Reading room

From Obama and Geithner, no real fixes for fraudonomics. Matt Taibbi questions whether the executive is serious about dealing with systemic financial abuses.

The Nation looks at how climate change became a key plank in the anarcho-capitalist kulturkampf, and whether we're willing to pay the price to save our planet.

Speaking of capitalism, Matt Stoller, author of Naked Capitalism, points out ideological problems that Ron Paul highlights for the liberal establishment. (I tend to think that Stoller oversells the efficacy of Paul's critique of central authority's expression in military-industrial terms, but it's a good, brief essay about a thousand times more coherent and less cherry-picked than Glenn Greenwald's customary hate-on for Obama that linked to it.)

Similar to Stoller's discussion of historical plates in American liberalism, Haaretz looks at shifts in the Israeli left, in the context of the Occupy protests.

And speaking of Occupy, this (now outdated) article from The Nation, "Hard Times at Occupy Boston, looks at the problems of small self-government and describes some of the challenges that were overlooked in the national unsympathetic coverage.

The nation born at Versailles

In reading about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, both through Juan Cole and The Guardian, I keep thinking about the peace process after World War I, and how France's forcing of an extremely punitive settlement at Versailles basically crystalized German nationalism. Of course, it's not like Bismark did it differently when he beat the French.

But the Fatah/Palestinian Authority faction seems to have already made all the concessions they could without alienating the polity they nominally serve, and without a drastic reduction in American military aid, Israel has no need to consider making real concessions in return, because the occupation of Palestine is an acceptable status quo for them — especially given that any peace process, especially one that is so lopsided, won't likely reduce the amount of political violence from the Islamic nihilists in Hamas.

I realize it's a semi-fatuous comparison, but Israel reminds me the bullied kids often turn around to become bullies.