NoelNatter

Moving Up In The Blogging World?

2006-11-17T09:38:00.000Z

I've gone with Beta Blogger, so everything is new and shiny. I've also had to move my blogging address slightly to http://anglonoelnatter.blogspot.com.
Simply click on there and the same old sort of stuff I go on about will appear as if by magic!

SPAMMERS ARE SCUM!!!

2006-11-16T11:45:00.000Z

That should get a few hits!

By way of explanation

2006-10-23T08:27:00.000+01:00

I haven't done much with my blog through October. There are some reasons for this. I was pretty poorly towards the start of the month. Basically I caught whatever was going round and I had a week in bed. Then this week I have been out and about (drinks with friends in Ye Olde Londone Citye Centre; went to my first meeting of West Hampstead Book Club; and went to the cinema to see the v.good Children of Men- still from film above). I was going to do some blogging last night but my broadband connection was down for some reason. I'm back on nights this week, so I won't have much time this week to post stuff. However, I had to type something this morning just in case anyone thought I was dead or giving up the blogging game.

As I said in a recent post, politics has an air of the same old, same old for me at the moment. I realise that I will have to sit down and just type about the reasons for this at some point. However, the inspiration is not there are the moment. It will return, I am sure, but my blogging muse is currently AWOL.

PS I recently saw this on the Net. With the figure I got, you can see why the loss of my broadband connection last night left me scratching my head...

Down with fakes!

2006-09-24T23:44:00.000+01:00

"We did what we had to do and that's why we didn't survive, only the fakes survive." -John Lydon on The Sex Pistols.

It is all too easy for David Cameron at the moment. He says that he is reforming the Conservative Party in a modernising way, although he keeps quiet about what that means in policy terms. There are mumblings from the Munster Family wing of the Cons and their cheerleaders in the press, but if DC is really to persuade the liberal middle classes that the Cons are the lot for them at the next General Election he will have to take on his internal opponents, in the same way that Neil Kinnock did with Derek Hatton, Arthur Scargill et al in 1985. As that was two years into Kinnock's leadership, expect fireworks at next year's Tory Conference. The trouble Cameron also has is that most Con Party members are 110% sure that they only have to keep saying the things they have been saying since Mrs. Thatcher became leader over 30 years back to win the next General Election. Any party which had seen two crushing General Election defeats and then elected a complete no-hoper like Iain Duncan Smith, simply because he was anti-EU (nothing wrong with being anti-EU, I hasten to add) is still in a state of denial. Even now Cameron and his cronies use the most abused phrase in British politics "we have learnt lessons" (without spelling out what they are), which suggests that it is not only the rank-and-file which is in denial about the Cons' political future.

I was reading the Guardian's G2 section on Friday gone when I came across two articles, which seemed to have very little in common, apart from being good, and being condemnations of the sort of fakery in modern Britain which gets me worked up no end. The first is about the great man Dave Cameron and his ilk by a thinking Tory (not a "thinking Thatcherite", I hasten to add- that's an oxymoron for morons), George Walden. I hope he isn't right about the English being naturally deferential- we might as all give up now if that is true- but Walden is right about how the media encourages all this fakery wrapped in the warm odour of "sincerity".

I'm a fake, vote for me
Our present prime minister is a posh man pretending to be common. Our next prime minister may well be a posh man pretending to be common. Why do we love being patronised?
George Walden, The Guardian, Friday September 22, 2006

Britain is governed by an oligarchy of professional egalitarians, many of them from privileged backgrounds, whose power and wealth increasingly depend on the more or less cynical exploitation of populism in politics, the media and the arts. While in power, the Conservative party - lamenting low educational standards and intoning sombrely about family values - had been happy to endorse the increased commercialisation of television. The profits would go largely to friends of the party, while, for reasons too obvious to recite, their own children would be spared much of the cultural squalor that crudely populist television programmes would encourage.

Even so, who would have predicted that an Etonian of three years' parliamentary standing (whose experience of life had been predominantly as a PR executive for a TV company notorious for its low standards) would be elected leader of the Conservative party? That person would, until recently, have been denounced as a cynic. And if they had, furthermore, suggested that one of the first things a future contender for the Tory leadership would do would be to share with us the contents of his iPod and enthuse about his favourite single, they would have been laughed off as a hopeless pessimist.

Reality has, in fact, turned out to be a caricature. For the first time in our history, both major political parties are now led by what are inverted elites: well-born, privately educated men who vie with one another in affecting populist attitudes. Being from a superior social caste to Blair, it is in the logic of the new elites that Cameron should stoop lower, and so he does. A trivial example is their choice of records on Desert Island Discs: whereas Blair included three classical recordings in his choices, Cameron trumped him by having none at all.

Cameron is, to some extent, the political expression of the Princess Diana phenomenon. Diana was the patron saint of these new elites, and Cameron has clearly learned a lot from her. They not only look a little alike (it seems to me) but, it has been written, may be distantly related. She spooned with the masses and so does he. Both are upper-class figures who nevertheless contrive to lay claim to victim status: Diana exploited her difficulties with the royal family to gain public sympathy, and Cameron, somewhat distastefully, makes political play with his disabled son.

The politics of sentiment increasingly dominate public discussion, and sentimentality tinged with cynicism was what Diana was about. The same is true of Cameron's social politics. The cant of the new elites emerges with numbing shamelessness in his public declarations. Recently the one-time PR man for ruthlessly profitable trash TV made a heartfelt speech in which he said that money wasn't everything, and that the quality of our culture mattered. In his more mawkish mode it is possible to discern in the Tory leader's political pitch a faint echo of Diana's Christ-like affectations. With her, it was a scrupulously choreographed contact with people sick with Aids. With Cameron, it is an ostentatious tolerance of the lower orders: suffer the hoodies and the hoodlums to come unto me.

