How did Palin do in the debate, in which the bar was set lower than ever before?

Who won the debate, based on the polls?

How bad is the economy looking compared to two weeks ago?

If you’ve never heard of him, please check on his track record before branding him an alarmist. He is no radical. In his bi-weekly column for Forbes he wrote yesterday:

When investors don’t trust even venerable institutions like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, you know that the financial crisis is as severe as ever. When a nuclear option of a monster $700 billion rescue plan is not even able to rally stock markets, you know this is a global crisis of confidence in the financial system.

The next step of this panic could be the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar-plus of the cross-border short-term interbank liabilities of the U.S. banking and financial system, as foreign banks start to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to U.S. financial institutions. A silent cross-border bank run has already started, as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of U.S. banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates–as it may now–a total meltdown of the U.S. financial system could occur.

Make of it what you will. He has been almost preternaturally right in predicting each phase of the calamity, but maybe he’s wrong this time. The IMF yesterday admitted we are seeing a “full-blown crisis” and Europe is now scrambling to brace for the shockwaves. Is Weimar around the corner?

Off to a class. If things melt down over the next few hours feel free to send me a text message.

Sorry, it will continue to be slower than usual over here until my classes end on Saturday afternoon. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

From the latest Couric interview with Palin. Heh.

KATIE COURIC: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.”

SARAH PALIN: “Yeah, well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we’re seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel … and we’re hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn’t allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.”

Yes, just the kind of incisive, penetrating mind we need to deal with the most complex, most fragile moment in America’s entire history. President Palin. Horrifying. Literally horrifying.

The financial crisis remain an enigma, something kind of distant and amorphous. This column made it sound a lot more real, and the comments are spirited as well.

Even if Congress backs the Paulson bail-out, the $700 billion blast cannot save the US, Britain or the world from the deepest economic slump since the Thirties. If Congress balks, God help us. The credit system is suffering a heart attack. Inter-bank lending is paralysed. Funds are accepting zero interest on US Treasury notes for the first time since Pearl Harbour, because no bank account is safe.

Wherever you look – dollar, euro, sterling Libor (the rate at which banks lend to each other), or spreads on credit derivatives – the stress has reached breaking point. If borrowers cannot roll over the three-month loans that are the lifeblood of business, they will default en masse.

“Money markets are imploding. If no action is taken very soon, there is a significant risk that the global economy will collapse,” says BNP Paribas. Almost every trader says much the same thing. So does US treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who as Toby Harnden reports, literally dropped on bended knee to beg help from Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Republican refuseniks – defying their president – have a grim responsibility if they now tip America over the edge, setting off the “adverse feedback loop” that so terrifies the US Federal Reserve. Like players in a Greek tragedy, they seem determined to repeat the “liquidation” policy that led to the Great Depression – and to Democrat ascendancy for years.

Lehman Brothers’ collapse showed the chain of inter-connections that can cause mayhem across a clutch of different markets. That was just one bank – albeit with $630 billion or so in liabilities.
Credit is the lubricant of a modern economy. A seizure now would probably lead to the bankruptcy of General Motors and Ford in short order, but it would not stop with the US car industry. Waves of job losses would set off a self-feeding spiral. Yet more people would default on their mortgages (and car loans), driving house prices down even further. That, in turn, would threaten the solvency of the best banks. That is the way to Armaggedon.

As Mr Paulson says, US taxpayers are on the hook whether they like it or not. A $700 billion fund to soak up toxic debt and stabilise the credit market is the cheapest way out. It is certainly cheaper than Depression.

No way out. I really can’t say it enough: Get rid of your dollars. At times like this, history shows, the safest place for your money is stuff, or foreign currency. ABD.

This is not the time to give the keys to the kingdom to a clown.

A very strange and confusing story that leaves the reader with many, many questions and no answers at all. Something is definitely wrong with the story the government told us back in August. Stories don’t come any more bizarre than this one. Not even in China. (I thought the post immediately below won today’s prize for bizarre, but this one runs neck-and-neck.)

Read it, and let me know if there’s any way to tie together the bits of information we have to create a scenario that makes even the slightest bit of sense. WTF happened??

During the 2004 election I repeatedly posted this quote from the great H. L. Mencken. Looking at Palin and McCain, I realize it’s time to post it yet again. Savor every word. It is spot-on.

