`We blew it’ on global food, says Bill Clinton.
By CHARLES J. HANLEY (AP) –  October 23, 2008.

UNITED NATIONS Headquarters, New York City  — Former President Clinton told a U.N. gathering Thursday that the global food crisis shows “we all blew it, including me,” by treating food crops “like color TVs” instead of as a vital commodity for the world’s poor.

Addressing a high-level event marking Oct. 16’s World Food Day, Clinton also saluted President Bush — “one thing he got right” — for pushing to change U.S. food aid policy. He scolded the bipartisan coalition in Congress that killed the idea of making some aid donations in cash rather than in food.
Clinton criticized decades of policymaking by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, encouraged by the U.S., that pressured Africans in particular into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs as a requirement to get aid. Africa’s food self-sufficiency declined and food imports rose.

Now skyrocketing prices in the international grain trade — on average more than doubling between 2006 and early 2008 — have pushed many in poor countries deeper into poverty.

***

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the gathering that prices on some food items are “500 percent higher than normal” in Haiti and Ethiopia, for example. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the number of undernourished people worldwide rose to 923 million last year.

***

“Food is not a commodity like others,” Clinton said. “We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves.” He noted that food aid from wealthy nations could itself be a tool for bolstering agriculture in poor countries.

Canada, for example, requires that 50 percent of its aid go as cash — not as Canadian grain — to buy crops grown locally in Africa and other recipient countries.

U.S. law, however, requires that almost all U.S. aid be American-grown food, which benefits U.S. farmers but undercuts local food crops. Bush proposed earlier this year that 25 percent of future U.S. aid be given in cash.

“A bipartisan coalition (in Congress) defeated him (that is G.W. Bush),” Clinton said. “He was right and both parties that defeated him were wrong.”

Clinton also criticized the heavy U.S. reliance on corn to produce ethanol, which increased demand for the crop and helped drive up grain prices worldwide.

“If we’re going to do biofuels, we ought to look at the more efficient kind,” he said, referring, for example, to the jatropha shrub, a nonfood source that grows on land not suitable for grain.

The U.N. General Assembly president, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, agreed, speaking of the “madness of converting crops into fuel” for cars.

D’Escoto also expressed disappointment that of $22 billion pledged by wealthy nations to help poor nations’ agriculture in this year of food crisis, only $2.2 billion has been made available.

***

In opening the meeting, Ban expressed dismay at the potential impact of the global financial crisis on world hunger.
“While the international community is focused on turmoil in the global economy, I am extremely concerned that not enough is being done to help those who are suffering most: the poorest of the poor,” he said.

From:    e.polack at ids.ac.uk
Subject: New Climate and Disaster Governance Programme launched today!
Date: October 22, 2008

Climate and Disaster Governance: Understanding governance at the interface of climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development

CDG will help policy-makers and civil society organisations understand how different national and sub-national governance arrangements can make development more resilient to climate change and disasters.

CDG research is currently investigating:
•how citizens can best engage in national and local climate and disaster policy-making;
•the role social protection can play in reducing risks for the most vulnerable people;
•the opportunities and barriers to reducing climate and disaster risk in fragile states;
•the impacts of international policies on national and local capacities for disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and poverty reduction.

CDG partners invite you to collaborate on or across CDG’s research themes, and to share resources and information through the programme’s website.

CDG is also offering research bursaries to support developing country researchers on topics that fall under or across the programme’s research themes.

To find out more visit www.climategovernance.org

Climate and Disaster Governance: Understanding governance at the interface of climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development

The Climate and Disaster Governance programme is being launched today by the Institute of Development Studies and Christian Aid:

CDG will help policy-makers and civil society organisations understand how different national and sub-national governance arrangements can make development more resilient to climate change and disasters.

CDG research is currently investigating:
•    how citizens can best engage in national and local climate and disaster policy-making;
•    the role social protection can play in reducing risks for the most vulnerable people;
•    the opportunities and barriers to reducing climate and disaster risk in fragile states;
•    the impacts of international policies on national and local capacities for disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and poverty reduction.