Socially and politically, the consequence (and, subconsciously perhaps, the intention) of this de haut en bas smarminess towards the masses is the maintenance of the old order in modern guise. Naturally, Cameron would deny this, insisting that he is sincere in everything he says and does. But then so does Blair and so would Diana. All three strike me as instances of a contemporary phenomenon by which a person's feelings about him or herself become more important than their relationship with reality. To that extent, as a sagacious Princeton professor, Harry G Frankfurt, has recently pointed out, "sincerity itself is bullshit".

The Blair-Cameron continuum does not surprise me. Populism in Britain is systemic, involving a tacit complicity between left and right. By this I mean that the consequences of egalitarianism and the free market could, in practice, be remarkably similar, and that the main victims in both cases are likely to be at the lower end of society. For all their protestations to the contrary, neither right nor left really believe in meritocracy. At heart the left retains a gut opposition to selection in any form, while the right is in favour of competition everywhere except where it impinges on the educational and social privileges of the right itself, its sons and its daughters. But a situation in which talent finds no way forward while an elite of populist mediocrities holds power in field after field will, in the long term, prove damaging to the country.

Recently, the London School of Economics produced an international study showing that Britain is not only the least meritocratic country in the western world, but that in the past 30 years we have actually gone backwards. Another study, this time by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has confirmed that, while our independent schools are of the highest standards, in no other country is there such a gulf in achievement between state and private schools. The bigger the gap, the greater the need to pretend it is not there. Hence the English art of condescension in its contemporary form. Blair's posturing helped set the tone for the new elites and, as we have seen, the style is catching.

Our increasingly populist media - which, like Cameron, insists that class is a thing of the past - is itself increasingly run by journalists whose backgrounds can be traced to the middle or upper-middle classes and to independent schools. The facts are there, in a recent study by the Sutton Trust, showing that more than half of the most senior journalists in the land came from independent schools, which account for 7% of the country's pupils. This, too, represents a deterioration of the position a few decades ago. It is in the logic of what I call an ultra-democracy in thrall to the new elites that the more privileged the power-holders in the media, the greater the quotient of populist ingratiation and we are certainly seeing plenty of that.

Five years ago, immigration was not yet the vastly important subject it has since become. From every point of view, the new elites have reason to welcome what has happened. Whatever its consequences for the country, for them, mass immigration is an unqualified boon. It is not just the low wages and household help that benefit well-to-do people such as themselves. Here are millions of new clients for their condescension, in the true meaning of the term: lowering yourself to the level of people you see as inferior, the better to ingratiate yourself with them. The purpose is to sell them your populist politics or dud culture, while burnishing your humanitarian image. We must look forward to the time when able and independent-minded immigrants at all levels of society react against the patronage of the new elites who, morally, culturally and intellectually, are so frequently beneath them.

One of the more predictable habits of the new elites is to dismiss all criticism of the country in which they and their children flourish as doom-mongering or unpatriotic. Such a riposte is of little consequence: elites have always sought to jolly the populace along, dissuading them from untoward reflection and analysis, and have always played the patriotic card. For some time I thought I discerned a diminishing tendency, even among politicians, to take the populist whip and that it was only a matter of time before the posturings of our new elites were laughed to scorn. There must be a limit to the amount of patronising a free people can take from its leaders, assuming it wants to be truly free.

Watching a Tory leader pedalling to the House of Commons followed by a chauffeur-driven Lexus carrying a clean shirt and shoes, like some bicycling Bertie Wooster with his Jeeves in motorised attendance, I am not so sure. Something in the English mind makes it possible for the farce to be accepted. And when in his populist arrogance our would-be prime minister exposes himself to a television interview in which he is asked whether as a teenager he had masturbated over an image of Margaret Thatcher, an observer might have thought that he would be seen as having gone beyond the bounds of the acceptable in the eyes of his colleagues, many of them former devotees of Saint Margaret.

But our observer would be wrong. What matters for the new elites is not loyalty, principle or the crumbs of decency, but personal success, even if it involves the debasement of everything the Conservative party is supposed to stand for. In Tory eyes only two things mattered about the incident and their strategists will not have missed them: Jonathan Ross earns £8m a year because he is a smart fellow and the public love him, and when he succumbed to the temptation to twit Cameron with a pitifully witless joke, a mere handful of people rang the BBC to complain.

To me it seems clear beyond doubt that Cameron will become prime minister after the next election, even in a hung parliament. If so, it would be the biggest triumph of our new elites since the apotheosis of Diana. Such a result would also confirm one of our least admirable national characteristics: the irresistible English urge to deference, in this case deference towards the privileged and well-to-do masquerading as themselves.

© 2006 George Walden. Extracted from New Elites: A Career in the Masses, published by Gibson Square on September 29. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

You can see Dave Cameron in a gastropub, can't you? You can see him launching the Cons next General Election campaign in one, trying to make bonhomie conversation with some miserable old bloke, while quaffing a glass of beer he normally wouldn't touch with the proverbial bargepole. As I've ranted previously, I have no objection to serving food in pubs- anything tasty and filling which soaks up the booze should be encouraged. However, gastropubs should be avoided if at all possible, as most are as fake as Mr DC himself.

Hunks of this, rumps of that ...
Seared scallops with thyme butter and parsnip chips? Pistachios washed down by Staropramen? Laura Barton is tired of gastropubs - and yearns for a shabby old boozer where dining means crisps
The Guardian, Friday September 22, 2006

Gastropub. Three syllables that instill an oily dread into my heart. It is not the word itself, of course, more the fact that, were there such a thing as a linguistic gastropub menu, it would probably find itself described as a duo of pub and gastronomy served on a bed of wild roquette with a plum confit and red wine reduction.

