From OJ to OJT - 'Savlanut*' America!

You may soon be sick of hearing about health care.

Again the Obama plan is to subsidize government, get the government camel's nose under the tent. The government plan will initially be cheaper and, thus, likely to draw more and more into the system. Then wham, down the road the door will slam and you will be in a government controlled health system with all the wonderful bureaucratic benefits if you can find any.

A better approach might be to offer a government health program for those who cannot afford any health care and who are currently without insurance. Subsidize it and leave the current system as it is. Then build government run and staffed clinics for those under the government program with referral to existing hospitals.

This would satisfy the uninsured, leave the current system as it is and probably cost less in the long run. (See 1 below.)

More about Iran's potential to make nuclear weapons. (See 2 below.)

Lieberman as Israel's FM presents a huge problem for Netanyahu. It is a shame Livni and Netanyahu could not form a unity government for the sake of stability at this critical period in Israel's history. (See 3 below.)

Mark Steyn sees purposeful behaviour in Obama's actions and his 'dissing' of Gordon Brown. Steyn claims Obama's down beat message is part of his vital strategy to impose his health care plan, big government and green agenda. (See 4 and 4a below.)

Obama's 'pinata' grows? (See 5 below.)

Perversely the steeper the depression the more clean air? As dirty businesses shutter the air is cleaner or so this editorial writer claims. (See 6 below.)

American's are an impatient lot for sure. So take two aspirins and give the administration more time says Orszag. Headlines have taken us from O.J. to OJT! (See 7 below.)

Obama'a Taliban Outreach Progam and Saudi backing. (See 8 below.)


Dick

1) Health care debate to flood airwaves
By Sean Lengell

Who can be against affordable, quality health care? Want easy access to the doctor of your choice? Who doesn't? And who can say no to better innovations in medicine and medical devices?

Get used to these rhetorical queries. As the health care reform debate cranks up in the coming months, advocacy groups will spend millions of advertising dollars waging a public relations war of words to try to sway the American public - as well as Capitol Hill and the White House.

At stake is a multibillion-dollar industry poised for an unprecedented overhaul at the hands of President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

"Clearly, any change in health care policy will impact each of us ... so our plan is to make sure the American public knows what's going on," said Richard L. Scott, chairman of Conservatives for Patients' Rights, which on Tuesday launched its first multimedia ad buy in a yearlong campaign he said may cost him $20 million.

Mr. Scott, who made a fortune running the Columbia Hospital Corp. and who supports free-market principles in health care, said ad campaigns such as his play a pivotal role in helping influence the voting public.

"While Congress will be voting on this, and the president will sign a bill, I believe it's the American public that will decide what the bill is going to have in it," Mr. Scott said.

Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress have said they want to pass separate health care reform packages by summer's end and deliver a final version to the president by his end-of-year deadline.

The health care reform debate took center stage Thursday, as Mr. Obama invited dozens of lawmakers, health care providers, insurers and other stakeholders to a four-hour White House health care summit.

Though there was ample talk of bipartisanship and plenty of praise for the president's initiative in bringing varying groups involved in health care together to discuss the matter, the issue of government-run care was one of the major fault lines exposed during the day's events.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, who attended the summit, said his party colleagues "have serious concerns about the plan outlined in the president's budget."

"Taxpayers cannot afford to subsidize a bureaucratic takeover of health care," he said.

But Mr. Obama tried to reassure those worried that he will bring "socialized" health care to the nation, saying that under his plan, "if somebody has insurance that they like, they should be able to keep that insurance. If they have a doctor that they like, they should be able to keep that doctor." He added Americans would pay less for health care than they do now.

The debate is expected to be significantly more intense and expensive than the last big push at health care reform in 1993 by the Clinton administration.

What's also clear is that liberal groups touting universal health care will be better organized, aggressive and well-funded this time around compared with 16 years ago, when the now legendary "Harry and Louise" TV ads attacked then-President Clinton's proposed health care overhaul. The lobbying group Health Insurance Association of America, which ran the ads, spent $10 million on the campaign that was widely credited as playing a key role in killing the proposal.

"The [liberal] groups will be outspent again, but it won't be as bad," said Len Nichols, director of health policy at the New America Foundation, a centrist Washington think tank.

But Mr. Nichols added that the winning side wouldn't necessarily be the one that spends the most money.

