Why Israel Can T Win - Time Magazine

Thursday, Jan.
08, 2009
Can Israel Survive Its Assault on Gaza?

By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem
As Israeli troops encircle Gaza City, their commanders are faced with a painful dilemma: How far must they advance into the deadly labyrinth of slums and refugee camps where Hamas militants await with boobytrapped houses and snipers? With each passing day, Israel's war against Hamas grows riskier and more punishing, with the gains appearing to diminish compared to the spiraling costs to Israel's moral stature, to the lives of Palestinian civilians and to the world's hopes that an ancient conflict can ever be resolved. Ideally, in a war shaped by television images, Israelis would like a tableau of surrender: grimy Hamas commanders crawling from underground bunkers with their hands up. Instead, the deaths of at least 40 civilians taking shelter at a United Nations[EN]run school north of Gaza City are more likely to become the dominant image of the war. Israeli politicians and generals know that the total elimination of Hamas' entrenched military command could take weeks; it might be altogether impossible. The more realistic outcome is an unsatisfactory, brokered truce that leaves Hamas wounded but alive and able to regenerate and Israel only temporarily safe from attack. Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has promised a "war to the bitter end." But after 60 years of struggle to defend their existence against foreign threats and enemies within, many Israelis may be wondering, Where does that end lie? The threat posed by Hamas is only the most immediate of the many interlocking challenges facing Israel, some of which cast dark shadows over the long-term viability of a democratic Jewish state. The offensive in Gaza may degrade Hamas' ability to menace southern Israel with rocket fire, but, as with Israel's 2006 war against Hizballah, the application of force won't extinguish the militants' ideological fervor. The anti-Israeli anger swelling in the region has made it more difficult for Arab governments to join Israel in its efforts to deal with Iran, the patron of both Hamas and Hizballah and a state whose leaders have sworn to eliminate Israel and appear determined to acquire nuclear weapons. (See pictures of grief in the Middle East.) Just as ominous for many Israelis is a ticking demographic time bomb: the likelihood that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews in the land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is a catastrophic prospect for a nation that defines itself by its faith. At some point, Israelis will have to choose between living with an independent Palestinian state or watching Jews become a minority in their own land. As much as any other nation on earth, Israel is based on a dream: the aspiration to establish a home for the Jews in the birthplace of their ancestors. To a remarkable extent, that dream has been fulfilled, as Israel has grown into the most modern and democratic country in the Middle East and a dependable American ally. A strong, confident Israel is in America's interest, but so is one that can find peace with its neighbors, cooperate with the Arabs to contain common threats and, most important, reach a just and lasting solution with the Palestinians. But accomplishing all that will require Israel and its defenders to confront excruciating dilemmas: How do you make peace with those who don't seem to want it? How do you win a war when the other side believes time is on its side? And what would true security, in a hostile neighborhood populated with enemies, actually look like? As is always true in the Middle East, there are no
easy answers. But it's never been more vital that Israel start looking for them. How to Deal with Hamas The most immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. By Jan. 7, more than 700 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, had been killed. But there's something tragic, too, in Israel's predicament: in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't. Across Israel's political spectrum there seems to be a consensus that Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered though whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat is, at the least, questionable. See pictures of Israeli soldiers sweeping into Gaza. See pictures of Israel's deadly assault on Gaza. Perhaps more threatening than the rockets themselves was the doubt they cast over Israel's vaunted power of deterrence, which is key to keeping its hostile neighbors at bay. That power was badly eroded in 2006, when Hizballah was able to withstand the Israeli onslaught, force a cease-fire and claim victory in the process. That surely emboldened Hamas, which intermittently sent rockets into southern Israel and finally prompted Israel to respond in force. As respected Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority." But the cold reality is that eventually Israel may need to look not to "deal" with Hamas so much as do a deal with it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels. Hamas says it will agree to a truce if Israel retreats from Gaza and loosens the economic choke hold that has strangled the 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the sliver of land along the Mediterranean. After weeks of global outrage over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza, any mediator France, the European Union, Turkey and Egypt are all auditioning for the role will insist that Israel end its 18-month blockade. What then? Like Hizballah, Hamas will declare itself victorious: not only will it have survived a direct assault by a far superior military force, but it will also have freed Gazans from Israeli tyranny. As an added bonus, any economic revival of Gaza would put money into Hamas' coffers. But Israel would gain some breathing space and force Hamas to prove it can actually govern and maintain stability in Gaza rather than heap blame entirely on Israel. The Specter of Iran One indirect objective of the Gaza offensive might have been to warn off Israel's other nonstate militant foe: Hizballah. While the Lebanese group has been cheering on Hamas from the sidelines, it has refrained from entering the fray. Hizballah may have a stockpile of new rockets, but Israeli generals hope Gaza will serve as a cautionary example of what would happen if it used them. This is a reassuring thought, but it remains to
be tested. After all, Hizballah's rockets have only one purpose, and that is to be used against Israel. The broader aim of the Gaza war, Israeli security experts argue, was to send a message to Hamas' sponsor, Iran. It's certainly true that the assault has broken the Iranian pipeline that delivered weapons and funds to the militants. But by killing hundreds of Palestinians, Israel may have undermined its hopes of forming common cause with moderate Sunni Arab states against the nuclear ambitions of Shi'ite Iran. The Gaza offensive has greatly weakened Israel's few Arab allies. Moderate Arab countries that were edging closer to recognition of the Jewish state are now recoiling from what they see as the slaughter of fellow Arabs in Gaza. In Egypt, pro-Gaza protests turned into thinly veiled attacks on President Hosni Mubarak's rule, which has helped maintain the blockade of Gaza. The pressure may force Mubarak to support a truce that entails opening the Egypt-Gaza border as Hamas demands, but he is unlikely to soften his position on the Palestinian group that maintains links with Egyptian Islamists as well as the Iranian regime. But how far Arab states will be willing to go now to make peace with Israel is unclear. The Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Plan, which offered Israel peace with 22 Arab countries if it withdrew to its 1967 borders, will remain on the table for Israel's new PM to consider. Even Syria, a prime supporter of Hamas, spent part of 2008 in indirect peace talks with Israel mediated by Turkey. But Syria has broken off its talks for now, destroying any chance that Damascus, on behalf of Israel, might put pressure on the exiled Hamas leaders residing there. See pictures of Israeli soldiers sweeping into Gaza. See pictures of Israel's deadly assault on Gaza. Confronting the Danger Within Even in a dangerous neighborhood, it is possible to imagine that, secure in its military power, Israel could continue for years in a state of neither all-out war nor true peace, always willing to fight bitter but limited conflicts of the kind it did in Lebanon and Gaza. But military might would be useless against the threat that looms within its borders. Israel's population of 7.1 million is today divided into 5.4 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs. But if you include Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, they may already have a slender majority; and given their higher birthrate, the gap will widen quickly. This tectonic shift in demographics is what scared even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into abandoning the biblical dreams of a Greater Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. As Olmert recently warned, "If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland." In other words, if Israelis cling to the West Bank and Gaza, as many religious Zionists insist, Jews will find themselves a shrinking minority in their own state. Not only would Israel cease to be a Jewish state, it would no longer be a democratic one either, unless Arabs are given a fair share of power. A few bold Arab intellectuals are saying Palestinians should abandon the idea of a two-state solution and just wait until they outnumber the Jews. That would take decades, and it may rest more on wishful thinking by Palestinians than a real calculation of political reality. But the population shift underscores a plain fact: for Israel, the status quo won't be good enough for much longer.
A Road Map for Survival The path to a workable peace, one with a Palestinian state alongside Israel and both with internationally recognized borders, has long been well known. A succession of Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been reluctant to take it. Israelis have doubted that they had a partner who could deliver them peace; aside from being plagued by disunity, the Palestinians have been unwilling to modify their demands that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to their ancient homes inside Israel, which Israel will never accept. With a general election looming in Israel polls suggest that the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to become the next Prime Minister there is an opportunity to start talking again. Israel's leaders need to recognize that if Hamas cannot be beaten militarily, then it must be engaged politically. That means accepting the idea of dealing with some kind of Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. A coalition between Hamas and Abbas is essential for the future of a Palestinian state and for moderating Hamas' extremism. Hamas, which 18 months ago chased Abbas' men from Gaza, says it will pair up with Abbas if he, along with the international community, recognizes that the Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 elections. Israelis rightly view such claims with skepticism, and yet all Palestinians and their Arab backers reject the current situation, where the meager land set aside for a future state is chopped into two, Gaza and the West Bank, ruled by rivals. A new Administration in Washington has a chance to be both supportive of Israel and honest with it. Over the past three years, many Israelis have told me that President George W. Bush was too good a friend of theirs. He gave Israelis all they wanted but didn't rein them in when they needed it. Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that. But for 60 years, in the Holy Land, there has been a yawning gap between what was simple and what could be achieved. With reporting by Jamil Hamad / Ramallah; Aaron J. Klein / Gaza border; and Scott MacLeod / Cairo See pictures of Israeli soldiers sweeping into Gaza. See pictures of Israel's deadly assault on Gaza.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870314,00.html
Copyright 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy | Add TIME Headlines to your Site | Contact Us | Customer Service
Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009
Point Man Jim Jones

By Massimo Calabresi/Washington
When George W. Bush decided in late 2007 to make a final-year push for Middle East peace, he turned to retired Marine general James L. Jones for help. But after two months as Bush's Middle East envoy, Jones concluded that brokering a deal between Israel and the Palestinians inside of 12 months was, in his words, a "grandiose hope." So Jones turned his attention to the more modest goal of making peace in one city in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. Now Jones is about to become Barack Obama's National Security Adviser amid the worst violence between Palestinians and Israelis in eight years, and the prospects for peace seem bleaker than ever. But before the new Administration can pursue its own lofty hopes for Middle East peace, Jones will have to meet some goals closer to home. After eight years in which U.S. foreign policy often seemed the private preserve of the Vice President or an endless grudge match between State and Defense, Obama has asked Jones to rebuild a National Security Council that sorts out foreign policy disputes rather than skirts them. Working from a small, spartan office at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for another week, Jones knows he doesn't have the luxury of moving slowly. Obama will look to Jones to deliver his promised withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq in 18 months, oversee an intensification of the war in Afghanistan and sort out simmering relations with an Iran determined to pursue nuclear weapons. And he'll have to do all that by somehow forging consensus among Obama's strong-willed team of rivals: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden. "We will oversee the strategic implementation of [Obama's] decisions with a finely developed set of metrics," says Jones in the patois peculiar to those who spend 40 years as a leatherneck. Then he adds, "In a collegial way." Can he pull it off? It is telling that, by Jones' admission, he and Obama barely know each other. The President-elect picked Jones for National Security Adviser after meeting him face to face only a handful of times. In doing so, Obama is taking a calculated risk. The relationship between a President and his National Security Adviser--the person the Commander in Chief trusts to provide a candid assessment of the country's options--is crucial to success in foreign policy. Jones says that in his few meetings with Obama, he found that "[Obama] clearly is a man with really good instincts." A good part of Obama's presidency may depend on their being right about Jones. Jones, 65, was born in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in France. After graduating from Georgetown, he enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam as a company commander. He learned his political skills as the Marine liaison to the Senate in the early 1980s. Back in the field in 1991, he led a Marine expeditionary unit into northern Iraq to rescue millions of Kurdish refugees from Saddam Hussein. Two years later, he ran the U.S. aid mission to Bosnia. Jones became the top Marine in 1999. What makes Jones unusual is that after his tour as commandant came to an end, he didn't muster out. Instead, he went overseas as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, a job that since the Cold War's end has
been as much about diplomacy as about war-fighting. That's how he came to be in Obama's office in early 2005, giving the new Senator a "wave top" briefing on Russia, Africa and NATO's troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conversation lasted an hour. Jones impressed Obama with his "broad view of U.S. national-security interests, from classic military power to training missions, energy security and diplomacy," says an aide who attended the briefing. Obama struck Jones as a "very, very good listener." For the past year, Jones has been holed up at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he led a program to redefine America's energy policy. At the same time, Congress asked Jones to assess the training of Iraqi forces, a key to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. By last summer, says a close Obama aide, "General Jones was already under consideration for a top job in the Administration." Though not above spin, Jones is willing to admit things that are not to his advantage and take responsibility for his errors. At a West Wing meeting in late 2002, Bush asked each of the service chiefs whether he agreed with Donald Rumsfeld's plan for a lightly armed invasion of Iraq, and Jones said he did. When I asked him recently if, in retrospect, he should have spoken out against the plan, he said, "In hindsight, that's probably fair." Jones is equally blunt about how bad things have become in Gaza. After advocating for more realistic goals in the Middle East last year, Jones started a pilot project in the West Bank town of Jenin to organize training for Palestinian police and funding for development projects. Now he fears that his modest successes there may be undermined if the violence in Gaza continues. "I think they still believe" in peace, Jones says, but "I haven't asked that question since Gaza." It will be up to him and Obama to find the answers.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870488,00.html
The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

By Joe Klein
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantnamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency. The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked at Abu Ghraib?") It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable information. But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured first at Guantnamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner: "Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks." Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush Administration proudly produced it. Memos authorizing the use of "enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide, David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved by Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position standing stock still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two hours' sleep. But that's not going to happen. Indeed, it seems probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush
Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there's some theoretical exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I don't think there's much public appetite for that sort of action." There is, I'm told, absolutely no interest on the part of the incoming Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors. "We're focused on the future," said one of the President-elect's legal advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas one imagines the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain and arrested in London for his crimes. If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then they'd have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure through his excellent team of legal appointees that no such behavior happens again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration's policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business. If Obama doesn't want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position the real Bush legacy. See pictures of the abuse revelations that rocked the U.S. and Iraq. See pictures from inside Guantnamo Bay.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html
The Case for Bigger Government