"Gastropub" was coined (not fricasseed or flash-fried or muddled) in 1991 by David Eyre and Mike Belben, proprietors of the Eagle, in Clerkenwell, London, which was among the first public houses to seize upon the remarkable notion of serving food alongside its ale that extended beyond a listless bag of pork scratchings or a pickled egg. Fifteen years on, it is hard to believe that before 1991, the pinnacle of pub fayre was a pre-cooked chicken and mushroom pie with a mountain of oven chips and an iceberg garnish consumed at a Harvester or a Beefeater while the children amused themselves outside in the kiddies' playground. So when the Eagle opened its doors, in a flurry of caldo verde and sea bream, it was indeed a glorious day for Britain.

But now they are everywhere. Everywhere! They are breeding. This month saw the launch of the Michelin Eating Out In Pubs 2007 guide, and among its 559 entries, there were 48 gastropubs in London alone. (It is the gastropub's cutting-edge cuisine that separates it from, say, genuine, ye olde food-serving taverns.) "The gastropub phenomenon is showing no signs of slowing down," says Derek Bulmer, the guide's editor. "We excluded more than 500 pubs from the guide this year."
Gordon Ramsay, meanwhile, has announced his intention to enter the gastropub trade with the Narrow Street Kitchen in Limehouse. More gastropubs? This seems to me a bleak, bleak future, for as the years have rolled by I have rather had my fill of herbed polenta and parmesan shavings, and after considerable rumination I have reached this conclusion: I loathe gastropubs and all who sail in them.

As the Eagle is adjacent to Guardian HQ, I would do well not to criticise it lest they pelt me with pane rustica as I stroll to the bus stop. And to be honest, I do, hand on heart, like the Eagle, as indeed I like an array of other gastropubs the length and breadth of the British Isles. It is, after all, hard to object to nice food and an agreeable selection of ales. And I eat in them often enough, of course; just last night, purely in the interests of investigative journalism, I found myself in a Hackney gastropub sampling seared scallops with thyme butter and parsnip chips (reader, I felt besmirched), but increasingly I find they instill in me the same lacklustre despondency as dining at a Little Chef, only without those amusingly slurpy milkshakes or the promise of a lollipop at the end.

I believe the reason is this: so popular have the original gastropubs been that the new batch now upon us seems to have been created by following some fail-safe gastropub blueprint downloaded off the internet. There is something achingly wearisome about walking through a hostelry door and finding one's eyes skating over the same brown leather sofas (low, sprawling, slightly scuffed) the same rustic tables (one leg charmingly stabilised with a folded-up napkin) the same beer selection (Staropramen, Staropramen, Staropramen). In their soulless rehashing of the same old decor and accoutrements they seem little different to those brewery chain boozers with their fake beams and bulk-bought horse brasses and tankards.

Except, of course, they are a darned sight more expensive. From your premium ales to your lamb tagine via your gourmet crisps and your bowl of lightly salted pistachios, gastropubbing is a pricey business. Even Michelin's Bulmer cautions that the expensive menus now found in many pubs means they are "basically restaurants with a bar". Not that there's anything wrong with restaurants with a bar, but frequently, the fare on offer in these repro gastropubs does not really warrant the price-tag - on reflection, I am not wholly certain last night's scallops were genuinely worth £13.50, for example.

Meanwhile the menus, inevitably scrawled across blackboards, are written in a curious small-town-brasserie-meets-Jamie Oliver vernacular: all crushed foie gras potatoes, hunks of this, rumps of that, mash, hash, splash, and hand-cut things made for dunking. The roll-call of skate wings and goat's cheese and Toulouse sausages seem to have been shipped in with the sofas and the Staropramen.

Yes, it is brilliant that Britain has hauled itself up from its culinary slump, that we now live in a land where manchego and quince paste is offered up in a bar entirely without apology or explanation and that we have repatriated rhubarb crumble and devilled kidneys. But sometimes it strikes me that the ubiquitous gastropub menu, with its pork belly and polenta and cod and tapenade and wilted greens and chips-with-aioli (always bloody chips-with-aioli - what the hell happened to malt vinegar?) is really no different to the chiming predictability of the chicken in a basket and scampi and chips we were served in the 80s.

The ambience is different now, of course. There is no longer the piped music or jukeboxes offering Venus in Blue Jeans and the hits of Slade - instead gastropubs hire DJs to "spin" (not fricassee or flash-fry or muddle) a breed of what one must describe as blah blah blah music, the aural equivalent of one of those extremely pointless yet exceedingly large coffee table books. Indeed it is most probable you are resting your pint of Staropramen on one of the DJ's flyers rather than a beermat. Twenty years ago, the notion of having a DJ in a pub, except for a very special occasion when he might have been expected to play at least one Black Lace record, would have seemed preposterous. But the times, and the drinkers, have changed.

Today, gastropubs are where affluent young couples come to chill out, together, en masse, with their toddlers. They are chrome-loving, loft-style living, dinner party drug-users with expensive haircuts and a steady line in casual chic, and the gastropubs they frequent are the flagpoles of the relentless urban gentrification occurring across the country. Yes, arguably my objection to them is because they embody what I myself fear becoming, with my poncy media job and my extensive knowledge of balsamic vinegar, but mostly I am simply unsettled by what gastropubs represent: this kind of blond-wooded Britain that brunches and boozes and barristas, and is ever so pleased with itself for doing so; because in the gastropub world, everything is swimming in olive oil and smugness.

What I miss is those shabby pubs that smell of dirt and tobacco and stout, where you're as likely to get into a brawl as you are to find a packet of ready-salted Seabrooks crisps. Where old men hunch over a pint of mild and the only soundtrack is the put-put-put of a game of pool in the back room. No DJs, no Heal's sofas, no blackened salmon or pilaff or cous-cous. No gastronomy, just pub.