"I don't think it's really about spending - it's about which arguments are going to resonate with the American people," he said. "That's why they pay those [public relations] firms beaucoup money."

Tom Miller, a health care policy scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed, saying the debate won't be won or lost by paid advertising.

"Spending [on all sides of the debate] is not going to be at the level of a presidential campaign," Mr. Miller said. "Obviously, there are some resources being spent on one side of the equation, but it's premature to put any numbers out."

Mr. Miller also disputed claims that the "Harry and Louise" ads were a decisive factor in sinking the Clinton health care proposal, saying it was doomed weeks before the ads hit the airwaves.

With no plan yet unveiled to praise or criticize, most advertisements thus far have been generic, focusing mostly on the need for reform that covers as many Americans as possible without bankrupting federal coffers.

The current situation has led to a seemingly odd coalition representing such divergent health care stakeholders as the pharmaceutical industry, consumers and doctors, as well as an insurance company and health organizations. The partnership last month launched a multimillion-dollar TV ad campaign to thank Congress for passing a children's health insurance measure and to encourage lawmakers to work together to address further health care reform legislation.

Mr. Nichols said the coalition is understandable because all players in the debate have a common goal: fixing the nation's broken health care system.

"Stakeholders realize that this system we've got probably is not sustainable," he said. "If we do nothing, we're going to have to cut the Medicare benefit package a lot or raise taxes a lot. Neither one of those is popular, and no politician wants to be in the party that's in charge of telling the people that."

Mr. Miller added that because no one wants to be left out of the debate, it makes sense for groups to pool their resources and work together while they await more details on a plan from Capitol Hill and the White House.

"I like to call them the 'Stockholm syndrome' survivors," he said. "They feel like if they leave the prison yard [alone], it could get dangerous for them."

"Right now, it's more favorable and more worthwhile for these varying interests to say, 'I want to make sure I don't get slashed or harder hit than my other competitors, and maybe if I stay part of a team, it won't be terrific, but I'll pick up some extra business, and it could be worse.'"

2) Washington experts: Iran has fissile material for 50 nuclear bombs


Washington sources quote experts familiar with the Iranian program maintain that it is far more advanced than the US and Israeli governments are willing to admit.

On March 4, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a paper with two important disclosures:

1. Iran has enough fissile material available for making up to 50 nuclear bombs. One of the paper's authors, William Schneider, undersecretary of state in the Reagan administration, who has made a study of Iran and its nuclear strategy, estimates that Tehran can go from low enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium in a relative brief period of time, perhaps a year or so.

Israel's current leaders, while evading action to curb a nuclear-armed Iran, now go about saying that the Jewish state can live in its shadow. They discount the crude threats coming from Iran and argue that Israel is not really the Islamic Republic primary objective; its true goal is subjugation of the Sunni Muslim world.

Another part of this argument is that Tehran will not go into production of single bombs but wait until it can produce batches of 10-15 bombs or nuclear warheads.

This proposition is knocked over by the Washington think tank's report and the briefing delivered to the Israeli cabinet by Israel's intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, Sunday, March 8.

Both confirm that Iran is no more than months away from being able to start a nuclear stockpile.

2. Schneider estimates that Israel will face the moment of no-return on action against a nuclear-armed Iran when Russia begins delivering sophisticated S-300 missile interceptors to Tehran. Not if but when, he says, although Israeli officials suggest the Russian-Iran deal has not been finalized.

The US experts' presumption is that these interceptors once installed will make it almost impossible for the US or Israel to attack Iran's nuclear sites.

3) World takes dim view of Lieberman in FM post
By Natasha Mozgovoya, Assaf Uni and Yoav Stern



American and European officials have thus far declined to comment publicly on the expected appointment of Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister. Behind the scenes, however, many officials are asking whether this appointment is really necessary - and newspapers on both continents are criticizing the move openly.

The official position in Washington is that Barack Obama's administration will work with whatever Israeli government is ultimately established. Beyond that, American officials are keeping mum.

But the "Lieberman question" continually arises in State Department briefings for journalists and in other forums. And opinion columns in the American press have presented Lieberman in an extremely negative light, with comparisons to Austria's Joerg Haider and even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, (both use "ultranationalist rhetoric of hate," one paper charged).


No American official is likely to convene a press conference publicly condemning Lieberman's appointment. However, such a choice will almost certainly encourage the U.S. administration to keep its distance from Benjamin Netanyahu's government, as Washington will not want to take the flak absorbed by demonstrating closeness to a government whose public face is widely considered to be a racist.