By Jeffrey Sachs
Thirty years ago, Americans were told that government was part of the problem, not the solution. We bet on the magic of the marketplace, but the magic proved illusory. Every major part of the economy health care, energy, transportation, food and finance is deeply troubled. Now we are ready to invite government back in to help solve our problems, if the price is right and the strategies are convincing. By spending more through government and treating government as a partner rather than an enemy of the private sector, we can potentially save vast sums in the long run through a more efficient health-care system, safer climate, more competitive economy and more secure country. President-elect Barack Obama's challenge will be twofold: to capture the potential benefits of a new age of government activism, while still protecting the country's long-term fiscal health. On Jan. 6, Obama warned that the cost of a major stimulus package and the continued effort to bail out the financial system could result in years of "trillion-dollar deficits." Deficit spending is needed to help revive the economy from recession, but trillion-dollar deficits for years to come would sink us in debt and risk a collapse of the currency. We need a sensible strategy that deals with the present crisis while preparing for the future. We need more government, and to pay for it we'll need to raise taxes relative to GDP over time. Even as our economy worsened, many Americans consoled themselves with the belief that at least we were better off than people in other rich nations. No more. When you compare the U.S. with Canada, Western Europe and Japan, the news is sobering. Our child-poverty and infant-mortality rates are the highest, our life expectancy is the lowest, our budget deficit as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) is the highest, and our 15-year-olds rank among the lowest on tests of math and science. A big difference between the U.S. and the rest of the rich world is that for the past 30 years or so, Americans consistently rejected "government solutions" to the problems of health, poverty, education and the environment. We've kept our taxes as a share of national income lower than Europe's by focusing on the private sector. But we're getting much less for our money. Markets are great at providing consumer goods and services. We don't want the government running our restaurants, movie houses, bookstores and manufacturers. Markets are not so good, though, at some very important things. A pressing example: our mostly private health system, at $8,000 per American, is twice the cost of Europe's mostly public system, yet with worse outcomes. And nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance. President-elect Obama inherits the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression: the financial sector is in ruins; the budget is hemorrhaging red ink; debt-ridden households have clamped down on spending, thereby pulling the rug out from under the economy; unemployment is soaring; the country is in two wars; and the unmet social and environmental needs are vast. These conditions demand a fundamental realignment in strategy that ultimately comes back to taxation: Will we pay for the government we need? Obama's big domestic program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, proposes doubling renewable-energy production and making public buildings more efficient. It calls for better schools and
classrooms and the rebuilding of our crumbling roadways and bridges. The President-elect wants our fill-out-the-forms health-care system to be computerized, which will save both lives and money. (See the global financial crisis in photos.) He'll certainly have to add to that list. Don't forget bailing out the financial system, helping deficit-ridden state and local governments, revamping the auto industry and funding more global-development assistance to defeat terrorism and overcome instability. Add it up and it will require perhaps 5% of national income on top of our current spending, or approximately 25% of our total GDP. Here's the problem with that math: the tax system brings in about 18% of GDP, less in a recession and Obama is even floating a two-year, $300 billion tax cut (roughly 1% of GDP per year). Even worse, our federal revenues are nearly exhausted by just four areas of spending: Social Security and other retirement programs, health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, defense, and interest payments on the public debt. Almost all the rest of our expenditures from education and infrastructure to international diplomacy and much more have to be funded by borrowing. We are racking up trillions of dollars in debt, to be paid in the future through taxation or inflation, in order to carry the year-in, year-out responsibilities of government. There are certainly some straightforward ways to start closing the budget gap. The Bush tax cuts for the rich should be rolled back this year, not next, to start collecting about 0.5% of GDP in extra revenues from those who can most easily pay, though this might just partly offset other tax cuts and recession-induced declines in tax collections. The spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be ended, not prolonged, saving at least 1% of GDP. We'd still probably be close to $1 trillion (perhaps 6.5% of GDP) shy of budget balance. With the economy in a tailspin, deficit financing of up to $1 trillion could make sense, but it's a fleeting option because foreign nations have lost confidence in the U.S. economy and currency. Instead, we will have to look for a variety of solutions. Infrastructure can be financed in part by borrowing against future user fees, like tolls on roads and higher electricity rates for more reliable and cleaner power, rather than against general government revenues. This strategy can probably cover as much as 1% of GDP per year. We can introduce new taxes on the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas to hasten our transition to sustainable energy. For example, instead of letting gasoline prices tumble now only to see them soar again shortly, we could set a floor on prices at the pump and collect the difference between the wholesale and retail prices in federal revenues. Various carbon and gasoline taxes could raise another 1% or so of GDP. The public will also probably accept taxes on health care if they convincingly help save even more in private outlays on health insurance. A well-managed system of public financing of health care can do that and allow us to cut the horrendous sums paid to health-insurance companies. And in the end, though almost no U.S. politician will say it now, the U.S. will probably have to follow Europe down the path of the value-added tax a kind of national sales tax. In the past 50 years, arguing for tax increases to fund the expansion of federal programs has been a political death wish. Lyndon Johnson could not sell the public on tax increases to pay for his War on Poverty when the Vietnam War intruded. Jimmy Carter failed to close the deficit through higher taxes in the late 1970s. And Ronald Reagan made tax cuts the down payment on every election since. George W. Bush, of course, imitated Reagan in cutting taxes, thereby creating huge new budget deficits. Voters are still willing to
permit the government to expand its share of GDP, particularly in the face of national crises and we are certainly in the middle of one. Tax revenues jumped from just 5% of GDP in 1936 to 15% to 20% during and after World War II, creating our modern tax system. At the end of the war, the level of federal taxation averaged around 18% of GDP, a rate that has remained nearly constant ever since. What has changed is the way we spend that 18%. In the 1950s, during the Korean War and at the height of the Cold War, about 10% of GDP was devoted to defense. Over time, that share of spending on defense declined, making room for proportionally more spending on things like health care, education and infrastructure. By the late 1970s, as defense spending declined to 4% to 5% of GDP, there wasn't a lot more room to squeeze defense for higher domestic spending. Even with the end of our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's most unlikely that we'd save as much as 2% of GDP, given the vocal demands for increases in military budgets. As our budget choices were getting tougher in the 1970s, Europe faced similar dilemmas and took a different course. While Americans rejected new taxes and new domestic programs, Europeans elected governments that introduced higher taxation, mainly value-added taxes, to cover the rising costs of health care, education, infrastructure, poverty relief and international-development aid. Ultimately, the Europeans restrained excessive growth in the welfare state in order to maintain global competitiveness and rebalance their economies and succeeded in sustaining the public-private partnerships and welfare-state benefits. The European strategy, with levels of taxation and government spending roughly 8% to 10% of GDP higher than in the U.S., has many successes to show for it: less costly and more reliable health care, the elimination of hard-core poverty, solid educational achievements, and social services that ensure better care for children and more flexibility for mothers and the elderly. The U.S. will not mimic Europe for many reasons size, diversity, tradition and, of course, vested interests but we can learn from Europe. Most important, we can see how government can be a partner of the private sector, not an enemy. (Read "Merkel's Caution on Economy Draws Fire".) The time has arrived to restore national prosperity and security with a smartly rebalanced partnership between the public and private sectors. Fiscal policy will be President Obama's biggest political hurdle. Expanded spending by government for health care, climate change, energy security, education, infrastructure and peaceful diplomacy is urgently needed, but large deficit financing is not a long-term option. Although Obama's tax cuts might stimulate consumer spending and placate Republicans any permanent cut would be a huge error, and even short-term tax cuts are an unnecessary risk. Obama's long-term success will depend on his ability to lead Americans to a new, even revolutionary consensus that the U.S. government can offer value for money.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870268,00.html
Obama's Options
By Martin Indyk
Barack Obama promised during his election campaign that he would pursue a settlement of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict from Day One of his presidency. The Gaza crisis has now turned that interest into an urgent requirement while making progress even more difficult. Nevertheless, in this crisis, as in the many other challenges the new President will face, there may also be an opportunity, which he can turn to his advantage. The President-elect has wisely used the cover of "one President at a time" to avoid taking a position on the deepening Gaza crisis, but there's not much sand left in the hourglass. Very soon, he and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, will have to hit the ground running with an initiative that shifts the media focus from whether Obama is going to distance himself from Israel to how diplomatically adept his new team is. And since he doesn't yet have that team in place, the challenge is even greater. Silence the Guns The immediate objective is a sustainable cease-fire. That may be possible in the early days of the new Administration because both Israel and Hamas may be ready for it by then. On the eve of the Feb. 10 Israeli elections, neither Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni nor Defense Minister Ehud Barak--both of whom are running for Prime Minister--will want to bear the costs or consequences of a full-scale invasion and prolonged occupation of the refugee camps and cities that constitute Hamas' strongholds. On the other side, Hamas does not want to lose control of Gaza. For both sides, this war has always been about renegotiating the terms of the cease-fire that had held for five months. The terms of a new truce will need to include: no rocket fire on Israeli civilians, no offensive Israeli operations, an international mechanism for enforcing a ban on smuggling offensive weapons, Palestinian Authority (PA) involvement in the control of open passages, and large-scale humanitarian and reconstruction assistance funneled through the PA rather than via Hamas. Negotiating the cease-fire package should be the job of the Secretary of State; the President's task is at the higher level of branding his Administration's approach to resolving the larger Palestinian problem. This is urgent because Islamic extremists--from al-Qaeda to Hizballah to Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--have gained great advantage from the anti-American anger in the Arab and Muslim world that the Gaza crisis has brought to a boil. They had feared that Obama, with his appealing narrative and middle name, would calm the waters and so dilute their influence. They now see an opportunity in the Gaza crisis to brand Obama as no different from Bush. The Big-Picture President
A commitment to resolve the Palestinian problem also takes on new urgency because the potential Arab partners in this effort--from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia--need to demonstrate to their irate populations that pro-American moderation and reconciliation can actually provide a better future for the Palestinians. Israelis too need to see that there is an alternative to the deepening dread of hate-filled Islamic extremists on their borders who are backed by an Iran intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. President Obama therefore will need urgently to paint his vision of a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, summoning all leaders of goodwill to the task--perhaps suggesting they convene in Washington to declare their common intent. He will need to announce a series of mechanisms for achieving it, including: resumption of Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations, rebuilding of the West Bank and Gaza economies and PA security capabilities, initiation of U.S.-sponsored direct negotiations between Israel and Syria, and operationalizing the Arab League peace initiative. And he should put this into the even larger context of his efforts to end the war in Iraq, engage Iran and construct a new regional security architecture. To avoid sounding Pollyannaish, he will have to emphasize the huge difficulties of and impediments to achieving this vision, avoid specific timetables and seek some small but early successes (starting with the cease-fire). But I believe Obama has the unique ability to lift the eyes of Arabs and Israelis from the mire of misery in which they seem forever bound to the far horizon of peace, security, normality and a better future for their children. Coming on the eve of Obama's Inauguration, the Gaza crisis has turned that opportunity into a necessity. Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, is the author of Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon & Schuster"
Click to Print
The Recession's Big Test

By NANCY GIBBS
Every day, another anecdote: Five Banks held up in a single day in New York City, where such robberies are up 54% from last year. Grocers putting electronic tags on sirloin to deter shoplifters. Psychologists predicting more mall violence and workplace rampages. And of course the story that started it all, the Wal-Mart worker trampled by shoppers who pushed past with urgent indifference even as paramedics tried to save him, for there were bargains to be seized. Mass moral breakdown seems a tidy, symmetrical response to a crisis driven by greedheads and gamblers who blew the bubble that carried us away and politicians who stood by and watched it burst. So now we stand in the rubble, surrounded by sharp questions. How sturdy are we, how suspicious, how brave, how bitter? What is it going to do to us, individually and collectively, when dread takes up residence next door, or right upstairs in the empty rooms we prowl around when we can't sleep because our debts and doubts are making too much noise? As a country, we have seen how we can rise to the occasion in a crisis: we saw it seven years ago when our cities came under attack. We've felt it in wartime, in natural disasters. But the Great Recession is no short-term, onetime event, to which we respond and move on. It is changing how we think and how we live and how we see one another. Barack Obama based his campaign on the promise to bring people together; the question now is, Can we resist the forces that would pull us apart? It's easy to forecast a Darwinian winter, when we lash out or hunker down and shiver even when we sit near the fire. We read about people walking away from mortgages they can afford to pay, just because everyone else is doing it and responsibility seems like a sucker's game. Retailers report that gun sales are up, because the Democrats are back and crime is expected to rise and civilization as we know it to break down. Someone somewhere is stirring the tar and plucking the feathers for Lehman's Richard Fuld and Merrill's Stan O'Neal and of course Bernie Madoff of the $50 billion swindle, because absent any effective sanction, we're all vigilantes now. The headlines will always track the mayhem more than the mystery, but if you look at all closely, there's another story to tell. Maybe the fascination with the rise and fall of the Wall Street titans is that unlike past recessions, this one affects everyone. It's hard to feel sorry for people for whom retrenchment means shifting from the private jet to commercial first class, but it does mean we're all having the same conversation, and psychologists point out we're happier when we're all in the soup together. The notion that misery loves company may be less about malice than about solace: that problems shared grow smaller, that courage is contagious. Is it just a coincidence that Mississippi, which typically ranks as the most generous state in charitable giving, is also the poorest? To suffer alone is a tragedy; to struggle together is an opportunity, when we find out what we really care about. It's possible we've reached a moment of creative commiseration. A friend in Iowa was invited to a poverty
party--"because why should a worldwide recession spoil all our fun!" the invitation said. Guests were told to bring "a dish to share, a (cheap) bottle of wine, a hard-luck story and a devil-may-care attitude." We share casserole experiments: food itself becomes communal, everything in the fridge pitching in. You learn a lot about your neighbors when you carpool, and save gas too. And for every story of swindlers and cheats, dwell for a moment on these: Someone placed an 18-karat-gold diamond ring in the Salvation Army kettle in Uniontown, Pa. A Sioux Falls, S.D., hotel manager came up with a plan to open his doors to 200 homeless people for Christmas. A Santa Clarita, Calif., family took in an 83-year-old woman left homeless by wildfires and helped rebuild her life. Food donations in Paradise, Calif., were up fivefold. "We'll take a cup of kindness yet," we sing as we welcome a new year, and never more so than this time. Maybe as times get worse, we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people's too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway, like the solitude of snobbery, and the luxury of denial.
Click to Print
The Secrets of 2009 Revealed!