SO EAT IN A REAL PUB AND ONLY VOTE FOR REAL POLITICIANS!! SAY NO TO FAKERY!!

Rave from the grave...

2006-09-24T22:23:00.000+01:00

Back blogging again. I haven't done anything much for about a month, which in the blogosphere is considered a century or two.

I suppose a lot has been happening in the world in that time, but I haven't been commenting on it. Perhaps it is because I am showing my age, and it's "same old, same old" to me. When I was a lad, every little political development seemed to be an incipient sign of the end and/or revolution, but now a feeling of ennui grips me all too often. I shouldn't be like that, the world is as exciting as ever, or so a nagging voice in my head tells me.

Anyway, I have some big blog pieces that I would like to get up and running. However, I need some real sitting down and concentrating to attempt these in a worthwhile manner (remember that procrastination is the id to the ego of perfectionism). I sent a couple of pieces to the New Statesman (basically e-mailing anyone of consequence there) but I have had no replies as yet. I don't want to say anything about that lack of response yet. The lack of response must be partly, I guess, a consequence of a period of high excitement in British politics at the moment (wake up at the back!!) what with the Tony v Gordon battles. I've said things previously about the whole saga before in my blog, but a few other comments may be in order here.

First of all, this is very much a battle between two wings of New Labour. Only those who still quaintly refer to Labour as "The Socialists" would see a Gordon Brown victory as meaning we become "the New North Korea" or some such nonsense. New Labour is built on the myth, forged in the aftermath of the 92 General Election defeat, that the public will never vote for higher taxes for essential services such as health and education, despite what they may say in opinion polls. In fact, the majority did vote for such policies in 92.

However, the voters were split between Labour and the Lib Dems (and other parties considered to be "Centre-Left", such as the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens) so the Tory minority was able to get back in with a split opposition vote. Now I think it would be harder to get people to support tax rises, because so much has ostensibly been ploughed into health, education and other social services without much discernible effect. However, a lot of that is to do with the various scams pulled by consultants, accountants and the verious other parasites who have made a killing out of New Labour embacing the private sector, without New Labour having much of a clue about how the private sector works under Actual Existing Capitalism. A book I have been reading in the past few weeks of blog silence worth having a read of is Plundering The Public Sector: How New Labour are letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money by David Craig and Richard Brooks. Opinion polls I have seen recently suggest that people are losing faith in the Welfare State, including the NHS. If the public sees the Welfare State increasingly as a means of funneling public money into the pockets of a bunch of private sector hucksters after the quick buck, no wonder the public has lost faith in it!

The other point I was going to say about the whole Blair-Brown saga is the myth that Blair is an election winner. Let's be honest, before he died in May 94 John Smith was well on the way to a solid Labour majority at the next General Election. OK, it would almost certainly have not been the 179 Blair achieved in 97, but it would have been solid enough (and would a smaller majority have been such a bad thing?). The Cons were in serious trouble by May 94, and people were sick to the back teeth of them by then. In 2001 Blair faced William Hague (I loved the strapline of his weekly column between 2001 and 2005 in the News of the World: "He Knows: He's Been There"...WTF?), who came across as one of those kids you used to see on Jim'll Fix It: "Dear Jim, can you fix it for me to become leader of the Conservative Party?". However, Mister Saville would make sure it was only for a day. Young Master Hague had the post for four years. Any half-decent Labour leader would have won against William Hague. In 2005, Labour got in quite narrowly, and the main reason for that was Gordon Brown being allowed on the election trail with TB, as opposed to being shunted over to the election trail equivalent of a Siberian power station. If anyone remembers, at the start of 2005 Blair's campaign manager was Alan Milburn, one of those bugger all in a suit types the Cons used to specialise in during the 1990s, and which Blair likes to surround himself with. The election was going to be all about public sector "Choice" rather than providing nearby quality hospitals, schools etc. When the polls started to show the Cons coming close to Lab Milburn was dropped (there is serious talk of him standing as the Blairite candidate for leader- do they want to lose the next election so badly?) and Gordon Brown was hastily rehabilitated and brought back on the national election campaign. Even with Brown and the playing on Labour's economic record (surely with anyone with half a political brain, their trump card) it was a damn close thing in 2005, a General Election won despite of Blair, not because of him.

Something else I was reading recently was an article by Ross McKibbin in the London Review of Books which makes the point I've made before: the pro-Americanism of New Labour, Brown as well as Blair:

"To Blair, and even more to Gordon Brown and his kitchen cabinet, America stands for ingenuity, dynamism, wealth and power. It is the model we should aspire....New Labour's relentless urge to privatise, to provide 'choice', even in areas where most of us don't want to make choices (like the secondary school system), to minimise the public sphere, all comes from the US. The Treasury's labour market policies are largely American...."

McKibbin also makes the point that the British public's resistance to public sector "reform" has:

"...increased the frustration felt by the Americanising members of the government- especially the prime minister- and thrown them ever more enthusiastically into the arms of American foreign policy, since in this area the preferences of the electorate don't keep getting in the way."

So expect, "same old, same old" when Blair finally ascends to Heaven. Blimey, I'm tired. However, I will keep ploughing on for a while. I need to stay up. I start nights at work tomorrow evening, and the quicker I adapt to staying up at night, the better.

Pics

2006-09-01T18:40:00.000+01:00

I was working nights today (if that is not an oxymoron) & someone had a leaving do ie she is moving to work days at weekends. Hence I wasn't at the mass lone demo(s) outside the Houses of Parliament. Please check London Pics if you are curious.

