Oliver: And Bob Dylan, Too.

C.G. Jung: “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.”

 

Bob Dylan: “Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.”

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

And Bob Dylan, Too

(by Mary Oliver)

 

“Anything worth thinking about is worth

   singing about.”

 

Which is why we have

songs of praise, songs of love, songs

       of sorrow.

 

Songs to the gods, who have

      so many names.

 

Songs the shepherds sing, on the

       lonely mountains, while the sheep

               are honoring the grass, by eating it.

 

The dance-songs of the bees, to tell

       where the flowers, suddenly, in the

                 morning light, have opened.

 

A chorus of many, shouting to heaven,

      or at it, or pleading.

 

Or that greatest of love affairs, a violin

      and a human body.

 

And a composer, maybe hundreds of years dead.

 

I think of Schubert, scribbling on a café

      napkin.

 

                 Thank you, thank you.

 

 

Global Warming Fastest Since Dawn of Civilization

The evidence just keeps growing, stronger and stronger. Global warming is real, and worse than we thought. So, when will we accept that the truth is the truth, reality is reality, and decide to objectively and intelligently address the issue, rather than just mindlessly continuing to deny it? I mean, really. How long does ignorance and denial prevail? Until it's too late to save future generations?

Link to article:
Warming fastest since dawn of civilization, study shows

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

More and more, reliable sources have reported that,

• we do not have the best healthcare system in the world;
• it is near twice as expensive and covers far fewer citizens less effectively than other advanced countries in Europe and Asia;
• for those who can afford health insurance, the cost just keeps rising faster than most incomes, and
• for those who cannot afford (adequate) health insurance, the cost of health care can and often does bankrupt them and ruin their lives.

You might want to know why this is so.

 

Time magazine's recent report, "Bitter Pill: Why medical Bills Are Killing Us," answers a lot of the questions. Every point in the health care products supply and service chain is about maximizing price and profit—and not least of all, the not-for-profit hospitals. There are no effective market dynamics or mechanisms to control it. There is no overarching organizational control to rationalize it. But there are the ubiquitous lobbyists doing their best for all those profiting parties to be sure that the troubled, noncompetitive status quo does not change. While the article doesn’t address all the big  issues and problems—like the 40+% of all health care cost that are incurred in the last of year life—it takes us quite a way down that road.

Put the time into it. It’s worth understanding.

 

But what might be harder to understand is why our federal government isn't rushing to address these problems when the ever-increasing cost of health care is also the principal culprit in our longer-term budget crisis. You don't hear or read that as often, but it is true. Obamacare helped in access and process, who gets access and who pays for it, but doesn't do that much to address the competitiveness and price of health care products and services. And the congressmen and senators still keep listening to the pandering queue of health care lobbyists formed in their waiting rooms.

Link to the the article:
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com

Rolling Stone: Bankers Too Big to Jail

In the same way that regulators, central banks and prosecutors often treat major international banks as too big to fail, banking executives are apparently just as often judged too big, too important, to prosecute. The realities and the details of it all seem just too offensive and dispiriting to be true. And yet, they are.

Rolling Stone offers this revealing article, “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,” about how in one such case British-based bank HSBC “hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists, and got away with it.”

Link to Article:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214
 

Poetry Everywhere: "Yesterday" by W.S. Merwin

A very personal, poignant and honest poem about the uncomfortable relationship with his aging father, one some of us can relate to. And even if such a sentiment was felt only occasionally or acted upon only rarely, it's hard to forget it, or the sadness that attends it--and more so after he's gone.

W.S. Merwin is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a former poet laureate of the United States. Needless to say, he's one of my favorite poets.

Yesterday  by W. S. Merwin My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand he says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know even when I was living in the same city he says maybe I would go there once a month or maybe even less I say oh yes he says the last time I went to see my father I say the last time I saw my father he says the last time I saw my father he was asking me about my life how I was making out and he went into the next room to get something to give me oh I say feeling again the cold of my father's hand the last time he says and my father turned in the doorway and saw me look at my wristwatch and he said you know I would like you to stay and talk with me oh yes I say but if you are busy he said I don't want you to feel that you have to just because I'm here I say nothing he says my father said maybe you have important work you are doing or maybe you should be seeing somebody I don't want to keep you I look out the window my friend is older than I am he says and I told my father it was so and I got up and left him then you know though there was nowhere I had to go and nothing I had to do

The Nordic Economic Revival: Reinventing Market Capitalism with Nordic Characteristics

Sweden and the Nordic countries were long reviled by American conservatives as places where “socialism” (government social programs) had gone out of control, taxes were confiscatory, and their economies languished. It was a model to be avoided. But no more.

