When I opened the mail today, I got this notice from my education lender:

Dear Borrower:
Effective July 1, 2006, for all loan programs ... a new military deferment has been created [for borrowers] serving on active duty during a war or other military operation ... .

I was shocked -- that this was a new idea. I'd assumed all of our soldiers, getting shot at for minimal wages (and already drowning in debt), could have at least counted on student loan deferrals while they were dodging bullets.

I assumed wrong. Getting military deferral concessions is a lender-by-lender battle. And the victory is far from complete.

If you're shocked like me, contact your alma mater. Ask them if they deal with lenders without military deferrals. And demand an explanation.

John Bolton when he served as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security was famous for pounding intelligence officials hard until they coughed up intel reports and "frames" that fit the political objectives he had in mind.

The practice of politicizing intelligence in the Bush White House seems to be continuing with "friends lists" and "enemies lists" determining who should be rewarded or punished in the "secrets-clearing process" in cases where former goverment officials publish materials on U.S. foreign policy debates.

In an unprecedented case, the White House National Security Council staff has insinuated itself into a "secrets-clearing" process normally overseen by the CIA Publications Review Board which screens the written work of former government officials to make sure that state secrets don't find their way into the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, or in other of the nation's leading papers, journals, and books.

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Here's a brief but interesting column about the potential harm to your credit score when you cancel an unwanted credit card.  It's alarming to realize that walking away from a poor consumer product -- for example, a credit card that relies on abusive practices and deception -- can negatively impact your ability to secure a car loan, mortgage or so many other aspects of your life.  The system really is stacked against the consumer.  I wonder what products and practices credit lenders would offer if they were the ones subject to an overarching rating system rather than (or in addition to) the consumer?

So I’m keeping with this “tune” metaphor as we continue to debate the Concert of Democracies. Ivo and Jim  and others responded to some of the points in my “out of tune” post with good points, but I remain insufficiently persuaded. Not that the Concert doesn’t have some strong points, but that the net assessment doesn’t come out positive for me.

 The “not the main tune” is another aspect. Even if we were to agree that the Concert is more positive than not, there’s the question of where it should fit in a new Democratic President’s priorities in 2009. It would take high priority: a frequent theme for Presidential speeches, a main subject in State Dept talking points, spending American leverage, taking up big chunks of summit agendas. Choices have to be made as to which priorities in which to invest presidential prestige, administration resources, piece of the media agenda, etc. I don’t see the Concert as so strong a priority relative to others as to warrant this priority.

I’d rather spend these resource on the likes of establishing a U.S.-China summit akin to U.S.-Soviet summits of the Cold War, dealing not only with immediate bilateral issues (currency value, intellectual property) but also broader global geopolitical issues appropriate to this evolving relationship; pushing on “responsibility to protect” and a definition of sovereignty that gives more recognition to the responsibilities not just the rights of states; and collective action on global climate change.

A great article in Time this week talks about how Michigan is rewriting its graduation requirements to prepare students for the 21^st century. In a global world of commerce, industry, and politics, students can no longer assume that good jobs are attainable without skills or education – and educators can no longer delay in reforming education to prepare young people for an increasingly dynamic global economy.

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The good news about the proposed Concert of Democracies is that it provides a target to which other semi-democratic nations can aspire. The bad news? It’s a good target for other countries to criticize.

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Today's news indicates that Palestinians are on the brink of a civil war which would surely spill over into Israel (militants will try to undermine President Abbas by launching mortar and/or suicide bombings). This would be disastrous for Palestinians, Israelis and Americans. The United States needs to start pushing hard for diplomatic movement that offers a political horizon for Palestinians to aim for. As the Baker commission tells us, America is badly damaged by continuation of this insanity.

Fortunately, the Saudi peace initiative is back. Four years ago, when it was first issued, the Sharon government ignored it although it was a ground-breaking document. The plan, endorsed by all 22 Arab states, offered Israel full normalization of relations in exchange for creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

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The Administration proponents have been up in arms this week by the visits of key Senators to Damascus. Nelson, Kerry, Dodd and Specter have all been there recently to talk with Assad.