PS Great quote I heard last week. A modern Russian saying: "Drink in the morning and the rest of your day is free".

Big Brother and stuff

2006-08-28T03:36:00.000+01:00

No, no, not the crap Channel 4 boreathon (pity they didn't do it like the book- human faces being stamped on by boots forever and helmets with rats) but 24/7 surveillance wherever you are. Like this...

It's not always good to share: A government plan for data sharing between public bodies threatens to further undermine civil liberties in the wake of the ID cards debacle
Michael Cross, The Guardian, Thursday August 24, 2006

Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens' personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.

The policy was agreed upon by a cabinet committee set up by the prime minister, and reverses the current default position - which requires public bodies to find a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals.

The officials behind the "transformational government" scheme say data sharing could present a more consumer-friendly face to government, and help tackle social problems such as prisoners re-offending.

For example, officials say, when moving house, a citizen would register the change online once with their local authority's "one stop shop". It would update its own records, that of the new local authority, and then of central government, including the electoral register, DVLA and Inland Revenue.

A destruction of liberty

Similarly, on completing a prison sentence, an ex-offender's details would be available to probation officers, local authority social services and the employment service, reducing the risk of people with criminal records disappearing from government records and re-offending.

Simon Davies, of the pressure group Privacy International, described the timing of the new policy as "sick", but said he was not surprised. "It's about the most blatant destruction of liberty we have seen for a while," he said.

Apart from the implications for privacy, widespread data sharing would enable different arms of the state to operate as one body - collecting fines and taxes on behalf of another agency, for example. This would be a major threat to civil liberty, Davies said. "Functional separation [between departments] is an important principle of justice and accountability, for example allowing you to fight a local authority on its own turf," he said. "This effectively dismantles that limitation."

Besides alarming groups concerned about the spread of the "big brother" state, the "transformational government" strategy, under which the new policy was drawn up, has already raised concerns about data protection from the information commissioner.

Contravenes data protection law

Presently, data sharing in government is regulated by several tiers of law. Like commercial companies, public bodies must comply with the data protection act. They are also subject to the common law duty of confidentiality, as well as statutes covering the release of specific sets of data: these can block data sharing even when the citizen concerned gives permission.

In November last year, the Transformational Government strategy drawn up by Ian Watmore, now head of the prime minister's delivery unit, set out proposals for government bodies to share IT systems and other infrastructure to enable public services to be designed around citizens rather than bureaucracies.

Earlier this year, the Cabinet Office revealed that the prime minister had set up a ministerial committee, called Misc 31, to examine data sharing. In early July, the committee, chaired by Hilary Armstrong, minister for the Cabinet Office, agreed to a new statement of the government's position: "Information will normally be shared in the public sector, provided it is in the public interest." Ministers are due to announce a policy based on this position in the week beginning September 11.

Davies said the new policy would end the current "truce" between the privacy lobby and government. "If the government want to play dirty, they'll find themselves staring down the barrels of something akin to the ID card debate. I would hope there's going to be a monumental row." Davies has been at the forefront of those opposing the ID card, which the Labour administration is seeking to introduce.

The new policy appears to contravene a key principle of the data protection act, which is that "personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes". Ministers are likely to argue that efficient public administration is not incompatible with other purposes.

The data protection registrar, Richard Thomas, would not comment on Misc 31's decision ahead of the formal announcement. He has, however, previously said that all government data sharing must be in accordance with the data protection act. Last month, he commented that while he supported "sensible" information sharing, the government risked losing public trust if "reasonable expectations of privacy are not met".

The official in charge of making Transformational Government happen, John Suffolk, the government's chief information officer, says there is no intention to create a free for all. "Not all information will be shared," he told the Guardian in an interview last week. Most frequently, data sharing will just be a matter of allowing access to names and addresses, he said.

"This is not about sharing your health record or criminal record. It's about basic data sharing to ensure that services to citizens are seamless." Government databases will still be subject to the data protection act, and accessible only by people who need the information.

Such statements are unlikely to satisfy critics. Even some government IT chiefs have concerns about the new policy. "Who defines the public interest?" asks Glyn Evans, head of business solutions and IT at Birmingham City council, which was well ahead of central government in making its services electronically available. Preserving trust is especially important in local government, says Evans. "These aren't anonymous civil servants viewing your data, they could be your next door neighbour."

Thomas criticised the Transformational Government programme's intention to make wider use of the national insurance number to identify citizens. He "has significant concerns" over whether the existing national insurance number is robust or secure enough to be used as a single identifier for all government transactions.

Originally generated for use in connection with benefits and taxation, the NI number has limitations, he says: "There has been no tradition of individuals keeping the number secure. If the number becomes a single reference to gain access to a wider variety of personal information held by government this poses a significant security risk."

Suffolk says that while no decision has been made, the national insurance database is the most likely candidate to become a central repository of citizens' names and addresses. "They have done a tremendous amount of work on data cleansing."

Whatever policy decisions emerge, Transformational Government's approach to data protection and privacy will face widespread critical scrutiny in the light of the identity card controversy. The new data sharing policy is likely to be set out in terms that emphasise its use in improving the accuracy of information and protecting privacy.

But Evans advocates taking one step further - letting citizens decide which public body has access to which pieces of personal data. While the idea is being tested in local government, "it may be a step too radical for Whitehall," he says.

What the hell's "the public interest"? "Hey, look, you know, its truly is the People's Public Interest..."

Blogging late tonight, 20 to 4 in the morning here in not so sunny London town. Being busy writing articles for the New Statesman. Hopefully they will think them good, publish them and even pay me. Nothing that regular readers (yes, just your good self I'm afraid- again) will be surprised at. One is a critique of "New Britishness", the other a sort of review of Tom Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain, one of the most important political books I've ever read, which was published 30 years ago next year, and had a second edition with a Postscript anticipating New Labour published 25 years ago this Autumn. Originally the two articles were really one, but I managed to disentagle them.