By Joel Stein
Plenty of journalists put together their 2009 predictions by consulting with economists, historians, pundits and the most annoying person they can find (for Oscar guesses). I got mine from Justine Kenzer, who is known as Psychic Girl and has done her $200 readings for Eva Longoria, Ellen DeGeneres and the cast of Friends, though I'm not that impressed with the last one. You don't need extra-sensory abilities to say, "I see a lot of terrible movies in your future." I met Kenzer at a friend's Christmas brunch. Four years of living in Los Angeles, it turns out, does not begin to prepare you for the answers you get to the question "What do you do for a living?" Compared with "psychic," "mobile spray tanner" and "Hugh Hefner's third girlfriend," writing about yourself for a newsmagazine seems totally legitimate. Like most psychics, Kenzer gets her information by communicating with dead people. I personally would talk to the yet unborn about the future and use the dead for questions about history, but that's why I'm not a prediction expert. Dead people, I would think, are probably clueless about what's going on in the present, let alone the future. Though maybe that's just because I think of them as super-old people. To start the process, Kenzer paused to tune into me. Then she told me that I'm attached to ascended masters and that one of these mentors is Abraham Lincoln. I think I was supposed to be excited about this, but it's not as if I'm constantly dealing with civil wars or freeing slaves. If I'm going to have someone dead guiding me, I'd like it to be someone with a better sense of fun, like Caligula or Malcolm Forbes. My first question for Kenzer's dead friends was about the recession. While many economists are predicting recovery at the end of 2010, the dead people were pointing her toward a far more realistic 2012. Kenzer sees a lot of companies going bankrupt this year. "I get a purple color and the letter a," she said. I figured that was Yahoo!, but she said no. "They're doing all kinds of things behind closed doors to not die." Some of those things, I predict, are opening lots and lots of credit-card accounts. When I asked if TIME magazine would have a good year, she said, "There's no issue there. There's an incredible strength behind it. There is one particular person who is connected to this strength. He has a very solid energy. It doesn't look like he's going anywhere." She said this person is probably managing editor Richard Stengel, and while she didn't specifically say he and his family would come into a lot of unexpected money this year, I figure it's best to keep that guy as happy as I can. I had made some of my own predictions before I called Kenzer--for instance, that Sarah Palin would do a daytime talk show, a reality show or a seminude Playboy spread. But Kenzer says Palin will go gently into that 19-hour Alaskan night. "This year she'll just pop up in interviews. There doesn't look like a huge energy in entertainment or politics. But she's in no way done." And Kenzer doesn't see a wedding anytime soon for Levi Johnston. "That guy is terrified. He is not in a stable place. I'm going to send him a little healing, poor thing."
Though she didn't have a great sense of whom the governor of New York would name to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, when I asked her about baseball, she didn't hesitate to answer, "I don't get a great energy around the Yankees. I see this symbol, and it's a no energy." When I screamed, "Oh, crap!" I thought Kenzer might have tuned into my spirit and sensed disappointment. But she kept going: "I get a better energy for the Red Sox--like, a really good energy around the Red Sox for this year." I think Kenzer was just mad at me for making fun of Jennifer Aniston. Which she knew about because she's a psychic. Because Kenzer is more of a "personal transformation girl" than a Nostradamus-type prophet, she was eager to get into my personal life. When we talked about my wife Cassandra's pregnancy, I ran some baby names by her and she decisively picked Laszlo. "I'm just looking at the spirit of the kid," she said. I'm not sure how a 5-month-old fetus puts out the spirit of a 70-year-old Hungarian cinematographer, but apparently ours does. I also think Kenzer spent a lot of time at brunch talking to Cassandra, who's a little obsessed with making our baby special. I'm just hoping that he isn't so special that he's psychic. Because as nice as Kenzer is, I don't want my son burdened with this much information about the future. Especially since he's going to be spending most of his time spelling his name for people.
Click to Print
Postcard: Adams.
By Stefanie Friedhoff
On Friday evenings, Francis Hajdas takes his sleeping bag to church. He puts it down among the pews on the left side, close to the century-old carved-wood confessionals, before examining a folding table by a marble tomb of Jesus, which holds a spread of apples, candy canes, water and homemade cookies donated by supporters. "People come from near and far to drop off food and wish us good luck," says the retired Navy electronics specialist, 72. "Makes me feel good to know that should I go to jail for this, I did the right thing." On Dec. 26, Hajdas and about 50 other parishioners in this northern Berkshires town seized the church of St. Stanislaus Kostka to protest plans to shut it down. They say they'll keep their vigil until their appeal is heard by the Vatican--or until the Diocese of Springfield, which oversees Adams' churches, has them forcibly removed. Struggling with dwindling congregations and battered by massive payouts to victims of clergy sexual-abuse scandals, dioceses in many parts of the U.S. have been closing or merging hundreds of churches to save costs. Now, however, the faithful are fighting back: the Friends of St. Stan's are part of a growing movement among Catholics who reject their dioceses' reform plans and are waging campaigns to stop them. Churchgoers at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Scituate, Mass., have been occupying the sanctuary for more than four years--one of four such vigils in the Boston area. In New Orleans on Jan. 6, police raided two churches slated for closure, ending a nine-week sit-in; three resisting parishioners were led out in handcuffs. At St. Stanislaus Kostka, protesters are learning the mundane lessons of church occupation: Bring your own toilet paper. Dress warmly against the nave's meager heating. And no matter how just your cause, don't expect a decent night's sleep on St. Stan's hard wooden pews. Built by Polish immigrants in 1902 and named after a 16th century Polish Jesuit novice, the church is profusely decorated with statues, stained glass, mosaics and hand-painted biblical scenes; a depiction of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa is richly decorated with diamonds, pearls and other jewels donated by parishioners. Until last month, it served a prosperous congregation of about 800; unlike many churches fighting closure, supporters say, St. Stan's is financially viable. "We are a vibrant community keeping many Polish traditions alive," says Dola ScieszkaLipinski, who was baptized, confirmed and married at St. Stan's and hopes to be buried there one day. "Why would they close us?" Church leaders say that closures are simply unavoidable; in addition to low attendance, the Springfield diocese faces an acute shortage of priests. "It was clear that of the three Catholic churches in Adams, two had to close," says Monsignor John Bonzagni, the diocese's director of pastoral planning. "We tried to make the best pastoral decision."
Peter Borr, head of the Boston-based advocacy group Council of Parishes, disagrees. "The dioceses are using these parishes as a milking cow," he charges. "They need the cash to pay for sexual-abuse settlements. That is why more parishes are willing to go against their leadership: they want to stand up against such injustice." Borr, 70, a Rome-born, Jesuit-educated former energy executive, started the council to advise churches facing closure after his own parish in Charlestown, Mass., was shut in 2004. Borr has been involved in the Boston vigils from the beginning and is leading their appeal before the Vatican Supreme Court. In the case of St. Stanislaus Kostka, he sat in his car in front of the bishop's house to hand-deliver the parishioners' letter of intent. Like Borr, the Friends of St. Stan are ready for a long fight. "We are prepared to do what it takes," says David Aitken, 54, who used to ring the church bells. For the moment, at least, the diocese is treating its errant flock with patience. "Suffering the closing of your parish is like watching a parent die," says Monsignor Bonzagni. "If the parishioners at St. Stan's need to mourn this way, we will do nothing to interfere." Church Vigil To see more photos from St. Stan's, visit time.com/kostka
Click to Print
E-Waste Not
By Bryan Walsh
Even though holiday sales were down at least 2% from 2007, millions of Americans awoke Christmas morning to new computers, TVs and iPhones. (I didn't, but thanks for the pens, Mom.) Many of those gifts were replacements or upgrades, which prompts the question, What should you do with your old cell phone and other electronic equipment? If you're like some 80% of Americans, you'll simply toss your obsolete gizmos into the trash. After all, that Jurassic 15-in. (38 cm) computer monitor doesn't look as though it's packing up to 7 lb. (3 kg) of lead. Every day Americans throw out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the U.S. garbage stream. Improperly disposed of, the lead, mercury and other toxic materials inside e-waste can leak from landfills. If you're part of the 20% trying to do the right thing by recycling your e-waste, there's something else to worry about. Old phones and computers can be dismantled to get at the useful metals inside, but doing so safely is time-consuming. Thus, many electronics recyclers ship American e-waste abroad, where it is stripped and burned with little concern for environmental or human health. And authorities rarely stop the export of potentially hazardous e-waste. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that refused to ratify the 19-year-old Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to regulate the export of hazardous waste to developing nations. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the export of only one type of e-waste--cathode-ray tubes in old TVs and monitors--and a report last August by the Government Accountability Office dismissed the EPA's enforcement as "lacking." The same report included a sting investigation that found that 43 U.S. recycling firms were willing to ship broken monitors with cathode-ray tubes to buyers in foreign countries without getting the required permission from the EPA and the receiving nations. Yet some of these companies had been trumpeting their exemplary environmental principles to the public. "At least three of them held Earth Day 2008 electronicsrecycling events," the report notes. A lot of exported e-waste ends up in Guiyu, China, a recycling hub where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead, while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. According to reports from nearby Shantou University, Guiyu has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world and elevated rates of miscarriages. "You see women sitting by the fireplace burning laptop adapters, with rivers of ash pouring out of houses," says Jim Puckett, founder of Basel Action Network (BAN), an e-waste watchdog. "We're dumping on the rest of the world." Puckett and other environmentalists are pushing for a full ban on e-waste exports. They're hopeful that the new Administration will prove receptive; as a Senator, President-elect Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill that in 2008 became a law barring the export of mercury.
In the meantime, green groups are pressuring electronics manufacturers to take responsibility for the afterlife of their products. The strategy is working. By reducing toxic metals like mercury and using fewer small pieces of aluminum and glass, companies like Apple now design their laptops to be more easily recycled. Sony has pledged to work only with recyclers that pledge not to export e-waste. And Dell, which since 2004 has offered free recycling for its products (customers arrange shipping online), recently announced an in-store recycling program with Staples. To confirm that its recyclers are really recycling, Dell uses environmental-audit firms to check up on its partners. So how do you ensure that your old phone doesn't end up poisoning a kid in China? If it's still working and in good condition, you can sell it to Greenphone.com which markets such phones to poor customers overseas. If it's broken, don't put it in the garbage with the wrapping paper and the fruitcake. Instead, find out if your retailer or manufacturer offers free recycling. If not, BAN has put together a list of "e-stewards," U.S. recyclers the group has accredited; check them out at ban.org But one tiny activist group can't stop the mountain of e-waste Americans are producing, a mountain that will only grow when cable companies stop broadcasting analog signals on Feb. 17 and render obsolete the millions of rabbit ears used on old TV sets. Some TV manufacturers, like Sony, are offering free take-back programs, but if you really want to be e-green, try this: get a coupon from Uncle Sam for a discounted digital converter, and don't upgrade your old TV (or phone or computer) for a little while longer. It may not be in the generous holiday spirit, but it certainly fits the new recessionary one. Electronic Afterlife Old gadgets are ravaging Guiyu, China. To see how, go to time.com/ewaste
Click to Print
Minds on The Edge

By John Cloud/Seattle
Doctors used to have poetic names for diseases. A physician would speak of consumption because the illness seemed to eat you from within. Now we just use the name of the bacterium that causes the illness: tuberculosis. Psychology, though, remains a profession practiced partly as science and partly as linguistic art. Because our knowledge of the mind's afflictions remains so limited, psychologists--even when writing in academic publications--still deploy metaphors to understand difficult disorders. And possibly the most difficult of all to fathom--and thus one of the most creatively named--is the mysterious-sounding borderline personality disorder (BPD). University of Washington psychologist Marsha Linehan, one of the world's leading experts on BPD, describes it this way: "Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering." Borderlines are the patients psychologists fear most. As many as 75% hurt themselves, and approximately 10% commit suicide--an extraordinarily high suicide rate (by comparison, the suicide rate for mood disorders is about 6%). Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously. They are powerfully connected to the people close to them and terrified by the possibility of losing them--yet attack those people so unexpectedly that they often ensure the very abandonment they fear. When they want to hold, they claw instead. Many therapists have no clue how to treat borderlines. And yet diagnosis of the condition appears to be on the rise. A 2008 study of nearly 35,000 adults in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that 5.9%--which would translate into 18 million Americans--had been given a BPD diagnosis. As recently as 2000, the American Psychiatric Association believed that only 2% had BPD. (In contrast, clinicians diagnose bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in about 1% of the population.) BPD has long been regarded as an illness disproportionately affecting women, but the latest research shows no difference in prevalence rates for men and women. Regardless of gender, people in their 20s are at higher risk for BPD than those older or younger. What defines borderline personality disorder--and makes it so explosive--is the sufferers' inability to calibrate their feelings and behavior. When faced with an event that makes them depressed or angry, they often become inconsolable or enraged. Such problems may be exacerbated by impulsive behaviors: overeating or substance abuse; suicide attempts; intentional self-injury. (The methods of self-harm that borderlines choose can be gruesomely creative. One psychologist told me of a woman who used fingernail clippers to pull off slivers of her skin." No one knows exactly what causes BPD, but the familiar nature-nurture combination of genetic and environmental misfortune is the likely culprit. Linehan has found that some borderline individuals come
from homes where they were abused, some from stifling families in which children were told to go to their room if they had to cry, and some from normal families that buckled under the stress of an economic or health-care crisis and failed to provide kids with adequate validation and emotional coaching. "The child does not learn how to understand, label, regulate or tolerate emotional responses, and instead learns to oscillate between emotional inhibition and extreme emotional lability," Linehan and her colleagues write in a paper to be published in a leading journal, Psychological Bulletin. Those with borderline disorder usually appear as criminals in the media. In the past decade, hundreds of stories in major newspapers have recounted violent crimes committed by those said to have the disorder. A typical example from last year was the lurid tale of an Ontario man labeled borderline who used a screwdriver to gouge out his wife's right eye. (She lived; he got 14 years." There are several theories about why the number of borderline diagnoses may be rising. A parsimonious explanation is that because of advances in treating common mood problems like short-term depression, more health-care resources are available to identify difficult disorders like BPD. Another explanation is hopeful: BPD treatment has improved dramatically in the past few years. Until recently, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was seen as a "death sentence," as Dr. Kenneth Silk of the University of Michigan wrote in the April 2008 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Clinicians often avoided naming the illness and instead told patients they had a less stigmatizing disorder. Therapeutic advances have changed the landscape. Since 1991, as Dr. Joel Paris points out in his 2008 book, Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, researchers have conducted at least 17 randomized trials of various psychotherapies for borderline illness, and most have shown encouraging results. According to a big Harvard project called the McLean Study of Adult Development, 88% of those who received a diagnosis of BPD no longer meet the criteria for the disorder a decade after starting treatment. Most show some improvement within a year. Still, the rise in borderline diagnoses may illustrate something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown--a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination--mental patients as paranoid heroes. Many mental institutions were emptied at the end of this period. In the '90s, after serotonin-manipulating drugs were released and so many patients were listening to Prozac, thousands of news stories suggested, incorrectly, that the problem of chronic depression had been finally solved. Whether driven by scary headlines, popular movies or just pharmacological faddishness, the decade and the disorder do tend to find each other. So, is borderline the illness of our age? When so many of us are clawing to keep homes and paychecks, might we have become more sensitized to other kinds of desperation? In a world so uncertain, maybe it's natural to lose one's emotional skin. It's too soon to tell if that's the case, but BPD does have at least one thing in common with the recession. As Dr. Allen Frances, a former chair of the Duke psychiatry department, has written, "Everyone talks about [BPD], but it usually seems that no one knows quite what to
do about it." Inside the Mind To have coffee with Lily (a pseudonym), you wouldn't get much sense of how she has suffered. She is 40 but could pass for 30. She has blue eyes and long blond hair that falls across her shoulders in slightly curly tendrils. On the December day we met at a diner outside Seattle, she wore a pink wool cap pulled down tight and an Adidas jumper zipped all the way. She was friendly but not terribly expressive, and she carried an aura of self-protection. At one point in the late '90s, Lily was taking five drugs that doctors had prescribed: three antidepressants, an antianxiety medication and a sleeping pill. Borderline patients are often overmedicated--partly because therapists see them as difficult--but for Lily, as for most borderlines, the meds did little. "Drug treatment for BPD is much less impressive than most people think," Paris writes in Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. As a teenager, Lily felt little self-confidence. "Junior high and high school just sucks, right?" she said, laughing. "But I had a propensity to take it a little more seriously." With the help of therapy, she made it through high school and college, but in her late 20s, she became dissatisfied with her job selling specialty equipment. One October day, as she headed out for a mountain-biking trip, she looked at the dun sky and had the feeling that something was wrong. Bleakness massed around her quickly, much faster than it had when she was younger. Soon, nothing gave Lily much joy. She recalled a talk show in which girls had discussed cutting themselves as a release, a way to relieve depression. "I was so numb," she said. "I just wanted to feel something--anything." So she took a knife from the kitchen and cut deeply into her left arm. If Lily had a hard time figuring out what was behind such dark emotions, she was in good company. When a psychoanalyst named Adolph Stern coined the term borderline in the 1930s, borderline patients were said to be those between Freud's two big clusters: psychosis and neurosis. Borderlines, Stern wrote rather poetically, exhibit "psychic bleeding--paralysis in the face of crises." Later, in the 1940s, Dr. Helene Deutsch said borderlines experience "inner emptiness, which the patient seeks to remedy by attaching himself or herself to one after another social or religious group." By 1968, when Basic Books published the groundbreaking monograph The Borderline Syndrome, the No. 1 characteristic of borderline patients was said to be, simply, anger. Eventually, borderlines became pretty much anything a therapist said they were. Says Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness: "If you hated the patient--if the patient was pissing you off--you would bandy this term about: 'Oh, you're just a borderline.' It was a diagnosis that was a wastebasket of hostility." It was Linehan who changed all that. In the early 1990s, she became the first researcher to conduct a randomized study on the treatment of borderline personality disorder. The trial--which showed that a treatment she created called "dialectical behavior therapy" significantly reduced borderlines' tendency to
hurt themselves as well as the number of days they spent as inpatients--astonished a field that had come to see borderlines as hopeless. Dialectical behavior therapy is so named because at its heart lies the requirement that both patients and therapists find synthesis in various contradictions, or dialectics. For instance, therapists must accept patients just as they are (angry, confrontational, hurting) within the context of trying to teach them how to change. Patients must end the borderline propensity for black-and-white thinking, while realizing that some behaviors are right and some are simply wrong. "The patient's first dilemma," Linehan wrote in her 558-page masterwork, 1993's Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, "has to do with whom to blame for her predicament. Is she evil, the cause of her own troubles? Or, are other people in the environment or fate to blame? ... Is the patient really vulnerable and unable to control her own behavior ...? Or is she bad, able to control her reactions but unwilling to do so ...? What the borderline individual seems unable to do is to hold both of these contradictory positions in mind." Linehan's achievement was to realize that borderlines are, in fact, on the border between various dualities-dualities that they have to learn to accept and reconcile in order to change their lives. That's easy to say but seems impossible to do--until you see it work. A Life Redeemed After she cut herself, Lily was horrified. In a panic, she called her father, who took her to the hospital. When she was released, she and her parents redoubled their efforts to find her good psychiatric treatment. Through a friend at the University of Washington, they heard about Linehan and contacted her Behavioral Research & Therapy Clinics, which are housed in a homey little annex on the UW campus, where you might find little foil-wrapped chocolates next to the coffee and tea. Linehan, who grew up in Tulsa, Okla., and spent several years as a nun before becoming a psychologist, embodies several dialectical contradictions: a nun who has never lived in a convent; a careful scientist whose most engaging feature is her wry irreverence; a 65-year-old who has a maternal steeliness but was never a mother. It doesn't pay to underestimate Marsha Linehan. In Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder, she writes, "If the patient says, 'I am going to kill myself,' the therapist might reply, 'I thought you agreed not to drop out of therapy.'" In one intense session a few years ago, a patient told Linehan that her work stress was going to lead her to suicide. The patient said Linehan could never understand this stress because she was a successful psychologist. Suicidal borderline patients often confront and alienate therapists in this fashion; for many years, this kind of confrontation was seen as a defining characteristic of the disorder. Linehan believes that borderlines are hurting, not manipulating, but that doesn't mean she indulges them. In this particular confrontation, Linehan responded, "I do understand. I live with a similar amount of stress ... You can just imagine how stressful it is for me to have a patient constantly threatening to kill herself. Both of us have to worry about being fired!" Such in-your-face tactics were highly controversial when Linehan started out. Other mental-health professionals accused her in public meetings of being heartless, even unethical. But her therapy has saved
so many lives and worked so well in randomized trials that few criticize her today. For Lily, who calls Linehan's therapy "Zen philosophy meets tough love," Linehan was the first therapist to understand that managing Lily's illness would require Lily to take a new kind of responsibility--a willingness to grow the emotional skin she never had. In the beginning, Lily resisted Linehan's assistance. She felt no one could truly understand the depths of her pain. But Linehan was the first therapist who responded to Lily with more than just endless psychoanalysis and pills. Instead, Linehan taught her practical methods of getting by day-to-day. Once, just after she started with Linehan, Lily locked herself in her parents' bathroom and swallowed six or seven antidepressants in a half-hearted suicide attempt. Her father broke the door down; her mother called the police. Lily never lost consciousness, but the cops said she had to go to the hospital anyway. Linehan advised Lily's parents not to accompany her. She also told them they needed to get Lily to work the next day. Lily learned that she wouldn't be cosseted. Linehan also taught Lily various skills to regulate her emotions. Among the most important is one Linehan calls the "wise mind"--a kind of calm, Zen state that Linehan insists even the most debilitated patients can achieve. "Generally," she writes, "I have patients follow their breath ... and try to let their focus settle into their physical center, at the bottom of their inhalation. That very centered point is wise mind." Lily remembers this sensation clearly; she came to feel that her dark moods had a physical location in her body--her solar plexus--and when she focused on it, she could deactivate a destructive emotion. Another skill Linehan taught Lily (and many others, via a popular DVD called Opposite Action) was an anti-anger technique for social situations: "Don't make the situation worse," Linehan counsels on the DVD. "And if possible, be a little tiny bit on the kind side. O.K.?" If some of this sounds like advice you heard in kindergarten, it should. Remember that borderlines have never learned to regulate their emotions. It's important to note that Linehan doesn't just practice tough love with her patients; she also tells them she knows they are hurting and doing the best they can. She emphasizes that she believes in them even though many therapists have tossed them aside. "Clients cannot fail," she says. "But both treatment and a therapist can fail." Both compassion and irreverence, both validation and tough love--these are the dialectics at the heart of Linehan's approach. One criticism of Linehan's Zen-derived method is that for some patients, it seems too foreign, too removed from Western experience. Linehan knows her therapy works for most people, but that doesn't mean she's unwilling to list its faults. "It takes too long. There are too many components. It takes too much training for therapists," she says. Such shortcomings have not dissuaded other therapists from learning Linehan's techniques. Some 10,000 of them have been trained in dialectical behavior therapy, and Linehan, to her dismay, has become something of a cult figure. "Cults in psychology hurt patients," she says. "People should try whatever works, not my therapy because it has my name on it." Lily, for one, is glad that it's the therapy she did try. One of her favorite films used to be James Mangold's 1999 adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, in which Winona Ryder plays a real-life borderline author. When
Ryder's character learns she has received a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, she indignantly asks, "Borderline between what and what?" It's a question that weighed on Lily for years and one that many of us may start asking if borderline diagnoses continue to increase. But today Lily is able to laugh about the film because she knows, finally, that the answer doesn't really matter. The key is not defining that uncertain borderline but learning to be happy there.
Click to Print
Bacon for Dessert.