Moreover, the potential for conflict is already obvious. Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the region last week speaking of the importance of resuming Israeli-Syrian negotiations, Lieberman was publicly declaring that he saw no point in talking with Syrian President Bashar Assad as long as the latter continues to support anti-Israel terrorist organizations.

In Europe, too, officials are keeping quiet, but the matter has been widely discussed in the press.

"Avigdor Lieberman is an anti-diplomat," proclaimed an article in the French daily Le Figaro. "His divisive statements and his 'anti' attitude have helped him gain the image of a dangerous radical."

The German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung described Yisrael Beiteinu as an "anti-Arab" party, while the weekly Der Spiegel recalled on its web site that Lieberman had advocated using the same force in the Gaza Strip that Russia used in Chechnya.

European papers in general have reported widely on Lieberman's new role as kingmaker, and have reminded their readers of his statements in favor of transferring Israeli Arab towns to the Palestinian Authority and making Arab citizens of Israel swear a loyalty oath.

In the Arab world, there has also been no official reaction as yet to the possibility of Lieberman becoming foreign minister.

However, it is clear that this would cause great discomfort in the two Arab states with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations - Egypt and Jordan.

Jordan has refused for years to invite Israel's foreign minister to Amman, meaning Lieberman's appointment would not mark a change in Jordanian policy.

In Egypt, however, the change is liable to be more noticeable. Though senior Egyptian officials have refused to comment publicly on the matter on the grounds that it is an internal Israeli issue, in the past, several of them have described Lieberman as "racist" and "rude."

Cairo was particularly incensed by Lieberman's statement several years ago that should Arab countries launch an attack on Israel, Israel would be justified in responding by bombing Egypt's Aswan Dam, among other targets. Egypt was also infuriated by his statement in the Knesset last October that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak "could go to hell."

Asked at the time for a response to the latter, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki told Haaretz that Lieberman's comments should not be dignified with a response.

Lieberman's "anti-Egyptian and anti-Arab sentiments," Zaki added, "are well known."

4)The Great Destabilization: Can America, the engine of the global economy, pull the rest of the world out of the quicksand?
By Mark Steyn

British prime minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African-American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.


And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure — Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Sound of Music — though this sort of collection always slips in a couple of Dude, Where’s My Car? 3 and Police Academy 12 just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players.

It could be worse. The president might have given him the DVD of He’s Just Not That Into You. Gordon Brown landed back in London a sadder but wiser man. The Fleet Street correspondents reported sneeringly that he (and they) had been denied the usual twin-podia alternating-flags press conference. The Obama administration had supposedly penciled one in for the Rose Garden, but then there was that catastrophic snowfall (a light dusting). This must be the first world leaders’ press conference to be devastated by climate change. No doubt President Obama could have relocated it to a prestigious indoor venue, like the windowless room round the back of the White House furnace in Sub-Basement Level 5. But why bother? Some freak flood would have swept through and washed the prime minister and his DVD set into the Potomac and out to the Atlantic. And by the time the Coast Guard fished him out, the sodden classic movies wouldn’t work in any American DVD player any better than in the Brit one.

He did, however, get to give an almost entirely unreported address to Congress. U.S. legislators greeted his calls to resist protectionism with a round of applause, and then went back to adding up how much pork in the “Buy American” section of the stimulus bill would be heading their way.

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse. From Canada to India, the implications of the Obama ascendancy are becoming painfully clear. The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called “Why Obamania Isn’t the Answer,” which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some bigshot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a “European American.” Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn’t need any actual European Europeans getting in the way — just as, at his big victory-night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn’t need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn’t want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand — which isn’t unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit-bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America’s trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

And that was before Obama made clear that for him the economy takes a very distant back seat to the massive expansion of government for which it provides cover. That’s why he’s indifferent to the plummeting Dow. The president has made a strategic calculation that, to advance his plans for socialized health care, “green energy,” and a big-government state, it’s to his advantage for things to get worse. And, if things go from bad to worse in America, overseas they’ll go from worse to total societal collapse. We’ve already seen changes of government in Iceland and Latvia, rioting in Greece and Bulgaria. The great destabilization is starting on the fringes of Europe and working its way to the Continent’s center.

