Charles Cogan: The End of “Solutions of Facility”?

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One of the meanings of “facility” in English is now rare: “a tendency to be easygoing, yielding, etc.” But in French, “facilité” is very much a live word. “Solutions of facility,” which Charles de Gaulle inveterately decried, means taking the easy way out. This the United States has done with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” for the last 40-plus years, indeed since the Six Day War of 1967.

Bland statements to the effect that the international community does not recognize the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem, or flaccid pronouncements that the building of settlements in the Arab West Bank are “unhelpful” for the peace process, have essentially been all that Washington has been able to muster by way of reining in its Middle East ally.

Is this now changing? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has remained—so far—very much on Barack Obama’s playbook, has described the president’s position in categorical terms: “He wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he has now accepted—grudgingly and with caveats—a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, nevertheless cannot accept ruling out “natural growth” in settlements. After all, babies are babies! They keep coming!

James D. Zirin: Global News on the Internet — Always a Free Lunch?

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The contours of the global media market have undeniably changed. There is too much evidence to deny it. Print journalism is on its way out, taking its place alongside the one-horse shay. Online news and comment is in.

In America, the venerable Christian Science Monitor now publishes its weekday editions online with a weekly print version claimed to have “unique” content. Seattle’s Post Intelligencer recently closed its printing presses in favor of an exclusively online edition. The two jointly operated Detroit dailies, the Free Press and the News, just ended home deliveries on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays and directed doorstep readers to their respective web sites. Globally, but for a few South American and Asian markets, newspapers continue to cut back or close. In England, just this month, owners slated nine local newspapers for closure, and South Africa’s oldest independent paper, Grocott’s Mail, has shuttered its press room.

Web journalism has become the order of the day. Gone soon will be the tactile experience of the daily newspaper. Web-based editions of five daily newspapers, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Financial Times are offered on Amazon’s Kindle at heavy discounts off the newsstand price, and others will likely soon follow suit. The digital generation simply doesn’t do “tactile.”

The reasons for all this, as everyone knows, are economic. Paid circulation for print is down; just as advertising revenues are down. This may be a result of the global downturn, which has caused many advertisers to slash budgets. But it is in large measure, as well, a tribute to the loss of readers to the Internet. Moreover, no one knows how effective print advertising  really is. A classified want ad in a small community newspaper may produce the desired responses, but the ad will cost more in print than a free posting on Craigslist. The undeniable reality is that national bread-and-butter advertising is better targeted on the Net. As John Wanamaker, father of the department store and of modern advertising famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Wanamaker’s statement may not apply to click-and-pay business models on the Internet where effectiveness of the advertising dollar is much more predictable, and ads  are much more sharply targeted to customers  according to geographic location, buying propensities or affluence.

Heidar Gudjonsson: What is the way out for Iceland?

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With its currency down over 70 percent in two years, with 90 percent of its financial sector collapsed, and with its stock index down 95 percent over the same period, what can Iceland do?

The political discussion has been confusing at best, and the chaos in the economy is not helping.  Iceland was hit with a triple crisis: first a currency crisis that started in 2006, then a financial/economic crisis that started in October 2008, and finally a political crisis as of this year.

The public is angry and confused, but there is a clear lack of leadership and constructive debate within the country. Some people argue that joining the European Union would be the only way out. After Iceland joins the EU, some of the government would be effectively outsourced and a new currency could be introduced by joining the European Monetary Union (EMU).  What this argument overlooks is the time factor. Negotiations with the EU would never take less than one year. Then all the existing 27 members of the Union would need to approve Iceland as a new member. There is currently a waiting list, and Iceland could not be fast-tracked to the front of that list. In fact, given the many problems that the EU is having as it is, the process may take three to four years, at best.

To join the EMU, Iceland would need to fulfill the Maastricht criteria of low and stable inflation. But here the track record of Iceland is anything but impressive, having consistently volatile and high inflation of at least twice the criteria, over the internationally low inflation period of past two decades. Iceland would also need to have a very low budget deficit, something the current leftist government is hardly going to meet (the target is below 3 percent but the current deficit is 10 percent). The last big obstacle is government debt.  With the current IceSave agreement, which the government is pushing the parliament to approve, the Maastricht target would be impossible to reach for the next decade or so.

Belinda Cooper: Letter from Berlin — Just the Usual Economic Woes, Plus Culture

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At the train station near where I stay in Berlin, there’s a snack vending machine, one that I can only imagine here in Germany. In among the colorfully-packaged chocolates and chips waiting in neat lines, there’s a row of thin, yellow booklets, each one different, that you can buy for one euro. Press the button, and out comes literature—stories and poems, mainly by little-known authors, published by SuKultur, a small Berlin publishing house. Some of them are quite good. That’s commuting in Berlin: You can buy a snack, or literature.

Reading material was pretty important on the train this past week, because the S-Bahn (Berlin’s overground city train, a part of the German national railway system that also receives subsidies from the city government) was unusually crowded and uncomfortable—a result of an inspection that found many of the cars’ wheels in urgent need of repair and immediately took hundreds of them out of commission. They had been neglected, it seems, due to cost-cutting measures: a reduction in personnel and equipment aimed primarily at increasing the railway’s profitability. This time it wasn’t Berlin’s fault, but the city is chronically short of money and is also saving where it can.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Berlin was a paradox—a heavily subsidized showcase for capitalism—and it’s never quite seemed to get the hang of frugality since the subsidies ended. As the S-Bahn’s top managers were being fired, the papers were reporting that Berlin was about to increase its outlays for culture by 16 million euros (certainly a lovely commentary on priorities).

I can’t speak for Frankfurt, where the stock market is, or for the industrial centers of western Germany, where plants are closing or going to government-subsidized, part-time work, but in the capital of Berlin, which has little industry to speak of and has been claiming bankruptcy for years, no one’s really talking about the economy. (A friend who has recently traveled in western Germany assures me that the situation is no different in cities like Hamburg and Munich.)

There are various theories about this, but to me, it’s not too hard to explain. As we’ve all heard by now, Germany actually has a social safety net. Despite reductions in recent years, it’s still the case that no German has to go without health insurance after losing a job, people’s pensions are not privatized, and since Germans tend to rent rather than own—a result of tenant-friendly laws and good public housing—there isn’t much danger of losing your home. People are not suffering personally any more than usual, unlike Americans. The social welfare system works, so far.