Anglo-Scottish co-operation...

2006-08-28T01:27:00.000+01:00

I had given up on pro-English and pro-Scottish political groups getting on and supporting each other, but the English Democrats proved me wrong (rather too far to "the Right" for my liking, but they aren't racist/BNPish)...

Vote SNP in 2007 and connect with the English!

The on-going scandal of English students being the only ones in the UK to face University top-up fees this September had a new twist today when the SNP came out in condemnation at the blatant "anti-English" policies pursued by New Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives alike.

The SNP have exposed the spiteful anti-English pact between Lib Dems and New Labour in Scotland, who jointly agreed to inflict extra financial penalties on English university students should they try to avoid paying English top-up fees (imposed let us not forget by Scottish and Welsh MPs!!)

In a public repudiation of this disgusting example of blatant anti-Englishness, the SNP have announced their intention to remove all punitive charges on English students wishing to study in Scotland, and give English students exactly the same rights as any other citizen living within the EU if they are elected to the Scottish Parliament next year.

The English Democrats congratulate the SNP for this wholely proper gesture. The EDP condemns all three main political parties in England for their continued discrimination against the people of England and urge all fairminded Scots, to vote for the Scottish National Party in the forthcoming election as it is clear that only the Scottish Nationalists understand the importance of fairness and equality in political life, without it the Liberal Democrats, New Labour and Conservatives will continue their inexorable decline - something we heartily welcome.

The Times
27 Aug 2006 by Ed

Interview with Gore Vidal

2006-08-26T23:38:00.000+01:00

"Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."- Gore Vidal.

Dubya being interviewed by Gore Vidal would make very good television...

Gore Vidal By David Barsamian, August 2006 Issue of The Progressive

Gore Vidal is a gold mine of quips and zingers. And his vast knowledge of literature and history—particularly American—makes for an impressive figure. His razor-sharp tongue lacerates the powerful. He does it with aplomb, saying, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” He has a wry sense of noblesse oblige: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

Now eighty, he lives in the Hollywood hills in a modest mansion with immodest artwork. I felt I was entering a museum of Renaissance art. A stern painting of the Emperor Constantine was looking down upon us as we sat in his majestic living room. A Buddha statue from Thailand stood nearby. But all was not somber. He had a Bush doll with a 9/11 bill sticking out of it on a table behind us.

His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.

“I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place,” he declares.

Vidal moved gingerly and was using a cane. A recent knee operation left him less mobile. He says, “The mind is still agile but the knees have grown weak.” We sat in upholstered chairs. On a nearby table I saw the galleys of his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation. It will be out this fall. His earlier one, Palimpsest, came out in 1995.

Prolific does not even begin to describe Vidal’s literary output. He’s the author of scores of novels, plays, screenplays, essays. In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, United States. His recent books (he calls them “pamphlets”)—Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War, and Imperial America—have sold in huge numbers. When I asked him what was the point of his work, he said, “I am chronicling America.” The prose, whether polemical or fictional, is elegant.

Distantly related to Jackie Kennedy, he does not romanticize JFK. “He was one of the most charming men I’ve ever known,” says Vidal. “He was also one of the very worst Presidents.”

He’s been a Democratic candidate for the House from New York and for the Senate from California. Today, he ridicules the Democrats for supineness.

He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. “The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

I talked with him on a hot afternoon in mid-April.

Q: In 2002, long before Bush’s current travails, you wrote, “Mark my words, he will leave office the most unpopular President in history.” How did you know that then?

Gore Vidal: I know these people. I don’t say that as though I know them personally. I know the types. I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

Q: Bush’s ratings have been at personal lows. Cheney has had an 18 percent approval rating.

Vidal: Well, he deserves it.

Q: Yet the wars go on. It’s almost as if the people don’t matter.

Vidal: The people don’t matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They’ve got the troops. They’ve got the army. They’ve got Congress. They’ve got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him.

Q: What do you think of the conspiracy theories about September 11?

Vidal: I’m willing to believe practically any mischief on the part of the Bush people. No, I don’t think they did it, as some conspiracy people think. Why? Because it was too intelligently done. This is beyond the competence of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They couldn’t pull off a caper like 9/11. They are too clumsy.

Q: Today the United States is fighting two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, and is now threatening to launch a third one on Iran. What is it going to take to stop the Bush onslaught?

Vidal: Economic collapse. We are too deeply in debt. We can’t service the debt, or so my financial friends tell me, that’s paying the interest on the Treasury bonds, particularly to the foreign countries that have been financing us. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.

Q: You’re a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?

Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

But our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?

Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.

I was involved somewhat with Congressman Con-yers on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.

Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I’d write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren’t going to admit it.

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don’t know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

It’s so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what’s left of it. It’s the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.

Q: When were the media better?

Vidal: They’ve never been much good. They belong to the people who own them. But they were better, the level was higher. There used to be foreign correspondents in other countries. There’s nobody abroad now. The New York Times gave up being anything except a kind of shadow of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post is the court circular. What has the emperor done today? And who will be the under-assistant of the secretary of agriculture? As though these things mattered.

Q: What do you think of the public advertising of one’s faith among political leaders? They make a show of going to church and participating in ceremonies.

Vidal: Personally I find it sickening, and very much against what our Founders had in mind. Remember that the country was mostly founded by Brits, and England’s always gotten credit for having invented hypocrisy. So we are reflecting our British heritage when we hypocritically talk about how religious we are.

Q: Is the U.S. more like Sparta than Athens?