By Joel Stein
At some point in history, we decided to keep meat out of our dessert. Maybe it was to distinguish dessert from the rest of the meal, or maybe it's because beef-flavored birthday cake tends to make kids cry. But suddenly menus everywhere have deemed bacon an acceptable crossover. The landmark Brown Hotel in Louisville, Ky., does a bacon baklava. More, a cupcake shop in Chicago, sells three bacon flavors. Animal in Los Angeles serves a deeply satisfying bacon chocolate crunch bar. At New York City's Dovetail, the bread pudding with bacon brittle is so popular it can't be rotated off the menu. And the bacon-for-dessert trend isn't limited to high-end, experimental restaurants. In 2008 you could buy bacon-covered chocolate at the Minnesota State Fair or watch bacon get dipped in chocolate on the Food Network's Dinner: Impossible. "I bet other meats would work" in sugary fare, says chef Jerome Chang, whose itinerant Dessert Truck serves New Yorkers a $5 chocolate bread pudding with bacon crme anglaise. "Bacon is just more sellable because people mix it up with their pancakes and their syrup and they're used to that. Plus, people like bacon a lot." The trend probably started in 2006, when molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal began dazzling deep-pocketed diners at the U.K.'s Fat Duck with bacon-and-egg ice cream. (That same year, when two contestants whipped up bacon ice cream on Bravo's Top Chef, Tom Colicchio turned to his fellow judges and wondered how long until Ben & Jerry's came out with one.) But the real mass-market shift started two summers ago, when Vosges Haut-Chocolat put out the $7.50 Mo's Bacon Bar. "I was a vegetarian at the time," says owner Katrina Markoff, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, "but I decided to make an exception for bacon." To her shock, the bacon bar became her best-selling item and is now available in more than 200 stores. Bacon works in dessert for the same reason peanut butter works with chocolate, or sea salt with caramel. Salt brings out the depth of flavor in desserts (try eating a salt-free brownie), and fatty foods are often cut by sweetness, like foie gras with Sauternes or fried chicken with honey. As more famous pastry chefs get their own restaurants, ingredients that had been on one side of the menu are showing up on the other. And some chefs are starting to branch out from bacon and put other meats in sweets. Jos Andrs of Washington's Minibar and Los Angeles' Bazaar serves foie gras surrounded by cotton candy. Ramon Perez, the pastry chef at L.A.'s Sona, added shrimp to his salted caramels for a sweet brininess--and a fear-factor thrill. Perez, who also serves apple lasagna with crispy bacon, is delighted by the mainstreaming of meat for dessert. "It means diners are trying to change their whole perception of food," he says. Or it just means we've learned to add sugar to everything. Bacon Bits To see chefs in action and get dessert recipes, go to time.com/bacon
Click to Print
A PG-Rated Second Life

By Josh Quittner
The weather outside is frightful, but video games are delightful. So lately, I've been cocooning inside with Sony's PlayStation Home, and I think it's the most realistic-looking implementation yet of a 3-D world. The 17 million or so owners of the pricey PlayStation 3--which costs $400--can download a free beta version via Sony's PlayStation Network, which connects the game consoles on the Web so users can play one another. Home is Sony's ambitious (albeit boringly named) attempt to create an online place for gamers to hang out in realistic virtual environments. So far, that includes a mall, a town plaza, a bowling alley, an arcade and apartments. Sony is betting Home can generate new revenue, since gamers will be able to try--then buy--all kinds of video games, movies, music and other offerings from Sony's many business partners. After downloading the software to your PlayStation, you log in and create an avatar, which you pilot using your PlayStation controller. Much like the Wii system, your avatar's features are customizable--within limits. Want your character to be 8 ft. (2.4 m) tall? Forget it. Humans are sized like the real deal. No really enormous noses either. Your character can't even be as fat as your average tech-gossip blogger, since only the slightest of beer guts is permitted in Home. And if you want to create a female avatar, she's got to look like something from Playboy, circa 1968. Not that that's a bad thing for some of us, although my 11-year-old daughter thought the bustiness was ridiculous. Home's aesthetic is Larry Flynt meets Lake Wobegon: all the men are strong, the women big-breasted and the children--well, there are no children. Just shorter adults. Your avatar can fluidly walk or run from place to place. A drop-down menu lets you dance everything from the robot to sorta salsa. You can text other Homies or talk via any USB microphone. While you can clothe your character in free off-the-rack stuff, Sony clearly hopes you'll spend real money to buy virtual outfits from the likes of Diesel, which will have a store in the virtual mall. Sony has a number of partner relationships already in place. You'll be able to buy furniture from Ligne Roset to outfit your apartment, quaff virtual Red Bull or watch a movie trailer (and maybe the whole thing someday) at the virtual cineplex. Sony is hoping Home will breathe some life into its flagging video-game division, which, according to Business Week, lost about $3.8 billion over the past two years. It sure can't help Sony that the latest PlayStation console costs nearly twice as much as Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's adorable Wii. While I know Home is still a work in progress, Sony ought to lighten up and give its users tools to build things, as the more adult-oriented virtual world Second Life has done. The past five years have been all about putting the users in control, which is especially smart in a place many people gather. To succeed, Sony needs to understand that an avatar's virtual Home ought to be his castle--not just Sony's mall.
Economy Cleanup: Clawback to the Future

By Justin Fox
We are in the midst of a cleanup of toxic financial waste that will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, at the very least. The primary manufacturers of these hazardous products pocketed multimilliondollar paychecks for their efforts. So why aren't we making them pay for the mop-up? This is, after all, what Congress decreed in 1980 for producers of actual toxic waste. Under the Superfund law enacted that year, polluters pay for the messes they make. Environmental lawyer E. Michael Thomas sees no reason lawmakers couldn't demand the same of financial polluters and force them to ante up some of the bank-bailout money. "This is a directly parallel policy judgment," he says. "It's beautiful in its simplicity, and it's also beautiful in its justice." The word for it is clawback, and it's not forthcoming, at least not anytime soon. "I'm just a plain old country lawyer, and I haven't heard from anybody who counts," says Thomas, a veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency and a couple of big law firms who is now a solo practitioner in suburban Boston--and whose letters to Capitol Hill have so far gone unanswered. Also, clawing back money from individual employees, as Thomas proposes, is a far more fraught and complex endeavor than hitting up corporations, as Superfund does. Still, while Thomas' bold idea is a long shot, talk of more modest clawbacks is in vogue on Wall Street. Clawback provisions have long been standard at venture-capital and private-equity firms, where partners are expected to regurgitate past earnings to make good on unmet promises to investors. And wherever outright fraud can be proved, those who benefited can be forced by the courts to disgorge their gains--as investors who withdrew money from Bernard Madoff's apparent Ponzi scheme before it collapsed might discover in the coming months. Clawing back gains absent fraud--and where there are no preset clawback agreements--is another matter. The concept is foreign to most of Wall Street. Hedge funds generally have only what you might call "claw forwards": high-water-mark provisions that prevent managers from pocketing performance fees after a loss until they've made up that loss to their investors. Investment banks, meanwhile, have for decades paid out bonuses on the basis of one year's profits and worried about the consequences later. This latter practice is now under intense scrutiny. Several big banking firms have announced that their top dogs will get no bonuses this year and that their future compensation will be structured to allow clawbacks of gains from bets that turn bad. It's not yet a sea change, though. "It only applies to senior executives, by and large, and those aren't the people who lost all the money," says Alan Johnson, a compensation consultant specializing in financial services. Bringing clawbacks down into the ranks of traders and investment bankers would be almost impossibly complicated, he contends. That, and it might not accomplish much. "Changing the pay system would not have prevented the current crisis at
all," says Johnson, because the people taking crazy risks didn't think they were taking crazy risks. Top executives at now defunct Lehman Brothers had most of their wealth tied up in company stock, for example, yet that didn't stop them from steering the company over the cliff--because they had no inkling that was what they were doing. Still, Lehman and other firms were once structured in a way that made employees think long and hard about risk. They were partnerships, and partners couldn't cash in until they'd been on the job for decades. This amounted to an implicit clawback system, with the other partners doing the clawing. The partnership model began to break down in 1970, when upstart Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette sold shares to the public. Merrill Lynch followed a year later, and in 1999 Goldman Sachs was the last big firm to go public. Perhaps that was all a mistake. "It's a radically regressive idea, but I honestly think Lehman Brothers would have been better off as a partnership," says Christopher McKenna, a reader in business history at Oxford University's Sad Business School. "How do you hold these people accountable? The answer is partnership." Can that clock be turned back? It depends partly on Congress but mainly on financial markets. If they come roaring back over the next few years, the whole clawback conversation will probably be forgotten. If they don't, investment banks and hedge funds will have to reinvent themselves to win back investors. Partnerships will make a comeback. Hedge funds will stop charging investors 20% fees. And clawbacks will be everywhere. Extra Money To read Justin Fox's daily take on business and the economy, go to time.com/curiouscapitalist
Click to Print
Can Apple Survive Without Jobs?

By Josh Quittner/San Francisco
The top marketing guy at Apple drew the unenviable job of filling in for CEO Steve Jobs at the annual Macworld Expo on Jan. 6. That would be hard enough under normal circumstances. Jobs is Apple, after all, its co-founder, Great Helmsman and Divine Light. But these were not normal circumstances. And Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, is no Steven P. Jobs. Where, oh where, is Jobs? Recuperating, we're told, from a hormonal imbalance that may or may not be related to the pancreatic cancer he fought off with surgery in July 2004. It's O.K., Jobs says, vowing to fight this thing, whatever it is, while continuing to run Apple as its CEO. Which is terrific, because, well, who can replace this guy? You've got to wonder whether Jobs is a creature loftier, more meaningful than just another corporate big cheese. CEOs come and go, after all, and some of them are every bit as megalomaniacally brilliant--think of Henry Ford, Thomas Watson, Sam Walton, even Bill Gates. Each of them set up a business that, massive and complex as it was, could be replicated and run by others. Jobs is different. He's a one-man brand, an innovator and agitator, a technical and cultural touchpoint for the media and information industries. He brought us the Mac machine that defines the personal-computer experience today. He changed music with the iPod, nearly making Sony obsolete. The touchscreen iPhone conquered Motorola's once so hot Razr. It's his vision and insane focus on style and function that made Apple the temple of techno-cool. So, if Apple is Jobs, what is it without him? That question is why the rumor mill, whose r.p.m.s intensify in advance of any possible news coming out of 1 Infinite Loop, shifted into turbodrive. On the eve of Macworld, it was announced that Jobs would not be making the keynote speech. Instead, Schiller, who often helps Jobs demo new toys at events, would be running the show. So here comes poor Schiller onto the brilliant stage of San Francisco's Moscone Center. Whereas Jobs is known for his handmade St. Croix black mock turtleneck and jeans, Schiller looks defiantly nerdy, sporting the kind of engineer blue button-down shirt popularized by the dotcom crowd in 1997. Whereas Jobs electrifies a room like some superhero from the X-Men, Schiller saps energy from the hall like an Everyman. You sympathize. He is a good dude. And this has gotta suck. Schiller's job right now is to make it seem as if the old Apple magic is still alive and well. Never mind that besides the absence of Jobs, Apple was missing anything truly zowie to show off. The best Schiller could muster was "I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all showing up and bringing your energy and enthusiasm to this keynote." Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
In truth, Jobs looked alarmingly thin in his appearances at Apple events during the summer and has not been seen in public lately. On Dec. 30, the gadget site Gizmodo, quoting an inside source, claimed Jobs was too ill to deliver the speech and his health was "rapidly declining," predicting "the inevitable news" would come in the spring. But then on Jan. 5, Jobs appeared, photonically if not in the flesh, via an e-mail to the "Apple Community." He disputed "stories of me on my deathbed" but admitted he had been "losing weight throughout 2008" and said, "The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority." Jobs wrote that he's suffering from a "hormone imbalance that has been 'robbing' me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy," noting that the remedy is "relatively simple and straightforward." A number of medical commentators found that explanation lacking. The CEO said that it would take until late spring for him to regain his weight but that he would continue as Apple's CEO during his recovery. It's doubtful that the obsession with Jobs and his health will end anytime soon, given how well he has positioned the company. Apple's computer division had a record year in fiscal 2008 and sold 9.7 million Macs, enjoying a growth rate twice that of the industry average. And that's actually the least interesting part of Apple's business. With the advent of the iPod and the follow-on success of the iTunes Store, Apple has sold 6 billion songs in six years to some 75 million people. And the iPod is nothing compared with what the iPhone is bound to become. Anyone who thinks it's a cell phone with a college education hasn't been paying attention. The iPhone is the first true mobile computer. Together with the Apple App Store, which has more than 10,000 free and cheap applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple--that is, Jobs--has built a platform that will generate billions of dollars. Beyond that, Jobs' Apple has helped right the music, TV and film industries, whose business models had been upended by the promise of free everything on the Internet. His coveted devices gave people a reason--and a way--to pay for media again. And if rumors are to be believed, Jobs could do the same thing for the print business. (Please! Hurry!) Tech blog Techcrunch reported recently that Apple is working on a 7- or 9-in. (18 or 23 cm) iPod Touch--big enough to read on comfortably--which is expected to be out later this year. So the stakes are high for us all--not just investors. Which takes us back to Jobs and his health. Is there life at Apple after he retires? Or, God forbid, dies? Plenty of companies with charismatic leaders can still thrive after they're gone, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University's business school. Recent examples include Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines and the Mayo Clinic, he says. The trick lies in the ability of successors to understand what made a company great--and preserve that part of the culture. And what's Jobs' secret sauce? "Most company leaders do what everyone else does," says Pfeffer. "The genius of Jobs is to get his company and its people to get out of that rut--to not follow the crowd but lead it."
No one outside the famously secretive Apple knows what, if any, succession plans Jobs has in mind. Observers speculate that Apple COO Tim Cook, design chief Jonathan Ive and dark horse Tony Fadell (who took the iPod idea to Jobs) are in the hunt--and, of course, Schiller, who, after enduring the horror of Macworld, might deserve the job.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
Wednesday, Jan. 07, 2009
Kate Winslet
By Richard Corliss
The Reader; Revolutionary Road She can do almost anything, be almost anyone, as long as the code word is danger. A ticket to a Kate Winslet movie pays for a trip into uncharted lands and toxic emotions. She doesn't play weak; she's not in it for the fun. She looks over the edge, leaps in and takes you down with her. This English actress, 33, has been a force for sizzle and discomfort since she was a teenager, in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, in which she propelled another girl onto a murderous fantasy ride. In Titanic, her biggest hit and least jangling role, she was the aristocratic love and death of poor boy Leonardo DiCaprio. Jude, Iris, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: they all cast her as the dominant female force. That suited Winslet, since her intelligence as an actress is essentially critical; it gives an erotic taunt and charge to any encounter. Winslet women usually proceed from an enveloping restlessness, a resentment of the status quo. This life isn't enough; let's stir things up, till death do us part. Reunited with DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road, she's the wife who wants to flee suburbia to rekindle a bohemian past. She speaks in cheerful midcentury modulations, but you detect the whisper of murder under her breath. Why can't her husband hear her pleas, which are also threats? Because he's wrapped in career anomie. He ignores her at his peril. In The Reader, Winslet's Hanna Schmitz, survivor and handmaiden of the Third Reich, can't escape or erase the past not even through the carnal, almost feral intensity of a brief affair she has with a teenage boy, Michael (David Kross), in 1958. If Hanna is the sum of what she's done, then she is satanic. If she is the repository of Michael's and the moviegoer's fascination, then she's saved from eternal infamy. Winslet puts across all of Hanna's misery, moral blind spots and allure in a performance of precise and desperate passion. Come fly with me, her laser stare says to hell.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1870281_1870283_1870284,00.html
Copyright ! 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy | Add TIME Headlines to your Site | Contact Us | Customer Service
Battlestar Galactica: Life After Earth