We’re seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of. But whatever piece you grabbed — exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia — it’s all crumbling. Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can’t take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. And the fellows who’ll be picking up the tab are the Western European banks who loaned them all the money. Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: “I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”? Oh, perish the thought. The prime minister flew 8,000 miles for dinner and a movie. But the president says he’ll call. Next week. Next month. Whatever.

4a) Snubbing Britain: Obama offends a country

Barack Obama was supposed to make the rest of the world like, if not love, America again. With his charm and sophistication, he would show our cultural superiors overseas, particularly Europe, that America had graduated from cowboy chauvinism to coffee-shop worldliness.

Then an actual European visited the White House, with the whole world watching. Oops. As the British -- or "the Brits" as the President called them during a brief press availability -- might say, the President dropped a clanger, all right.


Click for Editorials & Op-EdsOn their first official visit to the United States, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife came to the White House bearing the traditional grand gifts. The prime minister gave Obama a pen holder carved from the remains of the HMS Gannet, a warship that once ran anti-slavery missions along the African coast. The desk in the Oval Office is made from the wood of the Gannet's sister ship.

Brown also gave the President a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert's seven-volume authorized biography of Winston Churchill. This was apparently a response to Obama's having ungratefully sent back to England in January a bust of Churchill lent to the United States after 9/11.

Obama's gift to Brown? A box of 25 DVDs.

Then Obama canceled the customary joint press conference on account of snow and held a small press availability, leaving out more than a dozen British reporters.

The President acted bored by all of it, rotely acknowledged Britain's status as America's closest ally, and left the prime minister to go greet some Boy Scouts. The socially sensitive Britons went bonkers.

The Independent, a left-wing British newspaper, editorialized that Obama gave merely a "stale paean to the 'special relationship.' "

In a news report, it wrote, "Brown faces humiliation" and "The trip is in marked contrast to the hospitality lavished on Tony Blair by George Bush when they met for the first time."

The entire British press was inflamed with outrage that the American President had treated the prime minister of Great Britain so shabbily.

No one would have thought that George W. Bush could be made to look like a sophisticated gentleman compared to Barack Obama. But Obama just did it.



5) Obama's search for an enemy: The President keep beating the class warfare drum
By Michael Goodwin


He hasn't called anyone an "evildoer" or denounced an "axis of evil." But make no mistake: President Obama is putting together an enemies list.

Strangely, though, those on it are not terrorists or foreign dictators. They are mostly Americans lucky enough to have succeeded through capitalism and democracy.

In the President's words, they are guilty of being "special interests" and "lobbyists." The Bush-era tax cuts were merely "an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy" and he will bring fairness by raising taxes on "the wealthiest 2% of Americans."

His barbs flow almost daily, faulting corporate leaders for "greed" and shirking "a sense of responsibility." And sometimes he suggests the problem is criminal, as when he defended his plan for an expanded government push into health insurance as necessary "to keep the private sector honest."

Less than half-way through what should be a 100-day honeymoon, the Obama administration is on a war footing. Make that a class-war footing.

Sometimes the targets are critics, including two TV commentators singled out by press secretary Robert Gibbs for faulting the President's bailout plans.

Sometimes the targets are Republicans, like conservative talker Rush Limbaugh, the focus of a plan led by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to divide the GOP and score points with the Democratic base.

But the tone of the President's own attacks on industry and his spending and tax policies are increasingly worrying Wall Street and much of the business world. With the stock market reaching lows not seen in more than a decade, including a 20% drop since Inauguration Day, headlines like "Obama's bear market" are suddenly routine.

The President dismisses the growing perception he is adding to the economic pain. Asked about the markets, Obama waved them off as like a "tracking poll in politics" that "bobs up and down day to day."

It was a telling moment, for the markets on his watch have moved almost exclusively down. And the 55 million households that hold mutual funds are watching their savings and retirements vanish in great gobs.

Most are decidedly middle class, making them collateral damage of this war.

Obama himself remains popular, largely because of his charisma and because most people agree he inherited the problem. With staggering job losses and an unemployment rate now at 8.1%, the highest in 25 years, many Americans are hopeful our new President can right the ship and punish those responsible.

But Obama has expressed little interest in prosecuting those who cooked the books to make billions and undermined the financial system. Nor is he interested in rebuking Congress, including leading members of his own party, who fostered destructive lending and borrowing policies. He seems comfortable with his aides, including those who saw nothing amiss in their former roles as Wall Street players and regulators.