Vidal: We’re not so good as either. We certainly are not warlike. Spartans were based upon military service. We don’t want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans. We didn’t want to go out and conquer other countries. We wanted to corner wheat in the stock market or something sensible like that. So we are very unbelligerent. We were dragged screaming into World War I. Well, we were slightly enthusiastic about that, but we were very innocent farm people in those days. In World War II, we fought to stay out of that war. And every liberal figure in the United States from Norman Thomas on was anti-war. They were isolationists in the old populist tradition. So we never had a chance of being Sparta.

Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.

Vidal: It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state
legislatures. That’s what Madison always said. I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?

Vidal: Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His latest book is “Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics.”

How to really bring down the West...

2006-08-26T23:20:00.000+01:00

Hijacking planes is so passe, Osama...

Sell-out: Why hedge funds will destroy the world
If hedge funds were a country, it would be the eighth-biggest on the planet. They can sink whole economies, and have the potential to crash the entire global financial system. Yet they are beyond regulation. We should be very afraid.
Janet Bush, New Statesman, Monday 31st July 2006

Something ominous is going on in world finance - again. On 11 May, the US Federal Reserve, America's central bank, raised rates and hinted that it might do so again. Wall Street wobbled but stock markets in the emerging economies fell through the floor. Since that day, Colombia's stock market has slumped by 42 per cent; Turkey's by 38 per cent; Pakistan and Egypt by 28 per cent; India by 25 per cent; the Czech Republic by 22 per cent.

Why? These fast-developing economies have been the recent darlings of the world's mobile capital, acting as magnets for multinational corporations seeking new frontiers. Yes, the US economy is still the biggest in the world and changes in US interest rates affect the entire global financial system. But there is something very dark indeed at the heart of this story and it is called the hedge-fund industry - lords of havoc who, a consensus is building, have the potential to be responsible for the next great crash - and nobody knows what to do about it.

Howard Davies, then chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA), admitted in 2000 that hedge funds were not very well understood by policy-makers and regulators, but then added: "That is not astonishing in one sense, in that if we do not regulate it, we need know less about it. But it is clear that if we are interested in systemic stability, we cannot ignore a sector which can mobilise around the same volume of assets as the US commercial banking sector."

When Dr Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the most important financial supervisor of all, was quizzed by the US Senate banking committee about whether derivatives - complex financial instruments liberally used by hedge funds - should be regulated, he commented: "Derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and use them properly." This statement came pretty close to admitting that regulators don't have a clue what is going on and are therefore powerless to regulate the funds. Given their sheer size and increasing influence, this is stunning - and scary.

Hedge funds are private investment funds, primarily organised as limited partnerships - in essence, betting syndicates for the very rich. The amount of money they handle, in so far as anyone can estimate this, is mind-bogglingly large. The IMF's best estimate is $1trn; industry professionals reckon $1.5trn. If hedge funds were a country, it would be the eighth-largest in the world. To invest in one of these funds, you have to put in a minimum of $1m, although that initial investment is chicken feed compared with what can be earned - if that is the right verb for what amounts to global-scale gambling. The US Institutional Investor Magazine reckons that the top 25 hedge-fund managers in 2005 earned on average $251m each in 2004 - compared with $10m for the CEO of a typical top 500 US corporation.

Hedge funds are not new - just notorious. They started to take off properly in the late 1970s when floating exchange rates and volatile interest-rate movements transformed the capital markets, and gathered momentum as technology and electronic trading became increasingly quick and soph isticated. The funds were - and are - run typically by a tight group of traders, backed usually by fewer than a hundred individuals prepared to commit a great deal of money into their hands. Today, it is estimated that there are 9,000 funds and what started as a US phenomenon is spreading - though the FSA estimates that there are at present only 325 hedge funds based in the UK.

The key features of these funds are that they trade in eye-watering risk and they are barely regulated. The two are related. Because they answer to nobody but themselves, hedge funds have side-stepped regulation and can do as they like. What they like is risk - and their main tool is "leverage" - borrowing to play the markets. It is not unusual for a hedge-fund investor to control $100m in securities with only a $5m down payment. Of course, that means that when a bet goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. If the hedge-fund industry's positions in the market are 20 times the cash they actually hold, their potential impact on the world financial system is about equal to US GDP.

That is why the emerging-market stock markets have taken such a battering over the past two months. Hedge funds poured money into emerging markets in the search for high returns, able to borrow billions relatively cheaply while interest rates were low. But as soon as the cost of borrowing increased they had to bail out rapidly, leaving the developing economies to clean up the mess.

Of course, recent losses were preceded by spectacular gains. India's stock market had doubled in two years, hailed by the country's leaders as proof that the Indian economy had taken off. For some, at least, it has - but the stock-market boom has greatly exaggerated India's progress. There have been huge inflows of equity investment from foreign investment banks and hedge funds and a large portion of that money came not from New York, London or Frankfurt, but from Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island that just happens to be a tax haven.

Yet no economy can possibly benefit in the long term from a tsunami of "hot money" crashing in and rolling out as fast as it had arrived. For a long time, India protected its economy with moderate capital controls, but its resistance to neoliberalism finally crumbled as it entered a frantic horse race to attract the increasing number of jobs offshored by developed economies. Now it has call-centres and IT development galore; but the quid pro quo has been a new and intense vulnerability to unstable financial flows.

Devil-may-care money

For the 35 per cent of India's population that the World Bank estimates lives on less than $1 a day, that is a gut-wrenching prospect. The long-term solution for any economy trying to develop in a sustainable way is to rely less on devil-may-care foreign money, institute a framework that encourages long-term investment, and look to its own growing numbers of affluent - some in the diaspora - to invest in their country's future. In the short term, the clamour is growing for hedge funds to be regulated.