By James Poniewozik
Many science-fiction and fantasy sagas are driven by the quest for One Big Solution: a singular objective that, realized, fixes everything. Someone throws a ring in a volcano and Sauron is obliterated. Someone kills the emperor and balance is restored to the Force. On Battlestar Galactica, the Sci Fi Channel's darkly relevant reimagining of the 1970s campy space opera, the One Big Solution is us--that is, Earth. Somewhere in space, a few thousand humans have escaped near genocide by the Cylons, a race of robots of their own creation and indistinguishable from humans. The survivors are driven by the search for a planet--ours--on which a religious legend says the "13th tribe" of man long ago settled. Be careful what you wish for. Last year, at the midpoint of BSG's fourth and final season, the fleet landed on Earth to find a dead, rubble-strewn nuclear wasteland. It's as if Moses had crossed the desert only to find that the Promised Land had fallen into the ocean. The focus of humankind's survival strategy and religious mythology instantly turned to radioactive ash. Now, returning for its final run of 10 episodes (Fridays, 10 p.m. E.T.), BSG asks an unusual question: What happens after the big solution turns out to solve nothing? BSG began with a straightforward sci-fi premise: a space-chase saga but an uncommonly spartan, raw, unflashy one. There are no cute droids la Star Wars or sexy aliens la Star Trek. Its universe is dirty, lived in and worn out. The ships are cramped. The humans carry guns that shoot bullets; they also eat--yum!--processed algae vacuumed up from uninhabited planets. And they're given to creative basic-cable profanity--frak being BSG's F word of choice. That's not to say BSG is a bummer; it's thrilling, lyrical, even funny. ("The good news is," a politician says, wondering how to spin the news about Earth, "real estate prices are low.") But it's an adventure of exhaustion, not exhilaration. What has kept the diaspora going on this grim cruise is the promise of President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), a bureaucrat who becomes leader after the government is vaporized and who believes she is a prophet destined to lead humankind home. What keeps the viewer going is the cat-and-mouse game with the Cylons, who can hide among and interbreed with humans. (The robots, at least, are sexy.) Launched with a 2003 miniseries, BSG evolved into a sci-fi tale of the war on terrorism. Because Cylon "skin-jobs" pass for human--some believe they are human--the fleet fell into the kind of paranoia that, post-9/11, saw a sleeper-cell agent on every commuter flight. It also dramatized the danger of religious extremism: the Cylons are monotheists who see their human creators (who worship a version of the Greco-Roman pantheon) as heathens.
The parallels were uncomfortable. Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos, a far cry from the cuddly Lorne Greene of the '70s BSG) unflinchingly overrides civilian rule when he sees fit for security; Roslin is not above ballot-box-stuffing to ensure she leads the quest for Earth. In Season 3, when humanity lived under an Iraq-like occupation by Cylons (hoping to reform rather than exterminate the survivors), characters turned to bombings and suicide attacks against Cylons and their human collaborators. Like 24 (Jack Bauer and his ticking-time-bomb scenarios return Jan. 11), BSG tests the morality and rationalizations of an age of fear. Roslin is idealistic but possibly blinded by belief; Adama is high-handed but often right to be that way. Even swashbuckling pilot Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) is unstable as often as heroic. The Cylons, meanwhile, prove a fascinating society, racked with doubt and riven by debate over their religious mission. In its return episode, unsettling revelations about Earth's past come fast as the humans (now allied with a breakaway group of Cylons) wonder what to do next. In the process, BSG shifts from the topical to the timeless, raising questions about the nature of humanity as the protagonists are forced to redefine their purpose. Can humankind save itself, not by finishing some quest but by understanding the threats of its own creation? As this brilliant space saga comes to an end, humans are forced to recognize that the big solution is not out in the stars. But it might be in themselves.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
John Grogan's Short List
He's the author of the best seller Marley & Me and a new memoir, The Longest Trip Home. Here's what John Grogan has been watching, reading, listening to and harboring fond feelings for. (Oh, and he also went to see that flick about the couple and their crazy dog.) The Wire I don't subscribe to HBO, but after the umpteenth friend insisted that I just had to watch this police drama set in Baltimore, I bought the first season on DVD. I was hooked within the first 10 minutes, and now I'm on Season 2. In a world of predictable and hackneyed story lines, The Wire is fresh, nuanced and raw. You will find no black and white here, only a million shades of gray. Valkyrie The true story of a plot inside the Third Reich to assassinate Hitler. The critics have been mixed on this one, but I found Tom Cruise's performance credible and the story compelling, even if we all know the outcome before the opening credits roll. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski A boy, a dog, struggles of life and death, even a ghost. What's not to like? Emotionalism, by the Avett Brothers I discovered the Avett Brothers while browsing in one of those iconic hippie shops in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The album was playing on the store's sound system, and I was instantly smitten. It is impossible not to grin while listening to this infectiously upbeat blend of folk, rock and bluegrass, all played on acoustic instruments and with whimsical, witty lyrics to boot. Jenna Fischer as Pam on The Office My (wife-approved) celebrity crush. Redefining adorableness.
Click to Print
10 Questions for will.i.am

By Will.i.am
How do you manage to sustain the energy to be a rapper, producer and political activist? Gbemi Atimomo LAGOS, NIGERIA Well, I love music. I was inspired by artists like Earth, Wind and Fire; Bob Marley; Peter Tosh--and they would fuse social issues into their music, so I don't think of it as political activism but social activism. I don't like politics. I find the energy to do [it all] because I'm passionate. You say you don't like politics, but you supported John Kerry and Barack Obama. What got you involved in the process? Derrick K. Williams, DALLAS The spark was traveling outside America and seeing it from a distance, seeing the way people viewed us. America went from this beautiful country to "Oh my gosh, you guys are so stupid." But America tomorrow could still be the light of the world. Was each celebrity in the "Yes We Can" video strategically chosen for a certain reason? Emi Kaneshiro MILILANI, HAWAII The "Yes We Can" video, I wish--actually, I don't wish anything. It all came together like it was supposed to, like it was already destined to exist. One person found out, told another person, and it all happened in four days. It was just a beautiful time. People were just pouring into the studio. Did you want Fergie to join the Black Eyed Peas? Were you ever concerned that critics would deride you for selling out? Justin Castillo SALEM, ORE. We put Fergie in because of her amazing voice, her edge and her rawness. When you follow your heart, you're never supposed to do things because of what you think people might say. You do it for the opposite reasons. So, no, we didn't have those concerns. We did it because she was a true talent. What does the future hold for the Black Eyed Peas? Nikko Carlson CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Better question: What does the future hold for music as a whole? If I tell my 7-year-old cousin when she's older, "Hey, you know Virgin?" She'll be like, "Yeah, I'm still a virgin." She's not going to know that at one point in time Virgin was a record store, because everything is changing. The future of the Black Eyed Peas is to wrestle with the state of the declining music industry and make content that lends itself to different formats. What do you think about gangsta rap and its message? Bart Couder, BRUSSELS
Modern-day gangsta rap is cool. Some stuff I like. Some I don't. Every piece of entertainment sends out messages to young people, though. So what's important is that parents educate their children to know the difference between entertainment and reality. What's the main misconception you hear about hip-hop? Jeremy Erhart ENGLEWOOD, FLA. Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time-everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language. What major labels choose to market has nothing to do with what hip-hop truly is. There are tons of groups that are socially conscious. What was your reaction when Obama won? Justin Durueke, SEATTLE I was kind of shocked, like I didn't know if it was real or not. I remember when Al Gore won and then he didn't, so I didn't really believe it [this time]. I'm still shocked now. It was a beautiful thing. Have you written anything for the Obama Inauguration? Mel Maurer, WESTLAKE, OHIO No, but I'm planning on going. I don't know if I have a hotel, but that's O.K., I'm used to touring in vans and tour buses. I want to be there regardless of whether I'm there with the Obama party or if I'm just there as an American. Will having an African American as President have any effect on the state of hip-hop culture? La-Toya Duncan, BROOKLYN, N.Y. Now that Obama's President, it changes inner-city youths. They can now not just dream to be Lil Waynes and 50 Cents, but they can now dream to be Obamas. And that's dope. VIDEO AT TIME.COM To watch a video interview with will.i.am and to subscribe to the 10 Questions podcast on iTunes, go to time.com/10questions
Click to Print
Covering the Holy Land