“[W]hen a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental – men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost…

[A]ll the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre – the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920.

That vision was fulfilled, of course, in 2004. Let’s do all we can to make sure we don’t elect another moron. Are you registered, and do you have your absentee ballot if you’re living here? Don’t let Palin or the sage who selelcted her anywhere near DC. Your vote really does matter.

Thanks to ESWN for leading me to this story that says a lot about the state of the media in China. I think it crosses into those areas PR people want to keep out of the public eye, the industry’s “dirty little secret” (not really so secret anymore) that you cannot take anything you read in the Chinese media at face value, especially if it is corporate-related. Chances are quite high that what you are reading is either advertorial, complete BS, a press release — in other words, the writer was a PR person or propagandist, not a “news reporter” as we understand the term to be. What boggles the mind about this story is just how blatant this crisscrossing of PR, propaganda and journalism was.

The article starts by noting Sanlu was conspicuously awarded an honor for its great contributions to China shortly before we learned their products cause infant kidney stones and death.

The August 6 article reporting the “30 Years” honor bestowed on Sanlu was written by Miao Wanfu (苗万福) and appeared virtually everywhere — in scores of newspapers, at the website of the official People’s Daily, at Tianya, at Sina, and at a leading food industry website, to mention just a few.

And who is Miao Wanfu?

As the Oriental Daily and others have reported, Miao runs Sanlu’s internal public relations machine. But readers of the above “news” would never have guessed as much. Miao is identified — when a byline appears at all — as “correspondent Miao Wanfu” (通讯员苗万福).

On the People’s Daily website, Miao manages to come off as a staff reporter for the CCP’s top daily. And when the report runs subsequently at China’s leading food industry website it is attributed again to “correspondent Miao Wanfu.” We are told that the news comes from “People’s Daily Online.”

Misrepresentations of this sort are perpetuated across China’s media, where a lack of professional standards means “news” space is stuffed routinely with material from valuable advertising clients.

Here is “correspondent” Miao Wanfu again for People’s Daily Online, and for Hebei Daily. And here he is apparently reporting for the Central Propaganda Department’s Guangming Daily in June 2006 about the purchase of a stake in Sanlu by New Zealand’s Fronterra Group.

When Southern Metropolis Daily broached the topic last week of how Chinese media had contributed to the tragedy of China’s tainted milk crisis it was opening up a great big can of worms.

There are many hard and searching questions to answer. As the newspaper asked, why, before the breakthrough report by Oriental Daily journalist Jian Guangzhou (简光洲), did media suggest only that “certain brands” of milk powder had problems? And why, even as questions were beginning to surface about the safety of milk powder from Sanlu, were the company’s supposed contributions to the lives of ordinary Chinese being trumpeted so loudly.

Chinese media will not be given an opportunity to delve very deeply into these questions. The answers, after all, point to the ugliness of state media controls and the failure of media policy as well as to runaway commercial greed. The Chinese media’s role in the tainted milk crisis should remind us again just how poisonous the combination of rigorous press controls and unfettered commercialization can be.

This is always a dilemma when PR people talk to their multinational clients about winning domestic coverage. Does the PR person simply say it’s all a racket, and that much of the coverage the client will get is pay for play?

This is something that goes unspoken, more or less. Everyone knows all about the “transportation allowance” handed out to the journalists at every event, along with a generous gift. Everyone knows that much of what’s in the domestic publications is advertorial or propaganda. There is an understanding between the PR people and the client that this is how it works but I don’t think they ever quite say so, and in some ways all the players go through the motions of pretending it’s like getting coverage in the Western media: they make message documents, Q & As, briefing books, all the bells and whistles, while knowing the reporters will report what they are told. And often – though certainly not always – there is payment in one form or another.

With international media in China, as in the US, we are used to our pitches being declined. It takes lots of calls and hard work and message shaping to convince a real reporter to cover your story. That’s not usually the case when it comes to the Chinese media, where press releases are often printed verbatim. The domestic media will sit through just about any press conference, no matter how long and sleep-inducing, and then write their story. After you hand them the goody bag.

Reform of the Chinese media is a tough nut to crack. The red envelope and the advertorial and all sorts of pay for play games keep a lot of the publications functional. How do you reform an industry that’s rotten from head to toe? As usual, there’s a thin beam of light that offers some hope. It was, once again, Southern Metropolis Daily that helped get this story out. There are some “real” publications out there, and a lot of journalists who are anxious to report real news and who feel far more frustrated than we do that the government won’t let them.