Now the Nordics are held up as a model for Western countries to emulate, or at least to learn from. They lead the world in opportunity for advancement, prosperity, and global innovation. Personal taxes are still high by U.S. standards (but corporate taxes are lower), and they still fully embrace their social programs, but have reformed them to make them more effective, efficient and affordable as they balance their budgets. Maybe we could learn something from the Nordics.

 

The Economist presents us with an excellent review of this important unfolding phenomenon in a Leaders editorial and supporting special reports. They treat it like the key development on the world-wide stage of economic and social policy evolution that it is. This economic revival in the Nordic countries is so dramatic, in fact, that it is being called the new model for all the other economically challenged countries of the West—not the least of which is the United States and the European Union.

 

The Nordics were first to face the problems of high levels of debt and unaffordable social programs in the ‘80s and 90’s. And because they faced the challenge with courage, resolve and more success than anyone would have expected, they offer us intelligent strategies, policy innovations, and proven reforms that may prove as useful to us as they have to them. To do this, however, they had to throw the tired ideologies of the left and right out with the trash and let pragmatism rule. And that meant cooperation and compromise of government leadership, something the Nordics do much better than we.

 

From The Economist:

 

The four main Nordics—Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland—are doing rather well. If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking. The Nordics cluster at the top of league tables of everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness. They have avoided both southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality. Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernisation “getting to Denmark”.

 

[…] To politicians around the world—especially in the debt-ridden West—they offer a blueprint of how to reform the public sector, making the state far more efficient and responsive.

 

The idea of lean Nordic government will come as a shock both to French leftists who dream of socialist Scandinavia and to American conservatives who fear that Barack Obama is bent on “Swedenisation”. They are out of date.

 

---“The next supermodel: Politicians from right and left could learn from the Nordic countries,” Leaders section, The Economist (2.2.2013)

 

Okay, now that they have our attention, we need to know more of the particulars of what they have done, or, which of them has done what exactly.

 

On public services the Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up. When it comes to choice, Milton Friedman would be more at home in Stockholm than in Washington, DC.

All Western politicians claim to promote transparency and technology. The Nordics can do so with more justification than most. The performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an SMS message.

 

This may sound like enhanced Thatcherism, but the Nordics also offer something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of 15%. They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects. Denmark, for instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks.

 

The Leader’s editorial concludes:

 

[…] [E]ver more countries should look to the Nordics. Western countries will hit the limits of big government, as Sweden did. When Angela Merkel worries that the European Union has 7% of the world’s population but half of its social spending, the Nordics are part of the answer. They also show that EU countries can be genuine economic successes. And as the Asians introduce welfare states they too will look to the Nordics: Norway is a particular focus of the Chinese.

 

The main lesson to learn from the Nordics is not ideological but practical. The state is popular not because it is big but because it works. A Swede pays tax more willingly than a Californian because he gets decent schools and free health care. The Nordics have pushed far-reaching reforms past unions and business lobbies.

The proof is there. You can inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations. But you need to be willing to root out corruption and vested interests. And you must be ready to abandon tired orthodoxies of the left and right and forage for good ideas across the political spectrum. The world will be studying the Nordic model for years to come.

 

But there is much more in The Economist’s  special report, including pieces on welfare, immigrants, business, entrepreneurs, creativity, Norway’s oil riches, and more on the one truely differentiating factor, the ultimate secret of their success.

 

From the Special Report:

 

[T]here are compelling reasons for paying attention to these small countries on the edge of Europe. The first is that they have reached the future first. They are grappling with problems that other countries too will have to deal with in due course, such as what to do when you reach the limits of big government and how to organise society when almost all women work. And the Nordics are coming up with highly innovative solutions that reject the tired orthodoxies of left and right.

 

The second reason to pay attention is that the new Nordic model is proving strikingly successful. The Nordics dominate indices of competitiveness as well as of well-being. Their high scores in both types of league table mark a big change since the 1980s when welfare took precedence over competitiveness.

 

The Nordics do particularly well in two areas where competitiveness and welfare can reinforce each other most powerfully: innovation and social inclusion. BCG, as the Boston Consulting Group calls itself, gives all of them high scores on its e-intensity index, which measures the internet’s impact on business and society. Booz & Company, another consultancy, points out that big companies often test-market new products on Nordic consumers because of their willingness to try new things. The Nordic countries led the world in introducing the mobile network in the 1980s and the GSM standard in the 1990s. Today they are ahead in the transition to both e-government and the cashless economy. Locals boast that they pay their taxes by SMS. This correspondent gave up changing sterling into local currencies because everything from taxi rides to cups of coffee can be paid for by card.