CDG partners invite you to collaborate on or across CDG’s research themes, and to share resources and information through the programme’s website.

CDG is also offering research bursaries to support developing country researchers on topics that fall under or across the programme’s research themes.

To find out more visit www.climategovernance.org

Environment on AlterNet.
October 21st, 2008
 http://www.alternet.org/environment
___________________________________________________________

From the editors:
AlterNet has now rolled out voter guides for all our issue areas to help you make informed decisions in the upcoming election — just two weeks to go. Below is our enviro guide and you can also find a guide specifically for water issues in our Water section. Where do the candidates stand on different strains of energy policy? How about clean water? Green jobs? Check out the voter guides.

We’ve also got some great election and economy related content this week — the big topics of the day, including some words that Michael Pollan has for the next president.

Thanks for reading,

Tara Lohan, Managing Editor
___________________________________________________________

SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT MAY BE OUR BEST HOPE FOR THE ECONOMY — ELECTION GUIDE
AlterNet
From climate change to energy independence, a look at where
the candidates stand on this year’s top 10 environmental
issues.
 http://www.alternet.org/environment/1019…

ENVIRONMENTAL FAILURE: A RUINED PLANET IS CLOSER TO REALITY
By James Gustave Speth, Yale Environment 360
Environmental groups have grown in strength and
sophistication, but the environment has continued to go
downhill. Why?
 http://www.alternet.org/environment/1038…

HOW THE ECONOMIC CRISIS WILL AFFECT THE ENVIRONMENT
By Michael T. Klare, Huffington Post
Will the crisis be good or bad for the environment,
especially with respect to global warming?
 http://www.alternet.org/environment/1038…

CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS TO DRY UP THE SOUTHWEST’S FUTURE
By Jason Mark, Earth Island Journal
The abundant water and cheap energy that have fueled the
Southwest’s transformation are starting to dry up.
 http://www.alternet.org/environment/1033…

DEAR MR. NEXT PRESIDENT — FOOD, FOOD, FOOD
By Michael Pollan, The New York Times
We must move into the post-oil era to improve the health of
the American people and to mitigate climate change.
 http://www.alternet.org/environment/1026…

THE MELTDOWN WE REALLY CAN’T AFFORD
By Kerry Trueman, AlterNet
We are in danger of passing an extremely dangerous tipping
point, with the frightening discovery of massive deposits of
sub-sea methane in the Arctic.
 http://www.alternet.org/water/102351/

Obama Assembles US’s “Largest Law Firm” to Monitor Election. { You Do Not want A Repeat Of Florida 2000 }
Monday 20 October 2008
James Rowley, Bloomberg News, {and this is not a partisan agency!}

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain prepare for legal battles over swing-state election issues:  Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy.

Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.

The millions of dollars that have been poured into registration drives have yielded millions of new voters across the country. Those same efforts have now generated heated battles in both parties with cries of voter fraud and intimidation that may threaten the integrity of the election.

Election officials, meanwhile, are braced for huge turnout and the problems that could create with long lines, malfunctioning machines and challenges to voters.

Already, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed Ohio Democrats a victory, dissolving a court order obtained by Republicans to force state officials to release the list of 200,000 new voters whose names or addresses don’t match government databases.

***
Democrats’ Accusations:

Obama’s lawyers also have pressed allegations that Michigan Republicans planned to use mortgage-foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Indiana labor unions allied with Democratic presidential nominee Obama, an Illinois senator, are battling a Republican chairman over early voting in the state’s second- largest county.

***

2002 Law

Much of the partisan disagreement is over enforcing a 2002 law enacted by Congress to help states prevent a Florida-type recount by requiring election officials to set up database checks to purge voters.

Ohio’s Republican Party obtained a court order directing Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s secretary of state, to give county election officials the lists of new voters whose names didn’t match drivers’ licenses or Social Security records.

In her successful Supreme Court petition, Brunner called the order a recipe for “disruption” and “chaos” as the state prepares for a presidential vote that polls of Ohio voters predict will produce another razor-thin margin. Database checks are not “a litmus test” for the right to vote, she said in a statement announcing the appeal.