So maybe stories like this one, that flip the rock over so we can see the bugs scurrying away, will help keep up the pressure to reform. But the process will be glacial, and there will be kicking and screaming every inch along the way. Whoever controls the mouthpiece to the people controls the country. It’s in this area that Hu Jintao has been most disappointing, especially after the hope he generated in the wake of the SARS scandal of 2003, and I don’t expect to see real reform of the media for years to come.

The Chinese have no choice but to be kept in the dark, with only the Internet and word of mouth to challenge what they see on CCTV. But I sometimes think we in the West – especially in the corporate world – are willfully ignorant that this is how the Chinese media work, and continue to convince ourselves that working with China Daily is like working with the NY Times. It’s not.

A final word about Sanlu: Anyone who sees anything in this saga worthy of praise, as some sort of proof of the effectiveness of China’s self-correcting system that protects its people and illustrates the nation’s ability to pinpoint and manage crises is simply living on another planet. There are so many levels of rottenness in this story it’s impossible to know where to begin. The deception occurred at every level and there are no heroes except those the government sought to keep silent.

If Tina Fey isn’t one, who is? What a performance. Leave this site now and watch the clip here. Don’t have anything in your mouth as you’re watching.

At the risk of igniting a blog war, I feel I have to point out what might be the very worst post on China I have read in a long, long time, from a blog I respect enough to include on my blogroll. When I say bad, when I say dumb, when I say wrong – let’s just say it’s the equivalent of what I’d expect Sarah Palin to write about the Iraq war, saying how it was an exercise in successful American can-do determination and that no civilians were hurt and it all went like a cake-walk. I mean the type of post where you have to willfully block out any and all hints of truth as you arrive at your own fact-free truthiness.

It’s about the milk scandal, and it could have been written by HongXing:

While dismayed by the rogue manufacturers’ ability to abuse the public for such a long time (a year, I heard), I am relieved that eventually the scams were exposed, exclusively by forces within the Chinese society. No foreign White knight was in a position to rescue the Chinese people from their rulers and deliver them from their misery. In fact, the New Zealand diary company who owned a stake in the main culprit, Sanlu Diary Corporation, was part of the problem. The Western media have been on the sideline; their opinions on this event are largely irrelevant to the Chinese public. It has been the Chinese parents’ outrage and the Chinese media’s probing and revelations that constitute the main source of the Chinese authorities’ embarrassment and the main forces that prompted them into action. Heads have been rolling, with the resignation of a mayor and a cabinet member, and an executive’s arrest.

An indigenous and home-grown momentum of change is a hopeful sign of the Chinese society at these turbulent times. The society has demonstrated the means and resilience to channel the momentum into productive movements of improving the way businesses are supervised in particular and social activities regulated in general, developing mechanisms for righting wrongs and addressing grievances. The same resourcefulness and resilience were demonstrated in the revelation of kidnapped and enslaved teenagers in Shanxi province’s brick making factories, in the organized reactions when the snow storms in southern China stranded millions of migrant workers on their way home for the spring festival in railway stations, and when earthquake struck Sichuan.

It is heartening to observe that foreign elements and forces have little influence over the Chinese authorities, on either their legitimacy or policy preferences.

The light at the end of this dreary tunnel: the commenters on this site ripped the writer to shreds, called him out on his fact-averse approach and made a fool of him, in the spirit of the blog’s title. This post is all about looking at some of China’s most shameful recent catastrophes and pointing to each as proof of China’s greatness. Now, I’m not saying China isn’t great. It is. (That and much more.) I think America is great, but I don’t point to the Abu Ghraib photos and say there’s the proof of our greatness.

The whole things is a bit surreal, like a big practical joke, like a parody of the party propagandist transforming a nation’s flaws into virtues. And then there’s the closing sentence: “This is the silver lining I see in the scandals and disasters inflicted upon us in the year of 2008” – as if these scandals were “inflicted upon us” by some passive-voiced villain, and not by the sleazy corruption that is a defining characteristic of the CCP.

Nothing in this post seems to make any sense. It’s a Sarah Palin interview. Unless I’m missing something. Am I missing something?