By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor
Since the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, Israel and stories about the Middle East have been on the cover of TIME more than any other international subject except the Cold War. During that time, we've done some 68 covers on the Middle East, encompassing Israel and the unending cycle of Arab-Israeli problems. As the struggle has intensified between Israel and Gaza, a sad clich about the Middle East once again seems true--that the more things change, the more they tragically stay the same. In our 1948 cover story on the Israeli victory and its hero, David Ben-Gurion, we wrote that it was "time to stop pondering the settled question of whether there would be a Jewish state, time to start asking what kind of nation Israel was." That is the question we are again asking this week as we ponder not only Israel's endgame with Gaza but also what the future holds for the Jewish state. Tim McGirk, our Jerusalem bureau chief, poses the toughest questions facing Israel: Is a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine still possible? Will Israel's hostile neighbors ever acknowledge and adapt to its existence? These are the issues that Israel and the world must reckon with. The hallmark of our coverage of Israel is balance. I know this isn't a very scientific way of measuring, but I tend to have as many people vehemently informing me that TIME is unfair to Israel as people telling me the opposite. I was in Israel and the West Bank only a few months ago, and I got an earful from all sides. People still recall the libel suit we won against Ariel Sharon in 1985 and Yasser Arafat's selection as one of our Men of the Year for 1993. But for all that, we strive to make sense of this volcanic part of the world and help our readers understand what's at stake. We do it using the perspective of our decades of experience covering this never-ending struggle. McGirk, who has been based in Jerusalem since 2006, says he felt a sense of dj vu as the Gaza conflict unfolded: his arrival in the region coincided with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants, Israel's bombardment of Gaza and the subsequent war against Hizballah in southern Lebanon. "My lament, shared by everybody around here, is that even with this latest bloodletting, it doesn't appear that Israelis and Palestinians are coming closer to an understanding, not even one based on sheer exhaustion," McGirk says. As usual, our reporting has been enhanced by two other veteran members of TIME's Jerusalem bureau: Aaron J. Klein and Jamil Hamad. During the current round of fighting, Klein and driver Uri Narkis narrowly avoided being hit by Hamas rockets fired into southern Israel. "It was frustrating not being able to go in with the Israeli troops, observing the clouds of smoke rising over Gaza only from a distance," Klein says. Meanwhile, Hamad worked his contacts on the Palestinian side for insight into how the Palestinian leadership views the crisis. "Impartiality is a dream," Hamad says, "but honesty is a duty." It's one we have always striven to meet.
Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
Milestones
DIED Guitarist and founding member of the seminal punk outfit the Stooges, Ron Asheton, 60, would often make waffles for his bandmates--including singer Iggy Pop--at the Fun House, the Ann Arbor, Mich., home where the group lived for a time. Although aloha shirts had been around since the 1930s, Alfred Shaheen, 86, made his name after World War II with a Hawaiian store full of specially commissioned shirts. His clothing line folded in 1988, but items still sell for upwards of $1,000. A former six-term Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, aristocratic Claiborne Pell, 90, helped pass the 1972 law that created Pell grants for college students. The program has funded millions of higher-education opportunities. A divisive pick as President Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, 90, was criticized for not doing enough to enforce school desegregation in the South as a federal judge in the 1960s. He was later praised, though, for his strategic work on race issues. APPOINTED Most recently a top contender for the No. 2 spot under Barack Obama, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, 50, was named the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Jan. 4. Kaine's term as governor expires at the end of the year. PRINTED For the first time in its 157-year history, the New York Times printed a display advertisement on its front page. The color strip promoting CBS programming extended across the bottom of the Jan. 5 edition. Previously, cover ads were limited to text-only classifieds.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
The Moment
By David Von Drehle
A classic tale of Chicago politics involves a young man eager to plunge into a Democratic campaign. The skeptical ward boss asks who sent him. "We don't want nobody that nobody sent," he snarls. Chicago's Roland Burris had the opposite problem when he strode into the U.S. Capitol to succeed Barack Obama as the junior Senator from Illinois. Senate majority leader Harry Reid didn't want nobody that somebody sent--if that somebody was Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, arrested in December on charges that he was plotting to sell Obama's seat. Burris, who wasn't accused of any wrongdoing, was rebuffed by the secretary of the Senate. Instead of entering the chamber's cozy confines, where he would have stepped into Obama's role as the lone African American, he retreated in a chill rain before a flock of cameras. For those who see politics as a chess game for scoundrels, it was all great fun. Free on bail, refusing to resign, brassy Blago had turned the tables on rectitudinous Reid. In Illinois a person is governor until proved guilty, and some legal scholars opined that Burris had the bona fides even if they were issued by a character out of The Sopranos. Within hours, Senate Rules Committee chair Dianne Feinstein broke with Reid, calling for Burris to join the club. The Senate leader, out on a limb that his comrades were sawing off, soon softened his opposition. "[Bleep]ing golden," the cynic might say, borrowing from the Blagojevich idiom as allegedly captured on a federal wiretap. Will Rogers could count on a chortle whenever he said, "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." But these are serious times: the same day the Senate convened with two Democratic seats unfilled (comedian Al Franken's microscopic margin of victory is being contested in Minnesota), Obama announced that the nation could soon face a trillion-dollar deficit. Instead of serious leadership, Congress gave us the Burris showdown--in which gall challenged sanctimony while insincerity vied with incompetence.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
Helen Suzman
By Alex Perry
Born into white privilege in an increasingly racist society, Helen Suzman, who died Jan. 1 at 91, was a lifelong contrarian. She served in South Africa's Parliament from 1953 to 1989, fighting her government's repression of the country's black majority and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and his fellow antiapartheid fighters. From 1961 to 1974, it was a battle she fought alone as the Parliament's sole anti-apartheid member. To the fury of other activists, however, Suzman opposed economic sanctions, arguing that they hurt blacks more than whites. And while she earned the admiration and friendship of Mandela, she did not flinch from criticizing his African National Congress (ANC) once it won power. I met Suzman for tea in the lush garden of her Johannesburg home last June. She was, she said, "slowly fading away," with tinnitus in her ears making her head "ring like a church bell." But she was still feisty and outspoken, especially on the ANC. The party had failed to transform the lives of black South Africans, she argued--"The vast majority have been left behind"--while its leader and the likely next President, Jacob Zuma, "just tells people what they want to hear." Not an accusation ever leveled at Suzman.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
The Skimmer
By Alex Altman
Highlights of Accomplishments And Results: The Administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2009 By the White House; 51 pages How do you commemorate the legacy of an Administration with an approval rating in the 20s? As the curtain falls on the George W. Bush presidency, this slim volume unspools a highlight reel of Bush's achievements--from ousting Saddam Hussein and staving off post-9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil to combatting AIDS and malaria in Africa and distributing $16 billion in food aid. Framing the text are stats-laden info boxes, a bullet-pointed list of "100 Things Americans May Not Know" about their 43rd President's record and snapshots of Bush looking presidential (hoisting a bullhorn amid ground-zero wreckage, glad-handing troops and seniors). Chapter titles touting Bush's accomplishments--"Established the Freedom Agenda to Spread Hope Through Liberty"--read like handpicked epitaphs. History, as Bush likes to say, will be his judge, but it's worth reading this report if only as the closing argument before the defense rests. It's not as though the prosecution lacks fodder for a rebuttal. READ [X] SKIM TOSS
Click to Print
The World
By Alex Altman, Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Alyssa Fetini, Andra Ford, Kate Pickert, Frances Romero, M.J. Stephey, Claire Suddath
1 | Washington Richardson Bows Out President-elect Barack Obama's pick for Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, withdrew his name from consideration amid a grand-jury investigation into state contracts awarded to a political contributor. While the governor headed back to the statehouse, Obama's team scrambled to fill other crucial posts: Leon Panetta Bill Clinton's former top aide is reportedly the pick for CIA chief, a role some say should be reserved for agency veterans. Dr. Sanjay Gupta A neurosurgeon, TIME columnist and CNN medical correspondent, he's Obama's reported choice for surgeon general. Nancy Killefer The McKinsey exec was tapped as chief performance officer, a newly created post that oversees government efficiency. 2 | Germany The Financial Crisis Claims A Victim Adolf Merckle, a 74-year-old billionaire whose business empire included some of Germany's best-known cement and pharmaceutical companies, threw himself in front of a train on Jan. 5--driven to suicide, his family said, by the global financial crisis. Merckle had lost hundreds of millions of euros in a bad bet on Volkswagen shares, endangering the future of his companies as a result. A handful of other business leaders have taken their own life amid the recent economic downturn, including Kirk Stephenson, the London-based CEO of Olivant, who died in September. 3 | Islamabad Making Its Case India's government has delivered evidence it says proves that 10 terrorists who killed 179 people in Mumbai late last year were from Pakistan, including photos of Pakistani-made weapons carried by the attackers and transcripts of phone conversations between them and Pakistan-based handlers. Islamabad has not officially accepted responsibility; on Jan. 7, a security official was fired for publicly acknowledging a connection. 4 | Washington Protecting Pacific Gems In the biggest ecological move of his presidency, George W. Bush created three remote national monuments, protecting an unprecedented amount of the ocean from fishing and mining. The areas are home to the deepest waters on earth and some of its most unusual sea life. 1 Mariana Trench 95,216 sq. mi. 2 Pacific Remote Islands 86,888 sq. mi. 3 Rose Atoll 13,451 sq. mi. 5 | Ukraine Running Out of Gas In a dispute that threatens to leave several European countries short of
natural gas in midwinter, Russia stopped gas shipments to Ukraine, claiming the neighboring country owes $2 billion in late payments. A timeline: DEC. 24, 2008 Russian President Dmitri Medvedev orders Ukraine to pay up "to the last ruble" or risk sanctions DEC. 30 Ukraine agrees to pay its November and December debts JAN. 1, 2009 Russia claims it still has not received payment and cuts off Ukraine gas supplies. Both countries confirm that negotiations have halted JAN. 4 The Czech Republic reports a drop in Russian gas supply JAN. 6 With six European countries reporting a complete shutoff of Russian gas--which is funneled through Ukraine--the E.U. demands that talks resume. Russia and Ukraine blame each other for the lack of gas. The contract details are secret, though, making facts difficult to confirm 6 | Iraq GOODBYE TO THE GREEN ZONE The heavily fortified headquarters of the U.S. occupation for almost six years was formally turned over to the Iraqi government on Jan. 1. Approximately 1,000 of the nearly 14,000 Americans who work inside the 4-sq.-mi. section of Baghdad will stay in the zone, moving into new digs at the just-opened U.S. embassy--the largest in the world. 7 | Sri Lanka Key Losses For the Tamils The Tamil Tigers, a separatist group that has waged a violent campaign against the island nation's government since the 1970s, suffered a major setback when Kilinochchi, their de facto capital, was captured on Jan. 2. Sri Lankan troops are now targeting the jungle stronghold Mullaittivu, in the northeast, the loss of which would serve as a devastating blow to the Tigers. 8 | India What's Sanskrit for Enron? "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten," wrote Ramalinga Raju (below), chairman of India's Satyam Computer Services, in a Jan. 7 resignation letter admitting that he had hugely inflated the outsourcing company's profits for years. Also fabricated: the $1.04 billion the company reported as assets in September. Satyam shares dropped 78%. The news raises concerns about India's regulatory agencies and has worrisome repercussions. Satyam (Sanskrit for truth) serves 1 in 3 FORTUNE 500 companies and employs 53,000 people. 9 | South Africa 2010 World Cup Woes On Jan. 4, Jimmy Mohlala, a former South African Football Association vice president, who made news early last year after exposing the allegedly corrupt construction of a World Cup soccer stadium, was shot dead by an unknown assailant. Mohlala's death has added to the growing international skepticism about South Africa's ability to host the 2010 World Cup amid rising security concerns. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.] New-car sales in the U.S. in December 2008 compared with December 2007 -36% BMW -14% VOLKSWAGEN -31% NISSAN -32% FORD -35% HONDA -32% MERCEDES -37%
TOYOTA -31% GENERAL MOTORS -48% HYUNDAI -53% CHRYSLER (SOURCE: AUTODATA CORP.) 10 | Detroit A Bleak Holiday for Carmakers Sales of cars and light trucks in the final month of 2008 fell 36% from the previous December, capping a disastrous year in which U.S. auto sales tumbled 18%. After soaring oil prices over the summer made driving more expensive, the Big Three automakers, caught in the financial crisis and facing slumping demand, were forced to rely on a Washington handout to avoid bankruptcy. In the chilly December market, Chrysler saw sales drop by more than half, and no brands were immune save for Rolls-Royce and Mini, which witnessed only slight upticks. Experts say the dismal figures portend less production and variety in 2009. * | What They're Selling on the Internet: Former employees and clients allegedly swindled by financier Bernie Madoff are trying to get their money back--a few dollars of it, anyway--by hawking T shirts, tote bags and other memorabilia bearing Madoff's sullied name on San Jose, Calif.--based auction site eBay. Most items sell for less than $50, so it might be a while before victims earn back their lost $50 billion. "It's sad," said a seller, "but it's still humorous."
Click to Print
Verbatim
'You can go back to your--what do you call it?--your Google, and you figure out all that.' GEORGE H.W. BUSH, when asked about previous statements regarding his son's shortcomings as President 'They cheated me.' SHAKIRULLAH, a 14-year-old Pakistani, on the Muslim radicals who persuaded him to help plot a suicide bombing; he is now serving time in Kabul 'The request demands proper consideration.' JULIA GILLARD, Australia's acting Prime Minister, after the Bush Administration appealed to let Guantnamo detainees resettle Down Under should the prison be shut down 'We wanted to get married, and so we just thought, Let's go there.' ANNA-BELL, a 6-year-old German girl, on trying to elope to Africa with her 5-year-old boyfriend; they were picked up by police at a railway station near her home 'It's more like a comedy or something we watch and say, Oh, wow, that's kind of cute of American gangsters.' K'NAAN, Somalian rapper, on the braggadocio of his American counterparts 'Mood at Twitter HQ the first work day of the year: Focused anxiety.' EVAN WILLIAMS, CEO of the socialnetworking site, after learning that more than 30 Twitter accounts were hacked, including those of Barack Obama and Britney Spears 'It's not enough, as Jesus said, to put patches on an old suit.' POPE BENEDICT XVI, challenging world leaders to make major changes to the global financial system, saying short-term answers to the economic crisis weren't sufficient Back & Forth: Politics 'I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge.' DIANNE FEINSTEIN, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioning President-elect Barack Obama for choosing former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to head the CIA 'Whether it's Mr. Panetta or someone else, it's critical that the agency move in a new direction.' Representative PETER HOEKSTRA, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, saying Panetta's civilian background would bring a much needed "change in culture at the CIA" Energy
'This shouldn't be the responsibility of another country.' JOSEPH P. KENNEDY II, president of nonprofit Citizens Energy, after the Venezuelan government halted a program that provided discounted heating oil to impoverished communities in the U.S. 'It's hardly a surprise that he's pulling out of our economy now that he's crashed his own.' LARRY NEAL, of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, blasting Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez for bringing his rich-vs.-poor politics to the U.S. LEXICON Thirdhand smoke n.--The toxic residue from tobacco smoke that remains after a cigarette is extinguished USAGE: "A recent study in the journal Pediatrics notes: 'Children are especially susceptible to thirdhand smoke exposure because they breathe near, crawl and play on, touch and mouth contaminated surfaces.'" --Chicago Tribune, Jan. 5, 2009 Sources: Fox News; CNN; International Herald Tribune; Guardian; NPR; CNN; AP For daily sound bites, visit time.com/quotes
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
A Brief History Of: Ponzi Schemes

By Alex Altman
His methods and motives remain cryptic, but the carnage unleashed by Bernard Madoff is beginning to be revealed: in a New York City federal court, where the former Nasdaq chairman stands accused of masterminding a $50 billion Ponzi scheme; in congressional hearings; and in the Manhattan office of a French financier who killed himself after Madoff bilked him and his clients out of more than $1 billion. Ponzi Schemes--in which a swindler touts outsize returns, parries questions about legitimacy with hefty dividends and creates the illusion of solvency by paying off early investors with capital raised from later entrants--are named after Boston businessman Charles Ponzi. From 1919 to 1920, the Italian immigrant coaxed thousands of people into sinking millions of dollars into a complex deal involving international postage rates, which he said would earn a 50% profit in 90 days. Ponzi wasn't the scam's first practitioner; that was probably a New York City grifter named William Miller, who fleeced investors out of $1 million--more than $20 million in today's dollars--in 1899. The cons have since grown: a Florida church netted $500 million in a 1990s fraud that promised God would double the money of pious investors. Boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, in addition to foisting 'N Sync on an unsuspecting public, stole $300 million from clients over two decades. And citizens poured some $1.2 billion into Albanian pyramid schemes after the fall of communism; when the schemes collapsed in 1997, investor outrage toppled the government. Still, Madoff's $50 billion scam would be the biggest ever--except to those who say the risky trading in mortgage-backed securities was a Ponzi scheme of its own. The price tag for that crisis is already in the hundreds of billions.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
Donald E. Westlake
By Charles Ardai
A one-man crime wave of some 48 years came to an end Dec. 31 with the passing of Donald E. Westlake, 75, who (under his own name and as Richard Stark) wrote some of the best-loved and most influential crime novels of the 20th century. As Westlake, he chronicled the misadventures of hapless criminal John Dortmunder (played by Robert Redford in the film version of The Hot Rock); as Stark, he penned the Parker novels, about a ruthless professional thief, whose screen incarnations include Lee Marvin in Point Blank and Mel Gibson in Payback. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, Westlake received an Academy Award nomination in 1991 for his screenplay for The Grifters and won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award three times from the Mystery Writers of America. Westlake inspired younger writers ranging from Stephen King (who named the homicidal alter ego in The Dark Half George Stark in Richard Stark's honor) to yours truly, appearing as a character in my recent novel Fifty-to-One. As no one before him, Westlake played both the light and dark sides of the street--alternating witty, ingenious capers with tales of breathtaking cold-bloodedness--and taught two generations of writers how to stylishly pull off one perfect crime after another. Like Parker, Westlake was the consummate pro. Ardai, an Edgar and Shamus Award--winning author, is editor and founder of the pulp-fiction publisher Hard Case Crime
Click to Print
Inbox
Honoring Obama Your article naming President-elect Barack Obama as Person of the Year was insightful, interesting and original [Dec. 29]. After two elections in which it seemed the American people cast their vote for the guy they'd most like to have a beer with, your article illustrated why we as a country voted a different way this time. I'm proud not because we elected an African American but because we finally elected the smartest guy in the room. Erin Pagel-Mohr, REDLANDS, CALIF. Choosing Obama as TIME's Person of the Year was so predictable. TIME has had a love affair with Obama since the day he announced his candidacy for President! Time should change its name to the New Republic and follow the ideology of that publication's management team. Ken Taylor, HARTFORD, TENN. Your Person of the Year should have been Michael Phelps; his accomplishments were obtained with hard work and dedication. Obama was a creation of the media. Luciano Castro, MELBOURNE, FLA. I am 85 and cannot afford to take the risk of a delayed thank-you. At a time of life when I am busy packing it in, this issue is a keeper. I plan to store it safely in my cedar chest for my offspring. Marie Whitener Hindery, SEATTLE The Runners-Up Why are you wasting space on Sarah Palin [Dec. 29]? Her time is past. Let sleeping dogs lie. Nothing would make me happier than to have a woman as our Chief Executive. However, she should be an able, qualified one (where is Hillary Clinton when we really need her?), not a Miss Cutesy Pants. Doris Paster, SOMERSET, N.J. I was shocked by the advertisement for French President Nicolas Sarkozy written by his friend Tony Blair. Sarkozy's political "reforms" consist of destroying French society's historical bases. Sarkozy does not have the stature of a national or world leader, but he's the best at giving the illusion that he does. Laurent Boireau, PARIS Those We Lost in 2008 You describe the late Charlton Heston as a "figure of epic contradictions," citing his marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in the '60s and his leading the National Rifle Association in the '90s [Dec. 29]. I fail to see any contradiction. The man consistently fought in important and not entirely risk-free ways for the rights and dignity of individuals. John Loosemore, HANCOCK, MICH.
A Shoe Is Thrown in Baghdad I couldn't disagree more with what Bobby Ghosh wrote in "The Moment 12/14/08: Baghdad" [Dec. 29]. While I have been unhappy with most of President Bush's decisions, respect for the presidency should count for something. To me, Ghosh clearly disregards that with his less-than-objective rendition of objects being hurled at a U.S. (or any country's) President. What happened to that "journalists' code of objectivity" Ghosh writes about? Jeff Seyler, WILBRAHAM, MASS. Drug Warfare in Mexico Re TIME's Postcard from Culiacn: "Mexico's drug war" is in fact America's war fought in another country [Dec. 29]. You describe the narcotrafficking murders but fail to explain why they occur: as a direct result of demand for cocaine in the U.S. They do not demonstrate, as may be inferred, any inherently violent characteristic of Mexican society. About 90% of cocaine used in the U.S. passes through its southern neighbor, and Mexican civilians are dying so that American drug addicts can get their fix. David Sussman, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. Would Teddy Have Approved? Re Joe Klein's Teddy awards honoring courage in the political arena: A John McCain regime would have probably finished the job that the Republicans began so well of dismantling the National Parks system [Dec. 29]. This--and the concept that we should protect our national resources--is Teddy Roosevelt's greatest heritage. You really think he'd like McCain? Richard Bagwell, BERKELEY, CALIF. Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling
Click to Print
Tennis: Nadal's New Spin