 

The Nordics also have a strong record of drawing on the talents of their entire populations, with the possible exception of their immigrants. They have the world’s highest rates of social mobility: in a comparison of social mobility in eight advanced countries by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin, of the London School of Economics, they occupied the first four places. America and Britain came last. The Nordics also have exceptionally high rates of female labour-force participation: in Denmark not far off as many women go out to work (72%) as men (79%).

 

---“Northern lights: The Nordic countries are reinventing their model of capitalism,” Special Report, The Economist (2.2.2013)

 

Oh, and the ultimate secret of the Nordic success? Pragmatism, already mentioned, and tough-mindedness, both in the culture of government and society.

 

The Nordic countries pride themselves on the honesty and transparency of their governments. Nordic governments are subject to rigorous scrutiny: for example, in Sweden everyone has access to all official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines.

 

The Nordics have added two other important qualities to transparency: pragmatism and tough-mindedness. On discovering that the old social democratic consensus was no longer working, they let it go with remarkably little fuss and introduced new ideas from across the political spectrum. They also proved utterly determined in pushing through reforms. It is a grave error to mistake Nordic niceness for softheadedness.

 

Pragmatism explains why the new consensus has quickly replaced the old one. Few Swedish Social Democratic politicians, for instance, want to dismantle the conservative reforms put in place in recent years. It also explains why Nordic countries can often seem to be amalgams of left- and right-wing policies.

 

Pragmatism also explains why the Nordics are continuing to upgrade their model. They still have plenty of problems. Their governments remain too big and their private sectors too small. Their taxes are still too high and some of their benefits too generous. The Danish system of flexicurity puts too much emphasis on security and not enough on flexibility. Norway’s oil boom is threatening to destroy the work ethic. It is a bad sign that over 6% of the workforce are on sick leave at any one time and around 9% of the working-age population live on disability pensions. But the Nordics are continuing to introduce structural reforms, perhaps a bit too slowly but stolidly and relentlessly. And they are doing all this without sacrificing what makes the Nordic model so valuable: the ability to invest in human capital and protect people from the disruptions that are part of the capitalist system.

•  

 

---“The secret of their success,” Special Report, The Economist (2.2.2013)

 

 

This Nordic phenomenon appears to mark an important point in the evolution and inevitable merger of better thinking about both market capitalism and the investments in people, technology and society necessary to strengthen both and best sustain them. And it offers many innovative ideas and successes that will (or should) cause most of those on both the right and left to sit up, pay attention, and rethink the failed rigidities and value of many aspects of their 20^th-century ideological orthodoxies. Obviously, I consider it very much in your interest to read all the articles in the report.

 

PIMCO / Investment Outlook: Credit Supernova

PIMCO is one of the most credible, respected and successful investment firms in the world. And Wm. Gross is one of the principal thinkers that leads it. PIMCO has added its voice to the expanding chorus of those increasingly concerned about the threatening implications of our "Ponzi-like" credit environment, and our near-unmanageable and growing burden of debt. A must read for anyone who wants to better understand the economic phenomenon--and for those interested in what Mr. Gross believes it means for your approach to investing.

Link to article:
http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/Credit-Supernova.aspx#.URPPPwCmhzV.email

Oliver & Emerson: Red Bird, Rhodora & More

Every now and then I’m struck by the commonalities of interest, philosophy, temperament and style found in poets separated by centuries. Perhaps it’s just me, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry often makes me think of Mary Oliver’s and, now that I’ve read a lot of Emerson’s poetry over the last couple years, when I read Oliver’s poetry, it often makes me think of Emerson’s. I don’t fully understand why other than what I’ve said, and I don’t want to dissect it for fear of losing its magic; it just does. (Although, it may aid our understanding to read Mary Oliver's introduction to the 2000 compilation, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Here, I offer a poem by Emerson that strikes me that way, preceded and followed by poems of Mary Oliver. Enjoy.

 

Red Bird (by Mary Oliver)

 

Red bird came all winter

firing up the landscape

as nothing else could.

 

Of course I love the sparrows,

those dun-colored darlings,

so hungry and so many.

 

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.

I know He has many children,

not all of them bold in spirit.

 

Still, for whatever reason—

perhaps because the winter is so long

and the sky so black-blue,

 

or perhaps because the heart narrows

as often as it opens—

I am grateful

 

that red bird comes all winter

firing up the landscape

as nothing else can do.

 

 

The Rhodora:

On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?