Republicans contend the federal law requires record checks to counter fraudulent voter registration, which they say has been perpetrated by a nationwide network of community activists known as ACORN. The party’s presidential nominee, Arizona Senator McCain, has cried foul over the drive by ACORN - an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - to register 1.3 million voters this year.

“Deceased Individuals”

“They’re registering the same person at different addresses,” said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel. “They’re registering people at vacant lots” as well as “deceased individuals.”

ACORN says bogus applications are only a tiny percentage of the new voters it registered, and it flags suspicious cases to election officials.

On Oct. 2, Ohio Republicans won a separate court fight with Brunner over absentee ballots cast by McCain supporters. The state’s Supreme Court countermanded Brunner’s order that local election boards reject the ballots if the applicant hadn’t checked a box that indicating they were a “qualified voter” when submitting the absentee ballot.

Democrats and voter-rights lawyers, meanwhile, accuse Republicans of twisting the Help America Vote Act to use identity-card or database checks as a method to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots.

“No Basis”

“That is one of the oldest dumbest lines the Democratic Party uses,” said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republicans in Columbus. “There is no basis for it.”

Ohio doesn’t require first-time voters to register party affiliation, though the Obama campaign said Democrats have a significant edge among the 660,000 new Ohio voters.

Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there is scant evidence of large numbers of people fraudulently casting ballots. “`We all know the stories of dead people voting in Chicago,” he said. “We don’t have zombies showing up at polling places and casting ballots.”

Without “any data,” the argument over whether there is vote fraud or ballot suppression is “the political equivalent of a religious debate,” said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a Washington-based unit of the Pew Charitable Trust that studies election law.

“Tenets of Faith”

“Both sides have deeply held tenets of faith, but no way to prove” that “they are right or the other side is wrong.”

Still, vote fraud has become an attack line for McCain, 72.

In an Oct. 15 debate, McCain said Obama, 47, was in league with ACORN and accused the group of “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.”

Obama denied any connection with ACORN, and said the group was defrauded by people who filled out registration cards with fake names just to get paid.

Bob Bauer, the general counsel of Obama’s campaign, charged that Republican efforts like the Ohio party’s lawsuit, are “grounded simply in an effort to intimidate voters and suppress the vote.”

In a conference call with reporters, Bauer vowed to mount “ferocious response” to any effort to purge voter rolls, such as the lawsuit by Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen.

Van Hollen, who co-chairs McCain’s presidential campaign in Wisconsin, sued to force the state agency overseeing elections to perform database searches to check the validity of all voters registered since Jan. 1, 2006. A decision is expected next week.

Labor Unions

In Indiana, Republicans and Democratic-allied labor unions are battling over early voting in Lake County, an historically Democratic stronghold that includes Hammond, East Chicago and Gary near Chicago. John Curley, the county Republican chairman, argues that the election board lacked authority to open more than one site because state law requires a unanimous vote of the board.

The McCain campaign wouldn’t say how many lawyers it has deployed or how it is preparing for possible court fights.

“We are not jumping to conclusions that litigation efforts are going to be widespread,” said Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman.

Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee lawyer who chairs Lawyers for McCain in Florida, said his party isn’t “trying to lawyer up nearly so much as the Democrats.” Republicans are trying to mobilize voters while Florida Democrats appear to be trying to “win this through having the greatest number of lawyers.”

Collateral Damage: Is Health Care Reform Another Victim of Wall Street’s Madness?
Monday 13 October 2008, Mike Lillis, The Washington Independent.

Health-care reform - an expensive and politically thorny proposition in any environment - could be particularly tough in the face of a plunging economy.

Yet to hear the candidates tell it, the next president will usher in an era of sweeping changes. Both Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are pushing overhauls of the health-care system that purport to save families thousands of dollars while covering millions of the uninsured. Some estimates put the cost of their plans in the trillions of dollars. Neither candidate has said specifically how he would pay the tab.

The financial storm arrives at an inopportune time in the health-care debate. Nearly one in six Americans is uninsured. If the unemployment rate increases, in a system where coverage is tied jobs, that could well go higher.

