Martin Meenagh blog

More than Slouching towards a Crisis Things are picking up pace now. For the past year, I've been sounding (I know) like some 'moaning weirdo' about the very real issues that the West faces. I can of course do nothing about them, I am, like the vast majority of the inhabitants of the world impotent in the face of things. I have eyes to see, though, and at least this odd combination of commonplace book and diary that a blog is can put that down for you, should you wish to plough on. The present collapse of our souffle economy is just a preliminary to an absolutely inevitable adjustment. We have had eight years of deficits, spending growth, and the mortgaging of the British and American states to over indebted economies. The banks, if one looks at the rates of interest they impose upon loans to each other, and to their attempt to retract their own exposure to the global economy, have seen it coming for some time. Sovereign funds in the east are not a sign of the east's gr...

Fighting Pirates; is Obama being set up for a test stranger than fiction? The painting is Breughel's Fall of Icarus. Sometimes, history is much better than science fiction. All of the following facts and most of the arguments are true. Two hundred years ago, international shipping was menaced by the growth of a piratical federation centred upon Tripoli. Previously, the pirates had been kept in check for the better part of a millennium by an old order of Knights . The charismatic general, Napoleon, on his way to becoming Emperor, betrayed and broke the Knights in their island stronghold, Malta, in 1798. France and England then turned to their own world-struggle. The American Vice President, bitterly opposed to his President and who had negotiated a way of living with the pirates, became concerned at their freedom of manoeuvre. One of history's great secularists, he saw the menace of criminals who stole, killed and enslaved Christians on sight for what they were. On becoming pres...

Pakistan Forty years ago, Robert Francis Kennedy began a presidential campaign that would kill him. He knew that there would be personal attacks upon him. He knew that he had considerable personal baggage that must have weighed on him every night and day. By all accounts, he suspected that his hard line with criminal and Cuban elements had led to the death of his brother, and, indirectly, the disasters that followed. he put himself in danger and he sought to lift and calm a troubled, tearing nation with his understanding of grief and hope. Benazir Bhutto was no Robert Kennedy. She returned when well justified allegations of theft and corruption had been lifted. Her personal party welcomed her back, and the 'democratic' elite which has been selling Pakistan out for years rubbed their hands. She had deeply unpleasant enemies in Al-Qaeda, whose response to the battering of the Taleban in Afghanistan is to shake its tendrils across the border. She had the sinister Intelligence serv...

What is the British Parliament these days? Mr Gerry Adams, a Member of Parliament, and a Member of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, and a Member of Sinn Fein , is seeking a seat in the Dail Eireann . What prodigious and explosive energy he must have secreted away. Many excited commentators seem to think that he will not resign his westminster seat and will, consequently, be the first member of both elected legislatures since partition; I qualify the point since I'm fairly sure that Seamus Mallon and Brid Rodgers were nominated to the Senead, though not at the same time they were MPs. Mallon famously lost a case on a related point in the ECHR. Dr Ian Paisley, a sonic consultant from the textual world, was also more or less an Irish member of the European Parliament as well as a Westminster man for a long time, as I recall. The Adams development would fit neatly with the Irish presidency, which has a history of occupation by individuals not necessarily from the Republic, as...

The Korean Imbroglio and Asian thoughts I've spent a good part of the day talking with a very beautiful woman about Korea and I think that I am beginning to get what is going on in the Peninisula, though I pretend to no special knowledge. I'm trying to learn the language and am picking up bits and pieces, as I've blogged before . Roh moo-hyun , the former president who died in a fall and who is revered by many Koreans, both of conservative and democratic disposition, has been given a funeral this past week that has convulsed South Korea . Mr Roh, a catholic democrat (and religion is an important dividing line in Korea, even down to the protestant/cholla ' antichondokyo Marxism' of the Kim family up north) was a sort of RFK figure . He was known by some as a sort of Asian Mandela. Conservative elements had tried to kill him several times. His sunshine policy with North Korea was not liked by various groups inside or outside the fiercely nationalistic peninsula but wa...

End of the Beginning Right. It's time to draw together a few threads that I have been spinning for over two years now, just to record for myself the dimensions of our accelerating crisis. I apologise to regular readers for my repetition. You'll know the points of old. There are vast global imbalances in currency and trade, linked now to a growing regionalisation as pressure emerges on food, oil and commodities. This pressure is a combination of the return of wealth to high saving, hard working Asians after a couple of hundred years, the emergence of peak oil, and the effect of the vast monetary expansion of the dollar on the global reserve currency. The Euro is in many ways unsustainable in its present form, and the Greeks, Spanish and Portugese are going to drag it down. Ireland is fighting and may regenerate itself. Italy should also survive, because its people save, and its products, if sold to the Asian middle classes, would allow it to retire. A demographic chill is grippi...

The Crisis in Pakistan I want to post on the unfolding crisis in Pakistan in the nest few days; but I can't do anything better than direct you, if you are interested, to the Pakistan blog . It notes that of the fourteen points put forward by General Musharraf--God, what is it about messianic presidents and their fourteen points?--, eight express his frustration at the high judiciary (of which I approve) and another four relate to the menaces created by the Pakistani inter-service intelligence group (of which I disapprove), which tends to create trouble to keep itself in business. Watch that space; the fall of Pakistan and its 160 million citizens into crisis could be a milestone in our plunge into one of history's worst crises. The arc of instability stretching from Indonesia through to the Balkans via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Arabia and Turkey into the Balkans is now smouldering. And the banks are teetering on the brink here too, and in Indonesia it's volcano day...