Instead, Obama's class-war language, most of it written into prepared speeches, looks like selective anger, calculated to stoke public emotion to build support for his expansive agenda. That agenda, which revolves around a dramatic increase in Washington power, relies on tax hikes on the same successful businesses and individuals he denounces.

First he demonizes them, then he taxes them.

And always, he makes liberal use of bogeymen. On Friday, as he stood before a class of 25 police cadets in Columbus, Ohio, hired with federal stimulus money, the President delivered a standard attack line against unnamed dissenters. "They opposed the very notion that government has a role in ending the cycle of job loss at the heart of this recession," he said.

Actually, few if any critics advocated doing nothing. But never mind. Being President means you don't have to let the facts get in the way of a plan to divide and conquer.

6)The Recession’s Green Lining: A global downturn is doing what activists couldn't: closing dirty factories.
By Sharon Begley


To savvy snowboarders, Baikalsk has long been the beautiful resort where visitors are so few you can feel as though you own the mountain, at least temporarily: for about 5,000 rubles ($175), you can have exclusive use of one of the six long runs for the day and never see another soul as you schuss through forests. Of course, you've had to tolerate a smell that seemed to be a blend of rotten cabbage and New Jersey Turnpike. For in addition to the resort, this town on Siberia's Lake Baikal—the oldest, largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world—is home to the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, which has been belching foul-smelling sulfates into the air and chlorides, phenols and other chemicals into the lake since it was built during the Cold War. The pollution killed plants, crabs and fish and threatened the world's only freshwater seal, the earless nerpa. Environmentalists have been trying to shut down the mill since 1964, getting precisely nowhere. But where greens failed, the global recession succeeded all too well. In November, the plant ceased production. "The economic crisis," says Marina Rikhvanova, the head of the environmental group Baikal Wave, worked "like magic."

It is no coincidence that some of the dirtiest industrial operations are falling victim to the global recession. Over the past two decades, much of the world's manufacturing moved to where pollution standards are little more than mild suggestions. Since small, corner-cutting, inefficient facilities tend to both flout pollution laws and be most vulnerable to a sudden drop in demand, the global recession has hit such operations especially hard. Thousands of factories in China's Pearl River Delta have shut their doors since late last year, for instance; output of autos, electronics and other goods from factories in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Toluca has fallen so sharply that the amount of cargo trucked across the U.S. border has dropped 40 percent. In India, enough small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have closed that levels of sulfur dioxide (which forms acid rain) fell 85 percent in October 2008 compared with a year earlier. The recession is bringing a green dividend in the developed world, too. Reduced economic activity is projected to cut Europe's emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made greenhouse gas, by 100 million tons in 2009, and the United States' by about the same amount.

Recession is not exactly a long-term environmental strategy, obviously. The challenge is to use the downturn to deemphasize manufacturing in favor of cleaner economic activity, and to reengineer what survives so that when the economy revs up it's not at the environment's expense. Even world-class polluters get it. In China, as factories seek lines of credit to see them through the downturn, local governments are "less likely to help companies that are considered major polluters," says economist Deng Yupeng of Dongguan University.

At Baikal, the post-recession economy is poised to undergo a more radical shift, from pulping trees to serving tourists. One weekend in February the mountain was packed with skiers and snowboarders. Resort manager Yury Shiriak says that in December they had 7,000 visitors, compared with the usual 1,000. "Baikalsk will slowly transfer from an industrial place hated by ecologists into a tourist paradise," he predicts. It will help that the air and water are already cleaner. Only three months after the mill closed, locals already noticed a change. "We are so used to pollution, to the smell of rotting cabbage," said Andrei Pylukh, an artist. "The fresh air feels unusual. I see so many more birds on the lake and in my garden." The challenge for Baikalsk is to invest in hotels, restaurants and other labor-intensive, less-polluting businesses so the mill remains a permanent victim of the green recession but the town—which lost 2,300 jobs when the mill closed—doesn't.

The impact of China's slowing economic growth (6.8 percent in the fourth quarter last year but 13 percent in 2007) has hit hardest in cities in the export-heavy south such as Dongguan. There, roughly 10 percent of the 22,000 factories have closed since last year. In Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai, at least 60,000 small factories are shuttered. Survivors have slashed production and grounded fleets of diesel-fume-belching trucks. As a result, streams where factories dumped their waste are getting cleaner and the air is less smoggy. In 2008, the number of days with dangerous levels of air pollution in Dongguan fell by 65 from the year before, mostly in the final months of the year. "When there's less work, there's less release of sewage and trash, so environmental pressures have eased," says environmental scientist Liu Zhiming of Dongguan University of Technology.