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I've long thought that while Ivo is right about Iraq (say good-bye), the Administration's only course was to increase troop level, and draw down as the next election approached. (I was 1/2 wrong, however, because I thought they'd also accept the Syria/Iran diplomatic proposals, a sort of carrot and stick response to the Baker/Hamilton approach). But, McCain would not have been standing out there for so long arguing this point without some sense that the military (or parts of it) and others would go along. It's still have to tell where Gates will be on all of this new "surge", though the Times reports todays that this will leave Casey high and dry. I agree. Watch Casey as the fall guy on all of this. And watch new appointee Lt. General Odierno, who is taking over day-to-day aspects of fight in Iraq, as the new poster-child of the "we listen to our military" campaign.

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This is my first post on America Abroad and before getting underway I wanted to let everyone know what my role will be. Every Friday I will be posting a summary of what the bloggers have been discussing. Now let’s get started…

This week on TPM Café’s America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about... The Baker-Hamilton Report, Sanctions on Iran?, Britain's Nuclear Program and other Issues Inside of Iraq. My full summary is after the break.

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Okay, here's your place to make your prediction. How many US troops are in Iraq on New Year's Day 2008 and how many on New Year's Day 2009?

So New Jersey has decided, as predicted, to expand its civil unions law rather than opening marriage to same-sex couples.

Here's the big news: there's no big news. No outcry, no shock and awe. Remember how the country roiled just a few years ago, when VT first invented the term? Acceptance of LGBT folks' desire to care for each other lifelong has moved forward at warp speed, compared to other social movements.

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Lots of comments here on the ideas that Jim and I, amongst others, are pushing. Some of them are supportive; most are not. But we’re grateful for all of them (well, almost all of them…). Jim’s addressed some of the issues that have been raised, and a good many other issues are covered in our American Interest article (which, I should make clear, differs in many key ways from what the Princeton Project has proposed). I urge people to read it as well. Here, I’ll confine myself to two big issues that have repeatedly come up: who and why?

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The escalating tension between Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the current Saudi National Security Advisor and former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who only this this week resigned his position as Saudi Ambassador in Washington, is taking some new and disturbing turns.

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I'll have more to say shortly in response to the very interesting comments and suggestions our idea of Concert of Democracies has sparked here at America Abroad. For now, I wanted to bring your attention to an oped Jim Goldgeier and I have running in tomorrow Financial Times that relates to some of these issues. (Reprinted below the fold.)

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On December 12, the Campaign for America’s Future hosted Jacob Hacker to talk about his important new book, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement – And How You Can Fight Back at a forum in Washington. CAF is working with Hacker to promote widespread discussion of both his book and his plan for health care for all. That same day we arranged a video interview on the KaiserNetwork by Jackie Judd of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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As Ivo and Jim know from other discussions, I’m not a supporter of the Concert of Democracies. I largely agree with their starting point of a critique of the United Nations. The limits of what’s been achieved in the latest UN reform efforts are telling. Bold ideas on humanitarian intervention and “responsibility to protect” from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001-02, only to be watered down in what the UN was willing to adopt in 2005, and then giving us all these resolutions on Darfur claiming to be “seized with the matter,” but no real action behind the words. A name change on the main human rights body, and some membership jiggering, but still well short of principled human rights advocacy and defense.

Other examples as well that Ivo and Jim and others cite. The criteria that a new major institution needs to meet, though, is that it both substantially improves on the flaws of existing institutions and that it doesn’t bring significant problems of its own. Four points why I don’t think the Concert of Democracies meets these, the 2nd criteria in particular.

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I mostly agree with the diagnosis; I’m not so confident about the cure. The core of Daalder and Lindsay’s argument is that the UN is structurally, and irremediably, incapable of addressing the crises which now plague the world—because those crises arise mostly within states rather than between them, and all too many of the UN’s members hold sovereignty in such regard, or at least profess to, that they will not permit the robust responses we need, whether military or political. It’s hard to argue with that proposition.

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I don't usually cite George Will on anything, let alone Democratic party matters. However, the column in Thursday's Washington Post merits serious consideration.

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Glad to join a discussion of what seems to me, approaching this question from a political point of view that is a bit of an outlier at the Cafe, is nonetheless an idea whose time has come: a concert of democracies. One point I do think we need to achieve a greater degree of clarity on is legitimacy in the international system. Let me put it as bluntly as possible: Would a unanimous judgment of a Concert of Democracies convey greater legitimacy than a unanimous Security Council resolution, lesser legitimacy, or the same legitimacy?

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From the New York Times:

The number of people paying their mortgages late — or not paying them at all — increased in recent months, led by a rise in homeowners with troubled credit histories.