Meanwhile, employers facing stiff overseas competition are increasingly limiting health coverage for employees or dropping it altogether. Medical costs are rising at a faster clip than both wages and inflation. Under the next president, the oldest baby boomers will become eligible for Medicare, which is projected to go belly up in a decade. Powerful voices in Congress are pushing for a comprehensive shakeup to save the sinking ship.

And there may be more to come. Today, Democratic leaders will meet in Washington to discuss the possibility of a second stimulus package. Early estimates its cost at $150 billion.

The result?

The country is broke - at least as it concerns new spending proposals. In fiscal year 2008, which ended Sept. 30, Washington spent $438 billion more than it collected in revenues. The government must borrow money - largely from abroad - to make up the difference.

The Lewin Group, a nonpartisan health-care consulting firm, released its own analysis last week. It tallied the Obama and McCain plans at $1.2 and $2.1 trillion, respectively, over 10 years.

“They haven’t explained how they’re going to pay for all these changes,” said John Shiels, senior vice president of the Lewin Group. If the candidates had offered a financing plan, he added, the numbers “would be dramatically different.”

  The return on those investments would be substantial. The Lewin Group estimates the Obama plan would reduce the number of uninsured Americans - almost 46 million in 2007 - by 26.6 million people. McCain’s plan would reduce the uninsured by 21.1 million, Lewin found, though that figure is far higher than other analyses.

“It is essential to improving the economy,” said Jacob Hacker, political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.”

Still, in the face of the economic crisis, many experts say, budget considerations will dictate the debate at least as much as the policy details. “In this case, we’re not talking about health-care policy,” said Robert Blendon, professor of health policy at Harvard University. “We’re talking about economic policy.”

An impasse on health care would come at a terrible time for the nation’s economy. Policy experts have long warned that health-care spending poses the single greatest threat to the nation’s fiscal health. Medicare and Medicaid spending amounted to 4 percent of the gross domestic product last year. That percentage is projected to jump to 12 percent by 2050 and 19 percent in 2082, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The longer Congress puts off enacting reforms, the more dramatic the changes will have to be - and the more severe the effects.

“I wish I thought health-care spending were a bubble,” Alice Rivlin, former CBO director and now Brookings Institution scholar, said during an economic discussion in Washington last week. “It is not.”

Much of what will be possible on the health-care reform front hinges on a slew of fiscal unknowns. No one’s sure, for example, how long the current economic downturn will last. Nor does anyone know how much of the $700 billion in bailout cash will be returned to the federal coffers - or when.

If the Treasury has to pay more that it wants for the bad loans it plans to buy from financial institutions, there will be less money available to cover other federal programs.

***

We posted this because of the last few paragraphs which practically negate all what was said above. Now we learn that voters are consumers and they may have learned something from the way the Administration treats them. The Majority might actually have reached the needed level of rationality that brings them to realize that government must regulate if it wants to achieve something more then just pushing money out of the door. Aha! The problem is not the money but the will - and the will has to be subservient to your priorities. Health care should be the top priority, and insurance should be subservient to this goal, and not the other way around. The true foresight is that if medical coverage is made the primary goal, then ways will be found to regulate medical services for the benefit of all the people - this as a birth right to be funded in a controlled manner by the government licensed medical practitioners, within private or government clinics. The key is in a regulated competition set-up so the competition is not in terms of price, but rather in terms of service - the price being regulated by those infamous bureaucrats without whom there is no regulation.

***

  Many experts say the financial crisis could play to Obama’s advantage in the health-care debate. That’s because the crisis has made voters, once wary of too much government intrusion, more receptive to tighter federal regulation of private markets.

There is evidence that such regulation is needed. Last month, Families USA, a health-care advocacy group, released a report that found that insurance premiums in Virginia rose 83 percent between 2000 and 2007, while median incomes rose 20 percent. “[Consumers] want something that will more directly affect their pocketbooks,” said Ron Pollack, Families USA executive director, “and health care is central to that.”