But as in Baikalsk, the challenge is what to do when orders pick up again. If factories ramp up to 2007 production and pollution levels, the time-out offered by the green recession will have been wasted. There are hints that that might happen. Factory owners in China and elsewhere argue that their top priority should be job preservation, and that spending money on pollution controls or switching to renewable energy has to wait. In Guangdong province, factory owners are lobbying the government to roll back environmental standards that, they argue, have made them uncompetitive with Southeast Asia. And factory managers, under pressure to cut costs, know they can reap easy savings by turning off smokestack scrubbers and dumping waste rather than treating it.

But these may be the last gasps of dying industries. There are also signs that China, which has acknowledged that environmental damage had become a drag on the economy, may use the recession to retool part of its manufacturing sector. Some of a 4 trillion–yuan ($585 billion) stimulus package is targeted at projects that will improve energy efficiency, including wind and solar energy to power the "green economy" that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called for. The Ministry of Environmental Protection reportedly rejected 11 projects because they consumed too much energy or would have caused too much pollution.

For some victims of the recession, using the downturn to institute greener practices is more of a challenge. About two thirds of Brazil's 200 million head of cattle graze in the Amazon where virgin forest once stood, making cattle the single biggest cause of deforestation there. Now falling beef prices (down 51 percent over the past 12 months) plus the shortage of farm credit have done what "save the rainforest" campaigns didn't: give Amazonia a reprieve. "The economic downturn is a natural brake on forest destruction," says Carlos Nobre, a climatologist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. The rate of deforestation from last November through January, the institute just announced, fell 70 percent from the same period a year before. The environment minister believes that's a result of greater enforcement, however, not of the recession's effect on ranchers. But you can say this for the downturn: it's much easier to enforce forest-protection laws when ranchers aren't all that eager to chop down the jungle.

8) Obama's outreach to Taliban backed by intensive Saudi-brokered contacts


Agents of Saudi intelligence chief Prince Mogrin Abdul Aziz have paved the way for Richard Holbrooke's mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan as Barack Obama's special envoy.

This initiative also laid the groundwork for US president Barack Obama's hint at possible talks with moderate Taliban elements to The New York Times Sunday, March 8, a month after he approved another 17,000 troops for Afghanistan.

Karzai welcomed the move saying he had long supported dialogue with Taliban members who are not connected with terrorists.

The Saudis launched their mediation bid when Mullah Omar and party secretly visited Saudi Arabia in the guise of early Ramadan pilgrims. His two senior companions were Aghajan Mutasim and Abdul Hakim Mujahid.

Karzai was represented by his older brother Qayum

In two audiences, King Abdullah promised that if the Taliban pledged to stop fighting and joined the Afghan civilian government, it could count on Saudi political and financial support for its role in the Kabul administration.

That Mullah Omar was willing to travel to the kingdom while fighting US-led forces alongside Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda was taken in Washington and Riyadh as a hopeful sign that a breakthrough was possible toward a negotiated end to the conflict.

In his New York Times interview, Obama admitted the US was not winning the war.

Washington sources noted it took four weeks into his presidency for Obama to put in his first phone call to Karzai on Tuesday, Feb. 17. "It had become necessary," they said, "to pour oil on relations marred in recent weeks by leaked hints in the US media that the administration was looking for ways to remove the Afghan president."

Vice president Joe Biden and other advisers had been pressing Obama to get rid of Karzai quickly - even if this meant postponing the August presidential elections. But Holbrooke, who departed Kabul for New Delhi in the middle of the week with a comprehensive South Asia peace plan, warned the US president that ditching the Afghan president at this juncture would be unwise and could put the peace track with Taliban at risk. He urged Obama to stick with Karzai and show him a willingness to cooperate.

Vice president Joe Biden will report on the Afghanistan situation with NATO allies in Brussels Monday, March 9, laying the ground for the president's discussion early next month at the G20 summit in London and the EU-US summit in Prague.

The United States has called for a high level international conference to map out a new strategy on Afghanistan to which all its neighbors would be invited, including Iran.



* Savlanut is an Israeli expression and it means cool it, ie be patient.