Dan K. takes me to task for failing to discuss all possible forms of international cooperation in my earlier post making the case for a Concert of Democracies. Fair enough. I didn’t. Dan K favors the creation of a Concert of the Sane and Capable. I must confess that I have no idea what that means. (To offer my own paraphrase of Chris Hedges’s book, Glib Titles Give Us No Meaning.) But let’s talk about one form of international cooperation that is getting a lot of play these days: A Concert of Great Powers.

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Ah, the sophisticated Americans. CNN is now mocking Barack Obama's name on a daily basis with Jeff Greenfield and Jeannie Moose reminding their audience that Obama rhymes with Osama and that the Senator's middle name is Hussein.

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My friend Bruce Jentleson says he is "taken a little back" by "some of [his] pro UN-colleagues backing off UN sanctions against Iran."

Bruce is one of the best writers on multilateralism, as readers of America Abroad have come to know. But like the "other big powers" Bruce criticizes in his post, Bruce seems to want to "have it both ways" in his response.

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The New York Times' Helene Cooper has an important piece out today on Ambassador Turki's resignation and some of the surrounding context.

Turki's predecessor in his job, Prince Bandar, who was Saudi Ambassador to the US for 22 years, is reportedly jealous of the rave reviews Turki was getting in Washington -- and has been jockeying with Turki in Washington power circles by continuing to manage his own White House relations and contacts throughout Bush world without consulting and coordinating with Ambassador Turki.

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I agree with everything Bruce says about Iran – strong UN sanctions would be ideal. What I disagree with is what is implicit: that we can still get UN sanctions that send a meaningful message.

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He's not even gone, and already Don Rumsfeld has his knives out for his soon-to-be former boss. First, he tells an interviewer that he was fired because of the "outcome of the election" even though Bush said the opposite. Then, he says that the phrase "'war on terror' is a problem for me." What's next? That Iraq was a mistake?

This Holocaust denial issue is one of the rare ones I don't have strong feelings about.

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Interest rates on need-based student loans will be cut in half "within the first couple of weeks of the new session." Stay tuned for more...

Is Israel an apartheid state?

In his post, MJ Rosenberg argues that in his new – and surprisingly popular book, Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid – Jimmy Carter does not actually call Israel an “apartheid state.” As Rosenberg notes, it’s important to “Argue the facts. Argue the context. Argue the big picture.”

I couldn’t agree more. While MJ and I lie on different parts of the political spectrum when it comes to the Middle East, we do share a deep commitment to a strong US-Israel relationship (as do a significant majority of Americans) – and a commitment to the principle of spirited debate about this issue, and just about any issue.

In that spirit, I point readers to Jeffrey Goldberg’s review of Carter’s book from this Sunday’s Washington Post Book World. It is the single best deconstruction of the factual and contextual problems with Carter’s book that I have seen. He unpacks Carter's claims and makes clear the context the former President is operating under, and does so calmly and with -- a rightly deserved -- authority.

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Amidst all the debate about Iraqification and troop drawdown, a couple of interesting details in the Iraq Study Group Report haven't gotten the attention they deserve. Here's a quote from page 7 of the report:

"There are roughly 5,000 civilian contractors in the country."

5,000 contractors?

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As Ivo noted in his initial post for this debate, he and I have argued in the pages of the American Interest and elsewhere for the creation of a Concert of Democracies. To be convincing, the case for uniting the efforts of the world’s democracies needs to answer three threshhold questions: Do we need institutionalized forms of cooperation at all? Why shouldn’t we just strengthen and broaden existing institutions, especially the United Nations? What advantages would a Concert of Democracies offer over other kinds of cooperation? To get out debate started, here are quick responses to each question.

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With respect, I'd add a sixth to Max's wise five lessons of economic populism: It's micro, not macro, stupid.

Well I add the 'stupid' because of Carville's great, election-winning slogan, but the macro folks aren't stupid. They are just too entranced by their math and their determinism. When markets are open to the possibilities of creative destruction, unpredictable new entrants with unimaginable productivity enhancements happen. Macro doesn't predict what does occur in micro, and yet all we see around us is the aggregate of micro.

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In today's Financial Times, Larry Summers laid out his agenda for the struggling middle class. On the list: restoring the progressivity of the tax code by cracking down on tax evasion and sheltering, investing in education and health care, and disclosing CEO pay (presumably to discourage overly generous pay packages).