By EBEN HARRELL / PARIS
After studying the exotic wildlife of the Galpagos Islands, Charles Darwin surmised that animals can develop unique traits when they evolve in isolation. In the tennis world, Rafael Nadal is such an animal. Based on the island of Majorca, Nadal and his family shunned mainstream training programs as he grew up, preferring the more homespun methods of Rafael's uncle Toni, whose tennis credentials consist of a brief stint competing on the national circuit. Passing up funding from Spain's national tennis academy, and scholarship money from America's private academies, Rafael and Toni would travel to the mainland only when a tournament required it. More skillful opponents were viewed as problems to overcome, not exemplars to be mimicked. Nadal who first picked up a racquet aged 3 and his coach found their own solutions, developing a style of play concerned less with form and technique than with results. What matters is winning. Or as Nadal puts it, "I've always liked the competition more than the tennis." Whatever; it's worked. The approach ultimately produced an unorthodox, physical and devastatingly effective game that has taken Nadal, 22, to the top of men's tennis. In 2008, he recorded one of the sport's most successful seasons, becoming the first player since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to win on the slow clay of Roland Garros in Paris and the slick grass of Wimbledon in the same year, while also picking up an Olympic gold and the ATP's top ranking. Given all that, you might expect Nadal to stick with what's working. But he and, most especially, his coach can't help themselves. Having proved that Nadal's unique style can beat any player in the world, Toni has been quietly picking apart Nadal's game, remaking it shot by shot so that the Spaniard plays not less classically but more classically. As Nadal prepares for this year's first grand slam event, in Australia beginning Jan. 19, the top seed and his coach seem to be posing a new challenge: Can tennis's great outsider win by embracing normal? (See pictures of an alternative look at Wimbledon.) All athletes develop their own mix of style and technique. But Nadal's peculiarity is quantifiable. San Franciscobased tennis researcher John Yandell has used video-capture technology to record the topspin of Nadal's forehand. He found that Nadal's shot rotates at an average of 3,200 times a minute. Andre Agassi, one of the game's great shotmakers, generated 1,900 rotations per minute in his prime, and current world No. 2 Roger Federer, whose forehand is considered among the game's best, generates 2,700. As U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe has said of Nadal, "His normal safe forehand is the toughest shot in the world." That forehand is the central component of a style that tennis experts call "counter-punching." It's one that absorbs an opponent's attacking play with aggressive returns, and springs from Nadal and his uncle's contrarian instincts. Nadal is naturally right-handed. But early on, Toni decided his protg should play with his left hand to impart unusual southpaw spin. Toni then encouraged, or perhaps failed to correct, the extreme grip Nadal uses, and the unusual way he swings his racquet. To this day, instead of using the forward momentum of his body to generate pace on his forehand as the training manuals recommend, Nadal falls backward from the net on his forehand, whipping his racquet behind his head instead of across his body. This movement results in looping shots that keep an opponent heaving balls back, often on the
run, in a nightmare from which only an error provides release. Rallying with Nadal, says former Top 10 player turned coach Brad Gilbert, "is an education in pain." It's a pain Nadal applied indiscriminately last year, even against Federer, who may just be the greatest player of all time. The Spaniard's rise to No. 1 ended a five-year period in which Federer's free-flowing and artistic play came as close as humanly possible to achieving perfection within the boxed constraints of a tennis court. Since his first French Open victory in 2005, Nadal's more muscular game has consistently overcome the Swiss star on Nadal's favorite surface clay. But in 2008, Nadal came out on top in four meetings, including an epic five-set Wimbledon final that dethroned the grass-court champion in one of the greatest matches ever played. More than any other, that match in which Nadal seized control early on and slowly squeezed the air out of Federer, even as the Swiss player thrashed out a brave but doomed comeback summed up Nadal's unique brand of tennis: protracted but certain in its path to victory. Nadal's exoticism on the tennis court stands in contrast to the conventional life he lives off it. The son of a prosperous family his father, Sebastian, runs a successful window company, another uncle was a star soccer defender for Barcelona and Spain Nadal retains the earnest good manners of a middle-class Spaniard. Rebellious in his fist-pumping, swashbuckling play, he dresses smartly for social occasions. He lists his hobbies as golf, fishing and video games, and follows his uncle's rule that he carry his own bags and racquets when at tournaments. He still lives with his parents. His girlfriend, 20-year-old Maria Francisca Perello, is a student in Majorca whom Nadal met through family friends. "People see Nadal as some sort of rebel, but he's really just a normal guy, a normal Spaniard. He likes normal things and he lives a normal life," says his publicist Benito Perez-Barbadillo. Or, as Nadal puts it, "I'm happy all the time. But I'm most happy at home." The Weakness in Power Nadal may be a simple guy off the court, but he has found himself cast as a villain on it. Tennis purists have long bleated that his jarring, defensive game is less pleasing to watch and less effective than Federer's fluid style. Recently, though, the game's lite have started to come around. Swedish great Stefan Edberg has declared Nadal "unbeatable" by today's professionals, and Pete Sampras told reporters on Dec. 2 it may be Nadal, not Federer, who breaks his career-defining record of 14 major championships (Nadal has 5; Federer, five years older, has 13). But there is a caveat. Can someone with such a high-intensity game last long enough to break all the records? Tennis players' longevity varies depending on their style of play. As points and matches lengthen, careers often shorten. Nadal and his coterie of physical trainers know that the flip side of his heavy topspin is that it forces him to engage in bruising rallies. His muscle-bound physique which Nadal says is down to genes rather than weight-lifting adds an extra burden: the explosive forces those muscles generate put his body under increased strain. See pictures of fashion at Wimbledon. See TIME's Top 10 Sports Moments of 2008. This is particularly evident on a hard court, which offers less forgiveness than the softer surfaces of clay and
grass, and may explain why Nadal has never managed to make the final of a Grand Slam hard-court event. Ask his trainer, Rafael Maymo, what parts of Nadal's body are under strain when he plays, and he answers: "Shoulder, feet, legs and back. Oh wait, that's every part." Sampras is even more direct: [Nadal] puts so much effort into each point that eventually something will break." Just as his counter-punching style relies on a fundamental obstinacy, Nadal seems naturally resistant to criticism. In interviews, he consistently deflects questions with rhetorical returns ("But clearly I play better, no?" "I've won on grass before, no?"). At the BNP Paribas Masters in November, he insisted that what really needed changing was the length of the professional tennis season, not his game. (Two days later, tendinitis in his knee forced him to withdraw from the event.) "The Tour is very tough because the season is too long in my opinion," he told TIME as he melted four squares of butter into a steaming heap of plain pasta. (A portion of salmon waited to one side). "Next year is going to be very difficult for me because I have had such a tough season already." But while Nadal gripes about too many matches, Toni has been reworking his nephew's game to make it less physically demanding. In recent months, the pair have focused on increasing the velocity of Nadal's serve in the hope of earning more aces, and improving Nadal's net play in the hope of shortening rallies. More drastically, they have begun altering Nadal's trademark forehand. In Paris, I spent two hours watching Nadal practice forehands with a follow-through that came around his body in the traditional manner rather than whiplashing behind his head. Toni barked complaints if his pupil unconsciously reverted to his old follow-through. At one point, unhappy with the results, Toni pointed at a promotional picture of Federer on the JumboTron above the court, a post-forehand action shot of the Swiss player with the caption hit that back if you can! See, like that!, Toni seemed to be indicating. "Federer is a wonderful player," Toni says later, before making a gesture with his hand in imitation of a painter's strokes. "He plays with [this]," he says, hand brushing up and down. "His spirit is so easy." Is his coach encouraging Nadal to mimic Federer? "No, Federer is too good," says Toni. "Rafael must play like himself but better, [less spin], quicker points." But how can Federer be too good when Rafael is ranked No. 1? "There is a difference between who is better and who knows more," says Toni. "Better now is Rafael, he is No. 1 in the ranking. But who has the best game? Federer." Playing the Game Spend a few days with Nadal and it becomes clear that the changes he is making to his game are part of a wider makeover that he and his handlers have planned for 2009. At the center of these changes is the desire to project a more mature image. Whether that comes from Nadal himself is tough to say. Tennis stars can remain children long into their careers. Many players turn pro in their mid-teens. In the player's lounge at the Paris Masters, top pros in their late teens or early twenties lay around on faux-zebra-skin couches while their managers hustled the phones. The most popular section of the players' restaurant was a wall filled with jars of candy and licorice, and back at the hotel players spent a good portion of their time playing video games together. Even in this setting, there has always been something particularly childlike about Nadal's public persona, from his obsessive prematch routine of arranging his water bottles just so, to his compulsive butt-scratching between points, to his habit of posing for championship photographs while biting onto trophies like a teething tot. Nadal's manager, Carlos Costa of the management company IMG, says the young champ is ready to grow
up. The role model, again, is Federer, who has positioned himself as an elder statesman of the tour and whose exquisite touch on the court and advertiser-friendly image as a trilingual Swiss gentleman brought in an estimated $35 million in prize money and endorsements in 2008. (Nadal's camp won't discuss finances, but tennis writers estimate Nadal's earnings fall considerably short of that.) "When you see Nadal and Federer it's a different type of person," says Costa. [Federer] is more adult, [Nadal] seems more like a kid." If Nadal's earnings are to grow, that will have to change. Nadal's sponsors target "young people," says Costa. "But he needs to be the kind of guy that brands can think of as an ambassador. Someday he's going to be a man, more than a kid." That day may be some way off. As part of the campaign to rebrand Nadal, Nike announced last summer that the player would wear a new line of attire at the U.S. Open. Nadal normally wears knee-length shorts and a sleeveless shirt a trademark pirate costume loved by fans, which looks ridiculous on anything other than Nadal's muscled body. Nike said the new line would be "more mature" and appeal to an older tennis-playing public. But only days before the tournament began, the clothes were withdrawn because Nadal said he felt uncomfortable. Could changing tennis's most unique and effective specimen backfire? Nadal will never lose certain aspects of what makes him so effective: his pugilist spirit, and the ability to impose his muscular game on more talented players. But so much of his success stems from his resistance to tradition that Toni's plan to make his charge more orthodox may dim Nadal's aura among fellow pros. When I asked the American player Andy Roddick about the changes, he couldn't believe that Nadal would voluntarily reduce the spin on his forehand. "One of the things that is difficult about facing [Nadal] is the extreme topspin he gets on the ball," Roddick told TIME. "If it's true, I don't think it would make him more effective." And while sponsors may want Nadal to become a man, he needs to be his own man. Fans love Nadal because he seems so real. Even his most deliberate calculations to pick up the racquet in his left hand and hit the ball in a way nobody has before seem to stem from a subversive instinct. For tennis's antihero, on the court at least, normal might be a step too far. See pictures of fashion at Wimbledon. See TIME's Top 10 Sports Moments of 2008.
Click to Print
Oil's Sinking Fortunes

By VIVIENNE WALT
Few of us will miss 2008. Stock markets tanked. Government budgets bled as billions went to bail out banks. Thousands lost their jobs or their homes, or both. Yet amid the gloom there was one reason to celebrate as the year ended: filling your car with gas got cheaper with each day. After hitting a high of $147 a barrel in July, world oil prices have crashed to their lowest levels since 2004. By Jan. 7 the cost of oil for February delivery was around $43 a barrel less than half the price of a year earlier. Goldman Sachs last month predicted that the price could sink to as low as $30 by March. For car owners, airlines and any person or company that uses a lot of fuel, plunging gas prices provide a financial break just when it is needed most. But not everyone is applauding the return of cheap oil. Oil-producing nations that raked in billions over the past few years now face a reckoning. Governments that didn't set aside any of their windfall, or shortsightedly budgeted on sky-high prices and more than a few fall into both categories are grappling with tumbling revenues. The reality of lower oil prices for countries such as Iran, Nigeria, Russia and Venezuela in 2009 is likely to include political unrest, massive cuts in public spending, and rocketing inflation and unemployment. "The brutality and speed of the price decline is a huge shock economically and politically for some of these countries," says Didier Houssin, director of energy markets and security for the International Energy Agency in Paris. That shock is just starting to hit the world's fourth-biggest oil producer, Iran. The price crash has pummeled Iran's foreign earnings, 85% of which come from its shipments of 3.8 million barrels of oil a day. Last summer the country was garnering about $300 million a month from oil and natural gas. This month it's likely to make just $100 million, according to Saeed Leylaz, an economist in Tehran who edits the business newspaper Sarmayeh. For many of Iran's 65 million people, responsibility for the downturn has settled on one man: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. International sanctions have tightened during Ahmadinejad's fiery presidency, resulting in oil exports dominating Iran's economy even more than normal. According to energy analysts and economists, Ahmadinejad has also spent billions of dollars from Iran's Oil Stabilization Fund, which is supposed to act as a safety net during an oil crash, to pay for social programs for his millions of supporters, most of whom are poor though there is little public accounting for where the money has gone. Iranian budget deficits have soared and inflation is now a hefty 25% a year, according to Cliff Kupchan of risk consultancy Eurasia Group in Washington. Government officials are "digging a deeper hole, spending money they do not have," Kupchan says. Last November, 60 Iranian economists sent Ahmadinejad a letter warning him that his policies threatened economic ruin. "We have nothing because Mr. Ahmadinejad has spent it all," says Leylaz, who did not sign the letter, though he is a fierce critic of the President. "Mr. Ahmadinejad's economic policy has an absolute lack of financial discipline. His priority is making people satisfied now, not to have money for the future."
After months of upbeat assurances, Ahmadinejad finally admitted last month that economic problems had compelled him to recalculate the 2009 budget to reflect an oil price between $30 and $35 a barrel rather than $60. He also drafted a bill to scrap lavish fuel and electricity subsidies, which give Iranians some of the world's cheapest gas (just 36 a gallon), even though it has to be imported from foreign refineries. The move is a high-stakes gamble for the President, who is up for re-election in June and is already cast by his opponents as the cause of the Iranians' deepening poverty. "Mr. Ahmadinejad will spend as much money as possible to make people happy," Leylaz says. "Then immediately after the election we will face the collapse." Halfway around the world, Venezuela's President Hugo Chvez is confronting a similar predicament. Two years after Chvez won his third term, Venezuela faces a deep recession. The price Caracas gets for its oil has dropped some 70% since July to about $31 a barrel. That has left Chvez with about half the money he budgeted to spend in 2009, and doesn't take into account the millions of dollars Venezuela will lose each month if it abides by recently agreed OPEC production cuts. Despite all that, Chvez vows to keep spending, especially on social programs such as public housing and health. He has also flaunted his petro-wealth over the past few years, by giving money and free oil to allies like Bolivia and Cuba. Such generosity may be unsustainable, as Chvez is discovering. He provided cheap heating oil to poor Americans in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere until last week, when Venezuela's financial meltdown forced him to scrap the program. As with Ahmadinejad, the Venezuelan leader's political future hangs on a looming vote: a referendum on Feb. 15 to decide whether to amend the constitution to eliminate term limits that would allow Chvez to run for President indefinitely. "The government is in a hurry," says Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan Minister of Planning who's now director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. "It has to approve the constitutional amendment before it is forced to cut subsidies and depreciate the currency." Hausmann predicts inflation and unemployment will both spike this year, leading to a full-blown economic crisis. While social spending is high, Venezuelans have protested the government's failure to deliver fully on promises of cheap housing and plentiful jobs. Now the country's income has plunged, that anger is sure to increase, says Hausmann. "The train is running at 150 miles an hour and it has a big brick wall ahead of it," he says. "We are heading toward a crash and the pilot is not stepping on the brake." In Russia, an oil-driven recession has also sparked protests. Late last month hundreds of demonstrators poured onto the streets in several cities after the government announced a 30% tariff on imported cars, a measure designed to protect the country's struggling domestic auto industry. Unlike Iran and Venezuela, Russian officials squirreled away at least $600 billion in cash reserves during the years of soaring energy prices. But Russia's economic growth has fallen from 7% to about 2%, its stock index is down by some 70%, and investors have withdrawn $190 billion since last August. Zeljko Bogetic, the World Bank's chief economist in Moscow, warned investors last month that if the oil price drops to $30 a barrel and stays at that level through 2010, Russia would be forced to empty the rest of its cash reserves and borrow money abroad. "Clearly we are in the middle of a major growth recession in Russia," Bogetic said.
As Russia spends its savings, its power abroad could ebb. Russia has worked for years to reassert itself as a major international player. It has exported large quantities of arms (often to anti-Western allies like Iran and North Korea), cut off gas exports to Europe (most recently two weeks ago), and hosted the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. But Russia's clout, built on its growing oil wealth, could now crumble, says James Hickey, Russia expert at London-based think tank Chatham House: "Everything Russia does in foreign policy is about them looking for respect, wanting to be treated as a major player. But that is hugely undermined now. At $50 a barrel this is a very different Russia." Markedly lower oil prices are devastating not just to those countries that benefited from $147-a-barrel crude. Unlike in Russia, the oil boom barely touched the lives of most people in Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria. About two-thirds of Nigeria's 146 million people still live on about one dollar a day, according to the World Bank. As prices crashed last year, Nigeria's production slumped, too, due to rebel attacks on pipelines in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Last October, Nigeria's central bank governor Chukwuma Soludo announced there was almost nothing left in the country's rainy-day fund because production halts had forced the government to spend its savings on government salaries. With oil prices heading lower, Soludo warned, there was little to protect Nigerians from greater hardship. "Everybody will be affected one way or another," he said. In Nigeria at least, cheap oil could have an upside: with revenues dwindling, government officials may be forced to exercise greater financial discipline, says Pat Utomi, professor of political economics at Lagos Business School. Utomi points out that the 1980s oil crash led to much-needed privatization of state-run industries in Nigeria, strengthening the economy overall. "Nigerians say they have never benefited from oil," Utomi notes. "Progress is probably best with lower oil prices." If that's the case, then ordinary Nigerians are in luck. Energy analysts say oil prices are likely to remain low until the recession ends probably not before 2010 at the earliest. Scrambling to prevent further price drops, the 11 OPEC oil ministers voted in December to pump 2 million fewer barrels a day the biggest production cut in the organization's 48-year history. But even this may fail to push prices up, since it is the dramatic slowdown in global growth, and not an oil glut, that is driving the cost of oil lower. It is this cold truth and its consequences that have leaders from Ahmadinejad to Chvez so rattled.
Click to Print
A Tale of Two Cities