(by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

 

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red–bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

 

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if the eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

 

 

Red Bird Explains Himself (by Mary Oliver)

 

“Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow

and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was

only the first trick

I had hold of among my other mythologies,

for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest,

food to the young, kisses to my bride.

 

But don’t stop there, stay with me: listen.

 

If I was the song that entered your heart

then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,

and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its

followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep

for the death of rivers.

 

And this was my true task, to be the

music of the body. Do you understand? for truly the body needs

a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make the this work,

the soul has need of a body,

and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable

beauty of heaven

where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,

and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.

 

And one more from Mary Oliver, just as a bonus for being so attentive, just because I want to read it slowly as I type it:

 

                    Morning Poem (by Mary Oliver)

                       

                    Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

 

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

 

and fasten themselves to the high branches—

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

 

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

 

for hours, your imagination

alight everywhere.

And if your spirit

carries within it

 

the thorn

that is heavier than lead—

if it’s all you can do

to keep on trudging—

 

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted—

 

each pond within its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

 

whether or not

you have dared to be happy,

whether or not

you have ever dared to pray.

 

N.R.A. Defends Right to Own Politicians : The New Yorker

Andy Borowitz ("The Borowitz Report" in the New Yorker) is always so right on message, and satire is his medium, his natural gift. Of course, notwithstanding Mr. Borowitz's  entertaining focus on the NRA, and their extraordinary effectiveness at "buying politicians," I'm sure we all understand the NRA is not the only organization doing that--not by a far, far piece--and the GOP are not the only politicians being "bought." There are plenty in both parties to go around and, sadly, too many of both parties appear willing to be bought.

Link to the edition of "The Borrowitz Report":

N.R.A. Defends Right to Own Politicians : The New Yorker

Give All to Love? Each and All?

Love, in all its manifestations and meanings, with all its misdirections, misunderstandings and implications, I embrace. A subject I have an abiding interest in—so many of us do—it offers many invitations and promises, many layers to understand, experiential depths to plumb and heights to scale. It can be an interpersonal, existential, or spiritually quest, any or all.

Regardless, it must be approached with care, consideration, and discernment—to respect the potential for emotional and spiritual growth, even fulfillment, to be sure, but also the potential for emotional disappointment or pain, even distancing disaffection, even harm done. It can fashion the defining highs and lows, the possibilities and realities, that life offers. Here the estimable Ralph Waldo Emerson shares, celebrates, and qualifies some of the possibilities and potential, and the responsibilities and disciplines that should be honored. Mr. Emerson:

 

Give All to Love

 

Give all  to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-fame,

Plans, credit and the Muse,

Nothing refuse.

 

‘T is a brave master;

Let it have scope:

Follow it utterly,

Hope beyond hope:

High and more high

It dives into noon,

With wing unspent,

Untold intent;

But it is a god,

Knows its own path

And the outlets of the sky.

 

It was never for the mean;

It requireth courage stout.

Souls above doubt,

Valor unbending,

It will reward,

They shall return

More than they were,

And ever ascending.

 

Leave all for love;

Yet, hear me, yet,

One word more thy heart behoved,

One pulse more of firm endeavor,

Keep thee to-day,

To-morrow, forever,

Free as an Arab

Of thy beloved.

 

Cling with life to the maid;

But when the surprise,

First vague shadow of surmise

Flits across her bosom young,

Of a joy apart from thee,

Free be she, fancy free;

Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.

 

Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay,

Though her parting dims the day,

Stealing grace from all alive;

Heartily know,

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

It is important to note that Emerson believed you could not, or should not, hold so close as to reduce to possession natural things of beauty or people loved. It reduced them to captured or caged versions of themselves, constrained to be something more conforming to another's desires or dictates, something less than what you loved in their unfettered freedom, something less than who or what they were. And if love was in fact a kind of "god," as Emerson states midway through the last poem, I can only surmise that the "half-god" he refers to is an unrequited love, a love departed, or love perverted by trying to possess, constrain or conform the object of one's "love"--whether it is the person loved, the creatures and created things of this world, or our search for peace and identity in God. Thus, only in an attitude of freedom, in a posture of unconstrained expression of identity and views--yours and the beloved's--can love in the full flower of respectful regard, caring, and hope arrive. Only then can the relationship remain fresh, growing, changing, as it is "ever ascending." 

And this brought to mind another poem of Mr. Emerson's that I read early last year: "Each and All," which in some ways makes the point even clearer. I offer here that poem, excerpted, but unedited in the material part. Mr. Emerson:

from Each and All 

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;--
He sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home,
But the poor unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

 The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said, "I covet truth; 
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
the ground pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Is it at all suprising that Mary Oliver has long been a fan of Emerson's poetry and transcendentalist philosophy? And the more you read of how each of them poetically treat the flowers and creatures and goings on of God's creation, you sense two kindred spirits who have "yielded [themselves] to the perfect whole."