I have been looking forward to Summers' ideas because he has described our economic problems as well as anyone. He wrote two months ago, "The economic logic of free, globalized, technologically sophisticated capitalism may well be to shift more wealth to the very richest and some of the very poorest in the world, while squeezing people in the middle." Those people include regular American workers caught between technology and low-cost labor.

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At the risk of getting kicked off the site, I have a one word answer:

Abso-****en-lutely!

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House Democrats have made a minimum wage increase a centerpiece of their agenda. Politically, the move is a good one. Last month, Democrats beat incumbent Republicans and held on to seats in tough races by arguing convincingly that the proceeds of the growing American economy are being distributed disproportionately to the highest earners. From a political perspective, raising the minimum wage is one of the clearest ways to alter that distribution - in percpeption, if not in fact. But what about the economic policy behind raising the minimum wage?

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I’m a little taken aback that some of my pro-UN colleagues are backing off UN sanctions against Iran. Having passed UN Security Council Resolution 1696 that “demands” that Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development,” you don’t need to be John Bolton to see that the UN does have its own credibility at stake. Sure, China and Russia are recalcitrant, but however flagrant the Bush administration on Iraq and a host of other issue relating to the UN, the other big powers also can’t have it both ways, talking the multilateralism talk when convenient but not walking the walk when it comes to acting on ostensibly shared norms and commitments.

I’m finalizing a study, “Sanctions Against Iran: Key Issues,” for the Century Foundation that will be released later this week. Will post it then.

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In response to Lee’s post on Iran, Ernie asks about the consequences of US-EU sanctions against Iran for relations with Russia and China, specifically asking about China and Darfur, and Dan Greenbaum follows up by adding Chinese policy on North Korea to the mix. Let me take a crack at this.

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Paul Krugman’s column this morning, “Outsourcer in Chief,” makes a huge point that every Democratic presidential candidate should pound away at to discredit the conservative ideology that their Republican opponents will surely embrace. Here’s my shorthand version of the argument: everyone knows that conservatives say they believe in a strong defense to make Americans safer, along with smaller, more efficient government. But over and over again, those goals have been undermined by the right’s equally strong commitment to the idea that the private sector is inherently more effective than the public sector. The right’s think tanks have argued for years that when contracting out work, the government should impose minimal oversight because Adam Smith’s invisible hand will see to it that the public will benefit from innovation, high-quality, and low cost. Bureaucratic oversight only gums up the works. But in practice, the inattentiveness of the Bush administration’s agencies to what its private contractors do with the taxpayer’s money – an inattentiveness that conservative ideology insisted would be beneficial to the public, not just the contractors themselves – has demonstrably weakened America’s defense, made us less safe, and wasted many billions of dollars.

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One strategy aimed at populist economic insurgency is to depict it as obsessed with trade. That enables populism to be muddied by association with neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, the anti-immigrant lunacy of Lou Dobbs, and economic crankery. This is reinforced by the accurate observation that trade policy alone is woefully inadequate to significantly lightening the burdens of the working class.

Populism is really much more, broader and deeper. Its point of departure is the domination of monied elites who jury-rig commerce and call it free enterprise, who marginalize dissent and call it democracy. It rejects the Horatio Alger myth, with its false promise that if you study, work hard, and play by the rules, economic security will be yours.

Now to the economics: here are my nominations for the five leading concerns in populist economics:

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This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a jury finding that Wall Street-wizard Lehman Brothers aided and abetted consumer fraud. (See the opinion here.) Lehman Brothers does not, of course, have a consumer finance division. Rather, it got into trouble by financing another firm’s dirty business of predatory lending. Here’s the story, as presented by the court, followed by my own commentary ...

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I know everyone in the world already knows this, but as we, and (undoubtedly TPMCafe) prepare to decommission Bolton Watch (although, one should never stop watching John Bolton), let's report for a moment on Bolton's successor.

Bob Novak says it will be Zalmay Khalilzad, soon to be ex-Ambassador to Iraq.  Although what no one else is relaying is Novak's "footnote" that says that Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff, expressed interest in the job.

What would a Khalilzad ambassadorship mean for America, and the UN?

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OK. We’re going to try something different here at America Abroad. Aside from our regular commentary on current events (which we hope will continue at the brisk pace of the last few weeks) we’re going to discuss — debate, I suspect — a big idea, one that transcends the politics and politicians of the moment. It’s the idea of forging a new compact — a concert really — among the world’s liberal democracies to supplement or even supplant other major international organizations, like the United Nations and NATO.

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It must be something in the water, but folks over in the White House are clearly becoming delusional.

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