareholders funds and depositors money as easily and as nonchalantly as spinning the dice on a gambling table for a few dollars.

The sad truth is that little has been done despite all the rhetoric to ensure that the predatory chase for profits by banks does not involve gambling with shareholders equity and deposits. Players still get away with massive profits and bonuses when they succeed and little more than slap on the wrist when things go wrong.

It is an indication of a financial world that has gone awry as players such as hedge funds effectively search for new games to play in a massive, borderless casino where the uninitiated are quickly gobbled up and the others play high-stakes games in which some must become major losers.

This comment by Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who has also served as a Federal Reserve Board examiner quoted in the New York Times aptly sums up JPMorgans mistake:

JPMorgan Chase has a big hedge fund inside a commercial bank. They should be taking in deposits and making loans, not taking large speculative bets.

The trades by JPMorgan are complex to say the least and no one really seems to understand them. The New York Times reported that the complex position built by the bank included a bullish bet on an index of investment-grade corporate debt and was later paired with a bearish bet on high-yield securities.

The report further said that the trading losses suffered by JPMorgan have accelerated in recent days and have surpassed the banks initial estimate of US$2bil by at least US$1bil. Part of the reason for this is that hedge funds already know JPMorgans position is under pressure and are piling in on the opposite trade. That means the US$4bil losses anticipated may materialise sooner rather than later.

While the US$4bil loss wont threaten JP Morgans capital base, the question that must arise is what if the losses were much bigger and they could well have been. JPMorgan would most likely be considered one of those banks that cant fail and would have been rescued by the US government.

To stop exactly such situations, the Obama administration had put up the Volcker Rule named after former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker who helped formulate it but the legislation is still being hammered out. The rule basically seeks to prohibit banks from trading for their own account.

But there are exceptions and these allow banks to aggregate their positions and offset their exposures in a single hedge. Some feel that JPMorgans so-called hedge an oxymoron in this instance as it hedged nothing falls into that category but others dont.

For most of us, the solution is quite simple and straightforward if you are a bank and you take depositors money, you got no business speculating using that money, especially since you also have access to low-cost funds from the Fed and elsewhere by virtue of being a bank.

But it is an election year in the US and the silly season of course, much like it is here.

Remember, free enterprise and the capitalist system on which the US is built. You cant restrict free enterprise, the reasoning goes, even if it is your money the bank is using.

Big business has big money and they are using that to try and put Mitt Romney into the White House. If that happens, then it may well be bye-bye to banking sector reform which would be bad for the United States and the world.

New York Times columnist and renowned economist Paul Krugman was very blunt in his analysis of the JPMorgan debacle at the end of which he basically thanked JPMorgan Chases chief executive Jamie Dimon for confirming that the banking sector needs greater regulation.

Krugman, an unashamed and unabashed Democrat, has been one of those opinion makers who has been consistently calling for greater regulation of the US financial sector in the wake of world financial crisis.
JPMorgan, relatively unscathed by the world financial crisis sparked off by the subprime crisis but now in trouble through a trade engineered by a trader in London known as The Whale, is a timely reminder that little has been done to stop the recurrence of another world financial crisis.

Let us take heed before it is too late.

A QUESTION OF BUSINESS By P. GUNASEGARAM starbiz@thestar.com.my
Independent consultant and writer P Gunasegaram sometimes thinks that the financial world is just one whole, big, casino of unimagined proportions. The trouble is no one knows who owns it.

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Sunday 13 May 2012

Politics and religion a bad mix !


People who go to places of worship are united in their faith and never for a particular political party or politician.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has landed himself in a controversy by declaring his support for same-sex marriage. The US President has obviously taken into account the political impact of his move ahead of the US presidential election.

He must have done his maths and worked out the number of votes he could win and lose as a result of his stand. Obama is no angel. He is a politician and his only concern is to get himself re-elected.
Official photographic portrait of US President...
Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week, a Gallup Poll Survey showed that 50% of Americans supported gay marriage while 48% opposed it. What Obama hopes to do from his announcement is to win over the younger voters who are more open to this subject. His rival, Republican’s Mitt Romney, has come under attack from the Obama camp for being out of touch with his anti-gay marriage stand.

Obama also believes that blacks will still stick with him even though opposition against gay marriage among black church-goers is the highest among all the racial groups in the US. He retains the black votes and wins extra votes from the white liberals, and he knows he’s into his second term.

But I do not think it is necessary for Obama to invoke his Christian faith as well as Scripture in his defence of gay marriage.

He is not only the first American president to reaffirm same-sex marriage but must also be the first one to quote from the Bible to justify his decision. In this instance, he quoted Matthew 7:12, known as the Golden Rule from Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount.

The Sermon On The Mount is a collection of sayings and teachings of Jesus that emphasises moral teaching in the Gospel of Matthew. The Sermon is the longest piece of teaching from Jesus in the New Testament.

In a nutshell, the Golden Rule states that one should treat others the way one wants to be treated. My Bible states the Golden Rule paragraph as: “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”

What Obama has done, like many politicians and their supporters including those in Malaysia, is to read selectively a passage or chapter from a holy book to back their political arguments – political expediency, in other words.

Worse still, some Obama supporters have written about or appeared on TV to point out how some figures in the Bible were polygamists or adulterers while conveniently leaving out the parts that these people eventually repented and found God. They can get away with this because most of us feel inadequate to take on a debate on theology.

Holy books are supposed to be read as a whole, not as a chapter or two, to enable us to have a complete understanding.

Obama, for example, has even implied that the Apostle Paul’s objection to homosexuality in the Bible “is less than transparent” and perhaps even at odds with Jesus. I am not sure if Obama, whose campaign theme is Change, is planning to change the Scripture.

In Malaysia, we are used to reading and hearing PAS leaders – politicians masquerading as theologians – quoting from the Quran to justify their political positions. Umno leaders are often criticised as “pharaohs” from the Age of Ignorance – kejahilan – before the age of Islam.

But now there is a trend among some Malaysian church leaders and Christian-based writers, who support Pakatan Rakyat, to quote from Scripture to justify the need to vote against the government in the coming general election.

This is done during Sunday sermons and via email, and those who are uncomfortable with this religious push are being made to feel guilty or not in sync with the rest of the church. Likewise, nobody wants to listen to a priest or pastor on a Sunday heaping praises on the Barisan Nasional or telling us about the coalition’s transformation plans. We will leave that to the Prime Minister and Datuk Seri Idris Jala.

Politics and religion should not be mixed. People who go to places of worship are united in their faith and never for a particular political party or politician. That’s why we are in a democracy and that’s why we have elections – the right to differ and the right to choose.

The lesson to learn from the Obama controversy is this – the first time around, he was a fresh personality and people around the US wanted change. They were fed up with anything conventional and mainstream. Obama represented hope and ideals.

But the fact is, he is not a Saviour. He is just another self-serving politician who will do anything for self-preservation.

First, it was same-sex civil union. Now it’s same-sex marriage and once that’s legal, same-sex couples would have the constitutional rights to adopt babies from orphanages, and churches will break the law if they reject performing wedding rites for them.

Well, that’s change for you from Obama.

On The Beat  By WONG CHUN WAI\

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