McCain, by contrast, has a very different vision for health-care reform, pushing a plan that greatly expands the role - and freedoms - of private insurers. Writing in Contingencies magazine recently, the GOP presidential hopeful said, “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

{ so, here again, McCain may think in terms of deregulation as he was talking about while the world was boiling around him as Americans started to understand that deregulation was little more than a buzzword for “skin the people and line your pockets.” Does he not realize that the last month shrunk his supply of ideologues?}

That position might rally McCain’s most conservative base. But in an economic environment where Americans are increasingly anxious about their finances - and increasingly wary of unregulated private enterprise to manage it - such an argument might find more opposition than just a Democratic Congress.

From:    soros at other-net.info
Subject: ‘Capitalism Has Degenerated into a Casino’
Date: October 13, 2008

‘Capitalism Has Degenerated into a Casino’ says NOBEL LAUREATE MUHAMMAD YUNUS.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus says that greed has destroyed the world’s financial system.                      SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with him about the profit motive, social consciousness and what should be done to end the financial crisis.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Yunus, for years you have been preaching a more socially conscious way of doing business and have denounced the narrow focus on maximizing profit as harmful. Now, the entire financial system is wobbling …
Yunus: The current turn of events makes me sad. It is certainly not something I am happy about. The collapse has hurt so many people and has suddenly made the entire world unstable. We should now be concentrating on making sure that such a financial crisis does not happen again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What should be done?
Yunus: There are huge holes in the current financial system that need to be plugged. The market is clearly not able to solve these problems itself, and now people are having to run to the governments to ask for emergency assistance. That is not a good sign because it shows that trust in the markets has evaporated. At the moment, there is unfortunately no other option than for government takeovers and government support. That is currently the method being used to combat the crisis — a method kicked off with the $700 billion bailout package passed in the US. In Germany, the government has likewise jumped into the fray.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where exactly do you see the problem with such a strategy?
Yunus: The point is that we have to return as soon as possible to market mechanisms that can ameliorate the crisis and solve problems. Solutions should come out of the market and not from governments.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But you just said yourself that the market is not capable of doing so.
Yunus: That is exactly what we need to work on. For a long time, the main priorities have been the maximization of profits and rapid growth — but that focus has led to the current situation. Each day, we have to look to see if there is potentially harmful growth somewhere. If we find there is, then we need to react immediately. If something grows unnaturally quickly, then we have to stop it. Why don’t companies all pay into a fund that buys up securities that have become too risky? I can even imagine a business model for such a program.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: On the one hand, you say that the market has to solve the problem itself, on the other hand, though, you criticize overly quick growth. That sounds like you think that profit-oriented capitalism has failed.
Yunus: Not at all. Capitalism, with all its market mechanisms, has to survive — there is no question. What I excoriate is that today there is only one incentive for doing business, and that is the maximization of profits. But the incentive of doing social good must be included. There need to be many more companies whose primary aim is not that of earning the highest profits possible, but that of providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And you think that those two incentives are mutually exclusive? The bank you founded, Grameen Bank — which led to your receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 — both helps people and earns healthy profits.
Yunus: It is a company which is focused on the social good and which makes a profit, but it is not focused on maximizing its profits. I am not interested in turning all profit-oriented companies into socially conscious operations. They are two different categories of companies — there will always be businesses whose primary goal is that of earning as much money as possible. That is okay. But earning as much money as possible can only be a means to an end, not an end in itself. One has to invest money in something meaningful — and I would make a case for it being something that improves the quality of life for all people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What, though, does an increase in the number of socially minded companies have to do with the financial crisis?
Yunus: Were there more socially minded companies, people would have more opportunities to shape their own lives. The markets would be more balanced than they are today.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You are talking about saving the world with altruism …
Yunus: There are many philanthropists in this world, people who help people by providing them with homes, education, etc. But that is a one-way street. The money is spent and never comes back. Were one to invest that money in a socially minded company, it would stay in the economy and would be much more effective because it would be used according to the criteria of the market and would thus develop a certain amount of market leverage.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who do you think is guilty for the current financial meltdown?
Yunus: The market itself with its lack of adequate regulation. Today’s capitalism has degenerated into a casino. The financial markets are propelled by greed. Speculation has reached catastrophic proportions. These are all things that have to end.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The current financial crisis began as a credit crisis — homeowners in the US could no longer pay down their mortgages. At Grameen Bank, which provides microloans, the repayment rate is close to 100 percent. Do you think your bank could be a model for the entire finance world?
Yunus: The fundamental difference is that our business is very connected to the real economy. When we provide a loan of $200, that money will go to buy a cow somewhere. If we lend $100, someone will maybe buy some chickens. In other words, the money goes to something with concrete value. Finance and the real economy have to be connected. In the US, the financial system has completely split off from the real economy. Castles were built in the sky, and suddenly people realized that these castles don’t exist at all. That was the point at which the financial system collapsed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it now time for governments to intervene in the market economy and strengthen regulation?
Yunus: There has to be regulation, but governments should not be allowed to steer the market. On the other hand, it has become clear that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” which supposedly solves all the market’s problems doesn’t exist. This “invisible hand” has completely disappeared in the last few days. What we are experiencing is a dramatic failure of the markets.