Pakistan: Another Military Coup? | The Economist

From The Economist:

 

IN MOST countries the sight of 50,000 devout Sufis riding into the capital in brightly coloured buses and lorries [trucks] would not raise the spectre of military intervention. But so convoluted are Pakistan’s politics that the march led by Tahir ul Qadri is read by many as an indication that the army is planning another intervention in government (see article). If that happens, it will be a catastrophe for the country.

 

Mr Qadri, a cleric who served briefly as a politician under the latest military dictator, has recently returned from Canada and says he wants a “revolution” against the civilian government. He has emerged from nowhere, yet organised a march which arrived in Islamabad on January 14th—no mean feat, since marches are usually banned in the city—and which was broadcast non-stop on television. Pakistan’s many conspiracy theorists, encouraged by the country’s many conspiracies, suspect that he may be the army’s latest favourite to replace the politicians with whom the soldiers have lost patience.

 

---“Pakistan: The soldiers’ dangerous itch,” Leaders Section, The Economist (1.19.2013)

 

Pakistan has often been judged one of the most dangerous places in the world--at least in terms of American and Western interests. It has atomic weapons. It has a dangerously testy and tempestuous relationship with India. It harbors, supports and directs elements of the Taliban. It has a tenuous and halting commitment to democracy, and lacks political stability. It aspires to regional hegemony and recognition as a legitimate power by the world’s great nations, but fails to embrace the principles, values, and commitments that requires of them. Pakistan is not the reliable, consistent regional player and ally we and the Western World need.

 

All this is in large part a function of the periodic military coups that have punctuated social and political life with autocratic military rule. And now, according to The Economist, the military--always a too-powerful influence on Pakistan's polity and policies--may be poised to overthrow a weak, corrupt government and take control of Pakistan again.

 

But is that all? What other events or circumstances does The Economist cite in support of their expressed concerns?

 

Mr Qadri’s rise is not the only reason Pakistanis have to worry about the soldiers. On January 15th the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the arrest of the prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, over a long-running bribery scandal. The court, along with the army, has long been hostile to the government. There is talk in Pakistan of a “Bangladesh option”, a reference to a quiet coup in that country, engineered by the army in January 2007 and legitimised by the judiciary, leading to a two-year suspension of democracy in favour of unelected technocrats.

 

If the army were to try to get rid of the civilian government, now would be the time, for two reasons. An election is due this year, and a new administration with a decent mandate would be harder to bin than the tarnished Pakistan Peoples Party government of President Asif Ali Zardari. And this year, too, the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, is due to step down. His term in office has already been extended; but he may wish to defer his retirement a little longer.

 

A recent Pew survey found that Pakistanis are the least enthusiastic about democracy among six Muslim countries polled. That is hardly surprising. After nearly five years of civilian rule, the country is in a desperate state. Terrorist bombings are horribly frequent. The latest, in Balochistan, killed 86 people (see article). The country’s politicians are venal, self-interested and chaotic. Its growth is feeble, its debt unsustainable and its tax revenues have collapsed.

 

Okay, so it is understandable why another army intervention or coup might seem to many Pakistanis a welcome alternative to the weak, ineffective government and deteriorating conditions in Pakistan now. Yet, for all Pakistan's problems, military rule would seem unlikely to prove a better answer. In closing, the article offers some reasons for Pakistanis to be more concerned about the past and future effects of military rule—and to be more patient and optimistic about the new directions and possibilities the coming elections could offer.

 

Yet rather than being a solution to Pakistan’s problems, the army is a large part of the reason for them. Its frequent interventions contribute to corruption: politicians reckon they need to make money quickly. Its dominance distorts spending priorities: the government spends around ten times as much on defence as on education. And it undermines the country’s security: the threat of war with India provides a justification for army rule, which is why Pakistanis fear the recent flare-up on the border with India in which five soldiers died.

 

This could be its big chance

 

Pakistan could be on the verge of a breakthrough. If the election happens and if it is won by a coalition led by Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, then it will be the first time that an elected leader has served a full term and handed power to a successor. Such a peaceful transition would be a milestone in Pakistan’s journey towards democracy. It might even help the country get a decent government. It is to be hoped that Pakistan’s soldiers are not thinking of derailing the process. America, which in the past has shown a regrettable ambivalence towards military rule in the country, must make it clear that if they do they will get no support from Pakistan’s friends.