By Don Morrison
Forget Athens and Sparta, Sodom and Gomorrah, Dallas and Fort Worth. Of all the cities whose destinies have been twinned for one reason or another, few can match the intensity of the love-hate relationship between Paris and New York. For much of the past century, the City of Light and the City That Never Sleeps have competed feverishly for leadership in culture, couture and coolness, even as they freely exchanged influences and expatriates. Nowhere has that fond rivalry been more evident than in the field of design. "Paris/New York," a dense, imaginative exhibit running at the Museum of the City of New York until Feb. 22, focuses on 1925-40 the bright, anodized moment when Paris and New York were forging new ways of looking good. That was when Paris invented Art Deco (and New York improved on it), New York was alive with a new sound called jazz (and Paris went crazy over it) and Paris dominated haute couture (while New York industrialized it). "Let's work together," enjoined the French architect Le Corbusier. "Let's build a bridge across the Atlantic." Leading artists and designers of the day took up the challenge, hopping back and forth across the pond to create paintings, posters, buildings, furniture, fashions, dinnerware, interiors, jewelry and luxury liners. Aside from a few paintings by the transatlantic practitioners of Neo-Romanticism, a gentler version of Surrealism, this is a show about stuff. One of the first things you see is a 6-ft.-long (2 m) wooden model of the Normandie, that floating showcase for Art Deco and French luxury that was once the classiest way to go between the two cities. Nearby are modernistic silver serving pieces and other shipboard relics. A striking 1934 photomontage advertising the Normandie shows it sailing through Times Square past the Art Deco Paramount Building. Art Deco that decorative fusion of Art Nouveau, Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism and Futurism made its debut at Paris' 1925 International Exposition. In a New York minute, the style took Manhattan and was replicated in interiors, fabrics, typefaces and that local speciality, the skyscraper. Various 1920s and '30s New York high-rises are represented in photos, ironwork and hunks of decoration especially Rockefeller Center, the 22-acre (nine hectare) living museum of Art Deco that lies 52 blocks due south of the exhibit. The French government, not coincidentally, was one of the center's first tenants. Indeed, France fell in love with the skyscraper, and the show includes plans for (mercifully unbuilt) Parisian versions that somehow lacked the energy of their New York counterparts. Energy was America's competitive advantage. While Paris was bursting with ideas, New York was getting them built. The Paris furniture and fashion designers who were setting world standards began to find their masterpieces knocked off by New York department stores and the emerging Seventh Avenue garment district. A dressing table by French designer Lon Jallot is a riot of color and molded wood oops, that's the copy made in New York for Lord & Taylor's department store. If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe aphorized, then jazz is Art Deco on ice. France adored that
American musical invention and especially Josephine Baker, the black American singer and dancer who electrified the Paris jazz scene in the 1920s. Her sleek, exotic beauty is on display in Art Deco influenced posters, paintings, advertisements and fabrics, plus a film loop of her doing an athletic shimmy. "There's a lot of text here," says "Paris/New York" curator Donald Albrecht of his show's detail-crammed signs and labels. "It's like a magazine article exhibit-ized." And, like any good magazine article, it has not just a beginning and middle, but also an end. One of the last things you see is a 1932 replica of a never-built luxury liner by Norman Bel Geddes, who along with the likes of Gilbert Rohde and Donald Deskey formed a rising group of distinctively American designers. Bel Geddes' model is the same size as the Normandie at the show's entrance, but sleeker and more futuristic a metaphor for the passing of cultural leadership to New York. Where it mostly remains. World War II ended Paris' heyday as the world capital of design, and indeed of the arts generally. Despite a brief renaissance in painting and film in the 1960s, Paris is today a beautiful city with great museums, a glorious past and a lot of visiting New Yorkers. They should take note. The next culture-and-design rivalry will probably involve Beijing and Shanghai. Masterpieces by American creators of fashion, furniture and consumer electronics are already being replicated in the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas and sold at big-box stores. Meanwhile, Chinese painters like Yue Minjun and Zeng Fangzhi are pulling in big bucks at auction, and Chinese filmmakers, writers and musicians are not far behind. Perhaps appropriately, the Normandie ended its days in New York. While being refitted as a troop ship in 1942, it caught fire, capsized and sank in the Hudson River at 47th Street. At war's end it was sold for scrap. But along with other reminders that the two great cities were once joined at the hip of all that was hip, the Normandie lives on in wood, silver and memory. Rivalries end, style endures.
Click to Print
High and Dry in Chile's Atacama Desert

By Matthew Link
When the latest 007 flick Quantum of Solace exploded on the world's screens last year, its desert climax highlighted the fact that South America is not all steaming jungles and snowcapped peaks. The continent is also the site of the most arid place on earth the stunning Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The area is a fitting locale for part of the film's plot, which involves the sinister Quantum organization in an attempt to cut off a country's precious supply of fresh water. Only parts of Antarctica see less rainfall than the Atacama a strip of land about 600 miles (1,000 km) long, sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. NASA has conducted training missions there, since the rugged landscape is the closest to a Martian surface on our planet, and some of the world's most powerful telescopes are located in the Atacama because its air has little to no moisture. Indeed, parts of the desert are so dry that no life grows not even bacteria. Of course, all this makes the Atacama seem like the world's most unlikely place for tourism, but its remoteness and superlatives are exactly the things that attract travelers. "When we opened in 1998, everyone thought we were crazy," says Maurice Dides, the manager of the Hotel de Larache, www.explora.com, located near the sleepy, sandy, stucco village of San Pedro de Atacama. "Now, we are doing renovations just to keep up with all the new properties opening up here." Since 2006, a number of lodgings have popped up around San Pedro, each more tasteful and upscale than the last. The intimate Awasi, www.awasi.com, feels like the kind of private compound a Hollywood celebrity would relish, while the brand new Hotel Kunza, www.hotelkunza.cl, with its desert-themed spa, is taking a page out of the Four Seasons book. Although put on the travel map by trailblazing backpackers over a decade ago, San Pedro now sees the famous and the well-heeled: Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore have both visited. Small wonder that even more lavish resorts in San Pedro are on the drawing board. Most lodges in San Pedro include meals, drinks and excursions into the desert in their room price. Die-hard adventurers trudge up the 100-meter-plus mocha sand dunes of the Valle de la Muerte and surf down them on specially outfitted sand boards. Others opt for hikes up the cone-shaped Licancabur volcano, on the border between Chile and Bolivia, with its 19,420-ft. (5,920 m) summit topped by Incan ruins. On any given morning, you'll find groups of travelers dipping into the steaming hot springs at the Tatio Geysers, where over 80 vents make it the largest geyser field in the southern hemisphere. The Atacama's high-altitude plains are also home to flamingo-filled salt lakes, where dainty vicuas (smaller cousins to the llama) go to drink while strange-looking vizcachas (looking like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel) hop by. Some political tensions hang in the desert air. Bolivia still claims parts of the Atacama won by Chile in the 1800s War of the Pacific, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and Bolivian President Evo Morales continue to work on patching up the ongoing border dispute. More recently, black flags have fluttered over San Pedro and other Atacama towns in protest at a planned water project that will divert resources from the Tatio Geysers and other Atacama water sources for state-owned mining projects. "Nobody has told us how
these water resources are going to be replenished. Who will assure us that we are going to be able to continue to live in this region?" asks Sandra Berna Martinez, mayor of the San Pedro district. Perhaps 007 will have a solution.
Click to Print
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1642444_1870349_1870342,00.html
Walking the Talk with City Guides

By Steve Mollman
Who needs digital navigation? The best city guide is still flesh and blood and gets around on two feet. Here are some experts who can show you around Asia's big cities: HONG KONG: This city's history usually gets forgotten amid the neon glare and cell-phone chatter. But not by local historian Jason Wordie, tel: (852) 2476 5057. He reveals WW II shrapnel scars on the famed lion statues outside the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. headquarters and still functioning gas lamps atop Duddell Street. At times on his tours, he holds up photographs shot from the same spot many decades ago an effective way to reveal the march of time. BANGALORE: All those call-center workers blow off steam somewhere and you can find out where on a wobbly pub-and-history tour with BangaloreWalks, tel: (91) 988 067 1192. If bar crawling is not your thing, take one of the neighborhood walks revealing scenes rarely glimpsed by outsiders, including local temples, street markets and dhobis (washermen) at work. MELBOURNE: Known increasingly as a foodie paradise, Melbourne is a shopper's one as well. Hidden Secrets Tours, tel: (61-3) 9329 9665, guides you on a spending spree in the form of a three-hour Lanes and Arcades walk. Bust your credit limit in specialty shops, boutiques and quirky galleries while taking in plenty of architecture and history. The tour includes lunch. SINGAPORE: Geraldene Lowe-Ismail, tel: (65) 6737 5250, smartly times her tours of the Lion City to coincide with festivals and other cultural events. When better to explore Hindu heritage than during Thaipusam in February? That's when thousands of devotees walk miles between temples carrying kavadi, or offerings, which can be as simple as a milk jug on the head or as elaborate as a frame with peacock feathers and body-piercing spikes. Ramadan is the time to explore the old Muslim area of Kampong Gelam, and the Moon Festival is a great time to discover Chinatown's folklore. SEOUL: Seoul is noted for its high-rise, high-tech living, but 600-plus years of history can't be completely eradicated. For help with where to look, turn to architect Cho In Souk. Sponsored by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, her tours, tel: (82-2) 3290 7042, run once a month (except in winter) and reveal hidden historical alleys, shrines and neighborhoods that have somehow escaped modernization, like the charming Bukchon area. Cho grew up in Seoul and her personal observations add much to the tours.
Click to Print
Back to Article
Click to Print
Jakarta's Temple to Good Taste

By Jason Tedjasukmana
The giant, 11-ft.-high (3.5 m) Buddha watching over A-list revelers was the only one looking serene at the opening of Jakarta's Buddha Bar last November. All other faces betrayed an excitement that had been pent up for 18 months, during which an old immigration office in the upscale Menteng district underwent a much touted multimillion-dollar transformation into a branch of the famed Parisian bar-restaurant the French establishment's first Asian foray. Eight weeks after the launch and the buzz surrounding Jakarta's latest nightspot, tel: (62-21) 390 0899, has not died down. There's a downstairs bar, an upstairs restaurant with a Pacific Rim menu, and the terraces and gardens are a pleasant change in a city where drinking and air-conditioning tend to go hand in hand. Fusion may be a somewhat tired concept, but thoughtful design has elevated what could easily have been a tired look into a timeless one, with deep reds and dark woods lending richness to the interior. The building itself is another plus. "We thought it was sad that so many buildings here need to be saved and decided to restore this one," explains marketing director Renny Sutiyoso. Despite the grandeur of the building (originally called the Bataviasche Kuntskring when it was built in 1913 by the Dutch colonial administration) and its grounds, Buddha Bar doesn't impose cover charges or enforce a strict dress code. "We want to create a Paris-like experience without the attitude," says Sutiyoso. Areas in the vicinity of Menteng the Indonesian capital's stuffy old-money enclave are starting to loosen up in similar fashion, with new venues like the Social House restaurant and the cabaret-themed Raden Puas luring giddy scenesters and young socialites. In the face of this influx, kudos must go to the older residents, who include former President Megawati Sukarnoputri and have so far maintained a Buddha-like calm.
Click to Print
Vintage Models: Chinese Women in Advertising

By Ling Woo Liu
In China, it's no longer shocking to see sexy adverts peddling everything from perfume to hamburgers. Popular perception attributes this to the mass-marketing methods adopted during the past 30 years of economic liberalization, but in fact the transformation of the Chinese woman from coy maiden to poster girl has been a far longer process. The first inklings of change date to the early part of the 20th century, when middle-class urban women benefiting from increased educational opportunities and influenced by their Western counterparts began cutting and perming their hair, refusing to bind their breasts and feet and wearing shorter, tighter dresses, often with revealing slits. A new exhibit at Macau's Museum of Art explores this first wave of liberalization. "Modern Times: Chinese Women in Advertising" features more than 60 advertising posters that date from the 1910s to the 1940s. Most were printed from hand-painted Shanghainese originals, but a few also hail from Hong Kong and Macau, which by being foreign enclaves were also crucibles of change. A 1938 ad for W.D. & H.O. Wills Bristol & London cigarettes shows a statuesque woman stepping off an aircraft in a form-fitting blue cheongsam. In a poster for Indanthrene Cloth, two schoolgirls carry not only flowers but also a stack of books, as if to underscore the idea that the female of the era was no longer a simple domestic but also educated. During the Cultural Revolution, most of these posters were destroyed as symbols of bourgeois society, but the precious few that survived have become pricey collectors' items and the source of cheap replicas now found in antique markets throughout Asia. Complete with creases and cracks, the works in "Modern Times" are the real thing. The exhibit ends on Feb. 8, and at just 60 cents, the admission fee makes it one of the best bets in this casino town. For more information, go to www.artmuseum.gov.mo.
Click to Print
Inbox
The List Issue: Best and Worst I enjoyed your list issue but was dismayed that as a print subscriber, I was generally given short shrift [Dec. 22]. Instead of allowing your critics, journalists and commentators the space to back up their decisions, you gave us some lists along with cutesy drawings and clip art. You forced your bread-and-butter subscribers to sift through dozens of pages at TIME.com to read a few lists. I understand that a) you need to make money from ads on your website and b) you could not have printed all your lists in the magazine. But at least give us the chance to hear out your TV critic instead of printing his list in microscopic type on the cover. Jeff Sinclair, san francisco I was surprised that your "Top 10 Scandals" did not include Taiwan's former President Chen Shui-bian, a vocal advocate for Taiwan independence who has been indicted for alleged money-laundering and misuse of public funds. Such an apparent case of "absolute power corrupting absolutely" should be a lesson to all politicians. Cy Chen, Taipei Thank You. I am a movie snob and very critical of everything I see, but I thought Speed Racer was simply brilliant entertainment from top to bottom. It's been at least a decade since I've seen a movie more than once in the theater, but I saw Speed Racer three times. It was sad to see it flop and be critically savaged, but I appreciate your adding it to the "Top 10 Movies" of 2008. Denny Zartman, Atlanta Riots in Athens What we saw in Greece in the last few weeks was atrocious [Dec. 22]. Granted, a boy is dead from alleged police negligence, but that does not give license to hooded and masked anticapitalist anarchists to pillage communities and deface public and private property. These people should take a page from the citizenry of Australia and the United States, who showed their dissatisfaction with the powers that be with their right to vote. Since when has the right to an open government and democracy come from under a mask? Nicholas Chrisopoulos, Melbourne Paying More for Gas, Voluntarily With his proposal for broad new energy taxes, Michael Kinsley gets my vote for insight of the year [Dec. 22]. I don't like high gas prices any more than the next guy, but I would rather put the money to good use in the U.S. than send it to OPEC. The American people have demonstrated beyond a doubt that they can and will get by with less gas if there is a compelling reason in the form of a higher price at the pump. The enormous,
unstated side benefit of Kinsley's proposal is a huge step toward energy independence. Who did not enjoy seeing the OPEC ministers being forced to reduce production because of reduced demand in the U.S. and worldwide? I wonder if our elected representatives will have the courage to pursue Kinsley's idea. Richard Parins, Sarasota, Fla., U.S. Kinsley's latest missive in TIME falls prey to one of the oldest traps in economics Frdric Bastiat's broken-window fallacy. Just as a broken window creates work for the glazier at the expense of the window owner, money that Kinsley hopes to inject into the economy must first be taken out of it. Add in collection costs and the usual political malfeasance, and we have a net loss to the economy. There's more: Kinsley argues that last summer's high oil prices were essentially a tax on consumers; the money just went to oil companies instead of the government. But he forgets that oil companies do not have control over their prices. If they did, then why would oil prices ever drop? Kinsley's logic does not follow. Ryan Young and Drew Tidwell, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington Getting Out of Afghanistan Re Joe Klein's "The Aimless War": all the soldiers pictured with the article have the same haunting, tired, stressed, bewildered, questioning, faraway look [Dec. 22]. There is a saying, "The eyes are the portals to the soul of man." It is evident by the look in these soldiers' eyes that they are all asking, "What the hell is going on, and why are we here?" A better title for this story couldn't have been found. C.D. Rinck Sr., Mission, Kans., U.S.
Click to Print

Why Israel Can T Win - Time Magazine

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Why Israel Can T Win - Time Magazine

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thursday, Jan.

Can Israel Survive Its Assault on Gaza?

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870314,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Point Man Jim Jones

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870488,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Case for Bigger Government

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870268,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870498,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Recession's Big Test

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870486,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Secrets of 2009 Revealed!

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870483,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870539,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870485,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Minds on The Edge

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870491,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Bacon for Dessert.

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

A PG-Rated Second Life

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Economy Cleanup: Clawback to the Future

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870481,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Can Apple Survive Without Jobs?

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870502,00.html

Wednesday, Jan. 07, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1870281_1870283_1870284,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Battlestar Galactica: Life After Earth

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870487,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

John Grogan's Short List

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870490,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

10 Questions for will.i.am

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870496,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Covering the Holy Land

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870504,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870493,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870494,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870499,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870501,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870506,00.html

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009