Interview conducted by Hasnain Kazim. Translated from the German by Charles Hawley.

Monday, October 13th - Columbus Day 2008 - In Financial Markets The Chefs Of Europe Came To Washington to Save the Old World - The Week Will End With The Europeans Fighting Among Themselves For Positions at the UN.

The good news are that this Monday is much better then the Monday of last week. This because after serious tutoring by the Chefs of Europe, the US was softened to accept what George Soros and a few others said for quite a while - you do not just bailout those that undermined the economy because of their greed, that was allowed to grow thanks to a wrong headed concept of “Less Government Is Best Government.” You re-capitalize the banks and take equity position in them, so you can re-establish rule of ethics in those institutions. The Europeans started by Nationalizing their weak institutions rather then let them fail (like the Lehman case in the US) or bail them out (like the Goldman-Sachs case in the US). As George Soros said, by letting the system in the hands of Goldman-Sachs graduates, you really do not signal that you want to see change indeed. (We add to this that it would be like seating McCain in the Oval Office when the need is to create deep change in Washington.)

Further - just look at The Financial Times of today - for example at page 11 - “Goldman Connection Raises Questions Over Conflict of Interest’ and Page 24 - “Key Lehman Figures Stay On In Europe” - this after Japan’s Nomura bought the European and Middle East operations of Lehman Brothers. Then see page 24 - “Is Nationalization the answer to banks behaving badly?” and look for what went on in Iceland where the whole banking system was Nationalized. Look at the argument - “shareholders win - taxpayers lose” and the question “why not resolve it by making the two groups identical?” That is neither socialism nor demagoguery. It is not Corporate Socialism but plain “Country First” argumentation that has nothing to do with “me interrupt the campaign and go to Washington to pass the Paulson three page non-plan.”

OK, President Bush listened to the G7 on Friday - and magic - after he declared that the US will now buy into banks - not just the “toxic assets” of those banks, the New York Stock market this morning, followed the example of global markets over the week-end, and started returning value to the share-holders. While I write this, Monday at noon, the New York Stock Market DOW is up 520 points. Clearly, not because they trust now Messrs. Paulson & Bernanke more then they did a week ago - it did happen because they trust more the Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Markel consortium of individuals.

But, do not jump yet at conclusions - this article is not exactly an ode to old Europe. You can conclude that I trust more The Financial Times then the Wall Street Journal, but I will also point out the show of hands that will happen at the end of this week at the UN, and that will bring to the limelight also shadier aspects of Europe 2008.

 ***

The event will happen on Friday, October 17, 2008, when the UN General Assembly elects five non-permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Outgoing council members are Belgium, Indonesia, Italy, Panama, South Africa.

Uganda is the sole candidate for Africa and will replace South Africa. Mexico is the sole candidate for Latin America and will replace Panama. But for Asia there are two candidates and Japan has the definite advantage over Iran as replacement of Indonesia.

The only real fight will be for the European two seats where Austria, Iceland and Turkey will be fighting for the two seats vacated by Belgium and Italy.

Conventional wisdom at the UN says that Turkey will be a shoo-in with the 192 States voting, but Austria and Iceland will be in a tough fight for the second seat. And this is the reason for my bringing up now these elections.

The last months was very hard on Austria and Iceland. Think of the complete melt-down of the Iceland financial system, and the melt-down of the Austrian governing scheme.

 ***

Let us start with Iceland, as this is the easier case - it is on the surface only about money, but then also about eventual political freedom.

Richard Portes writes in The Financial Times of today “The shocking errors behind Iceland’s meltdown.” Iceland’s Glitnir Bank was the first casualty of Washington letting down Lehman, and precipitating the hermetic closure of the global credit market. Like fellow Icelandic banks, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, they were all solvent and posted good first-half results and had healthy capital adequacy ratios. And that is important - NONE HAD ANY TOXIC SECURITIES. All of them were very well managed for the last two years, but when the credit crisis hit Glitnir, the Icelandic Central Bank (CBI) did not help and moved to Nationalize the bank, creating in its wake a run on all banks. All this triggered a fall of the Krona and a margin call from the European Central Bank. Eventually the banks became collateral damage and some foreign branches taken over.

The problem was that the Icelandic banks  were highly leveraged, and like in the UK and Switzerland, too large relative to the domestic economy. The joke was that the large Icelandic banks had a small country attached to them.

The CBI did some terrible mistakes. They announced on Monday a peg of the Krona to the Euro at a rate well above the market that was unsustainable, and abandoned by Tuesday. They contacted the International Monetary Institutions in Washington and when help was not forthcoming they asked for $4 Billion from Russia that was answered positively, but the deal was not yet consumeted. Now, following the Friday agreements in Washington, it is probable that Iceland will be the first country in this crisis to be helped by the IMF. Perhaps also the Russian deal will be finalized this week, and the question is at what political price will this be for a small country, not an EU member, and positioned from Russia at the opposite end of Europe.

For our story here - What will this do to Iceland obtaining the votes it wants at the UN General Assembly, in its quest for a first-time membership at the UNSC - this as part of the group of Nordic States (that at the EU are indeed part of Europe). Will they get now sympathy votes, or will they be considered as economically non-viable?

***

The other contestant is Austria, and its problems seem even worse. The problem is purely political and this week-end it got thrown into total chaos by the auto-racing death of its fast talking right wing politician Joerg Haider.

The Story started with the brake-up of the traditional governing Red-Black coalition. That is the the left of center Socialists broke up their “Grand Coalition” with the right-of center Peoples Party. The voters at the polls punished both of them and elevated by a  close to 30% the two infighting extreme right parties, leaving 9% to the Austrian Greens. OK, one could go back to a diminished “Grand Coalition”with both parties - the Reds and the Blacks - headed by new leaders. This would be a punishment for their lack of acceptance of the previous debacles when these parties flirted with the extreme right.

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPO - the Blue Party), a small party of 5% of the electorate, entered into a controversial coalition as junior partner to the Reds in May 1983 and remained in power with that party until January 1987.

Appears Joerg Haider and in September 1986  he defeated the Austrian Vice-Chancellor Norbert Steger in a vote for the FPO leadership at the party conference in Innsbruck: many delegates feared that Steger’s liberal views and his coalition with the Social Democrats threatened the party’s existence. Haider attempted to increase his party’s standing by appealing to those opposed to the EU, those against immigration, and those who thought “the Third Reich was not all bad”, including its work creation programmes, and who believed that its crimes were exaggerated. Plain and simple - a Neo-Nazi ideology.

Under Haider’s leadership the FPO went from 4.98 per cent of the vote in 1986 to 26.9 per cent in 1999, putting it on a par with the Blacks. The outgoing Reds could not find a coalition partner and months of negotiations followed until in 2000 the Blacks formed a coalition with Haider’s FPO. This caused a sensation - both in Austria and across Europe - the heads of the governments of the other 14 EU members decided to cease co-operation with the Austrian government.

The coalition remained in office until 2007, although Haider stepped down as the FPO’s chairman in 2000. Without him his party’s voting bloc seemed to evaporate: at the 2002 election it lost nearly two-thirds of its support. Haider remained the FPO’s major figure until 2005, when he founded the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZO, or Alliance for the Future of Austria), the Orange Party.

He was expelled from the Blues but the Orange’s increasing popularity won it 11 per cent of the vote in the September 2008 general election. Last week, Haider and Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Blues, negotiated to put aside their differences following their combined success at the polls. The results for their two parties came to 28.2 per cent of the ballot, as against 15 per cent in 2006. This placed them on a nearly equal footing with the “winning” Social Democrats.

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Mr Haider, 58, whose fatal car accident early this Saturday morning, October 11, 2008, left Austria in a state of shock. He was travelling near Klagenfurt in the southern province of Carinthia, his home Province - the Province where he was Governor. He was going  at 88mph (142kph) along a stretch of road which has a 42mph speed limit.

State prosecutors investigating the crash said his car, a three-month-old Volkswagen Phaeton V6, careered off the road after overtaking another vehicle and flipped several times, causing the populist leader massive injuries to his head and chest even though he was wearing a seat-belt.

An ambulance took Mr Haider to Klagenfurt hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Ruling out foul play as a cause of death, Gottfried Kranz, the chief prosecutor, said: “Further speculation about other causes for the accident are invalid.”

Mr Haider, who had been on his way to his mother’s 90th birthday party, had been at a party at a night club less than a hour before the crash. State prosecutors declined to say whether they had found alcohol or traces of drugs in his blood.

Police said the Volkswagen Phaeton that he was driving at speed went off the road.

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Haider was born in 1950 in the Upper Austrian town of Bad Goisern. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a teacher. Both had been more than nominal members of the Nazi party – his father served as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. After attending secondary school in Bad Ischl, where he had first contacts with nationalist youth organisations, in 1968 he moved to the University of Vienna to study law. In 1973 he graduated and shortly after was called up for military service, volunteering for extra service on top of the mandatory nine months. In 1974 he started work at the University of Vienna in the department of constitutional law.

Haider had joined the youth wing of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPO, or Austrian Freedom Party), founded in 1955 as a mixture of political currents opposed to the two main parties, the Catholic-orientated Österreichische Volkspartei (OVP, Austrian People’s Party) and the Sozialistische Partei Österreichs (SPO, Socialist, later Social Democratic Party). These two had ruled Austria in coalition from 1945-66. With its roots in the Pan-German movement, the FPO included both nationalists and liberals.

In 1970 Haider became leader of the FPO youth movement, until 1974. He was party secretary of the Carinthian FPO from 1976 until 1983. In 1979, aged 29, he became the youngest MP of the 183 members of the federal parliament, serving until 1983. He served again in parliament from 1986 to 1989 and from 1992 to 1999. In September 2008 he was elected again to Parliament.

Today’s Independent writes: “Jörg Haider: Charismatic right-wing politician whose controversial beliefs and policies led to isolation for Austria.” The article of The Financial Times is titled: “Demagogue who stirred up Austrian politics.”

“A talented demagogue, he railed against asylum seekers, Muslims and the small Slovene minority in his home province of Carinthia. In 1995 he whipped up anti-EU sentiments.

He praised a member of Hitler’s notorious Waffen SS convicted of eradicating the population of an Italian village as someone “who did his duty.” He said Nazis had created “a good policy of employment.” he condemned the “laziness of the southerners” - meaning immigrants from lands south of Austria, describing their countries as “the place of criminality and corruption.” And in a mocking reference to the first name of Vienna’s Jewish leader, Ariel Muzikant, Haider said: “I don’t understand how someone called Ariel can have so much dirt on his hands.”

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OK, Haider is dead now, and Haider was never Austria, but Austria has no government at this time, and there is a new bloc of 30% of people-haters that he has managed to gather - indeed only 11% of these seemingly bigots marching under his world-hating Orange flag, while the others might be just plain conservative people. Nevertheless, if this bloc returns to the Austrian Government, what face will Austria have on the international stage?

The best thing that could happen for Austria is if the Reds and the Blacks seize the mome