Naturally, it is possible to argue that to the brave go the spoils. If hedge-fund investors are prepared to take the risk, why shouldn't they reap the rewards? If they live by risk, they should be allowed to die by it, too - in January the Eifuku Fund, based in Japan, lost $300m in a week.

This argument might hold water if hedge-fund gam- bling were purely a private matter. It isn't. When Enron, the huge US energy trading company that had increasingly relied on risky hedge-fund investing and leverage, collapsed in 2001, 4,500 people lost their jobs and more than $1bn of their pensions. Some $60bn was wiped off the value of US stock markets.

Enron's core business was failing - or had been hijacked by the greed and venality of its management. But hedge funds have the potential to wreck perfectly healthy and well-run companies. One senior British banker told me: "You talk to any FTSE-100 company and they live in fear of the hedge funds. If they choose to short your shares [a contract in which shares are borrowed for a set period on the bet that they will go down in price, and are then bought back, hopefully more cheaply, and repaid to the institution that lent them] you're fucked."

Hedge funds can arrest the development of whole econ omies, and they have the potential to crash the financial system. It has almost happened before. In 1998 the Fed persuaded the "Fourteen Families" (an apposite Mafia reference) of Wall Street - the major banks - to cough up money for a $3.6bn bailout for Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose bets went wrong. The Fed said at the time that LTCM's failure had been abrupt and disorderly and had posed "unacceptable risks to the American economy".

Nasty surprises

Has the lesson been learned? Of course not. Only a year after LTCM went under, the huge California Public Employees' Retirement System won the go-ahead from its board to invest up to $11bn - or a quarter - of the state pension fund's port folio in hedge funds. The FSA recently cited a J P Morgan survey which estimated that UK pension funds had allocated 4.8 per cent of their portfolios to hedge funds at the end of 2004, more than double the figure the previous year. Railpen, the UK railway pension fund, has invested £600m of its assets in a hedge-fund partnership, and Sainsbury's pension scheme has trebled its exposure to hedge funds.

So an increasing amount of ordinary people's money is available for use at the global gambling table. But how much could be at risk? We just don't know - and that means there is scope for any number of nasty surprises.

Even worse, as the regulators have admitted, they don't really understand this industry well enough to be able to deal with it. In June, the hedge-fund industry held a jolly at Knebworth, dubbed Hedgestock. Look at the titles of just two of the discussions: "'I can't believe it's not Beta' - Simple Beta, Complex Beta, Virgin Beta, and ABS factors - any Alpha left to spread around?"; and "'Incubator Alligator?' - sowing seeds, but do they stay for a cigarette?". One feels some sympathy for the Fed and the FSA.

In a world where, increasingly, we have only to twitch to be regulated it is pretty noteworthy that hedge funds are the exception. Either, in some way that we aren't clever enough to understand, they are of overwhelming importance to our collective well-being; or the regulators have in effect colluded with the wild frontiers of modern-day finance. They continually argue that hedge funds, by taking risks others won't, play a useful role in oiling the wheels of global markets.

Now, even they are alarmed that a hedge-fund-triggered meltdown is coming. Yet their efforts to move in on the hedge funds have been half-hearted at best, the habit of laissez- faire hard to shake off. Even when a serious regulatory effort has been attempted, it has been outmanoeuvred. In February America's Securities and Exchange Commission finally started requiring hedge-fund managers both within the United States and outside to register if they have more than 14 US-based investors and $30m or more in assets. In June the rule was thrown out by the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, on the grounds that it was "arbitrary" and didn't make a compelling case. Two senior Democratic senators are now trying to legislate to reverse that ruling.

Surely the Europeans, the last bastions against Anglo-Saxon free-market mania, will ride to the rescue. Well, not exactly. The EU internal market and services commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, recently ruled out new rules to regulate hedge funds, saying that they played a crucial role in putting the "fear of God" into company boards, to the benefit of all. A group set up to study hedge funds for the European Commission recently argued that the European industry was adequately regulated and needed to be protected from onerous new rules threatened from the United States.

So, hedge funds are increasingly looking to relocate from the US to Europe. It looks as if the wanton boys of the Dan gerous Sports Club will be allowed to carry on playing their virtual-reality money games - even closer to us poor sods trying to earn our livings.

Inside the hedge: a day in the life
by Al Fahunter

6.45am: I am in front of my multiple screens at our St James's-based offices after a Tube ride from north London, beating the rush hour and allowing me to read up on news and concentrate on the ordre du jour.

By 8am, when all European markets open, the phones stop ringing for about 45 minutes. This is when we decide what we'll do for the morning, trading-wise, until the US market opens or corporate and economic data feeds through. Today's story is that AMD is bidding for ATI in the US - great news if you hold European semiconductor stocks in Europe and Asia like me. The bad news is that Bank of Cyprus has pulled its counterbid for Emporiki Bank after a thumbs-down from Central Bank of Cyprus. I'd been building a position in Emporiki in the hope that Crédit Agricole would trump the Cypriots. I'm now looking at a €2 loss per share.

I concentrate on special situations in stocks and bonds - easily translated into M&A investments and corporate events, which have performed very well this year. I buy shares in the bid target and, depending on the bid structure, hedge my position by selling other shares or bonds - allowing me to leverage (ie, borrow) against the assets I manage. This usually inflates the bet two to three times the size of my investment, allowing me to reduce the risk and accentuate the gains.

My diary has calmed down for the summer, but the corporate reporting season is about to kick off: some companies are still vying for my votes or funds, so lunch is sushi at the desk while I catch up on the trading update. Like the 8am opening in Europe, the US opening at 2.30pm is followed by a period of tranquillity. Markets in Europe close at 4.30pm and we have the end-of-day auctions. I still have to attend a meeting and get a round-up from our traders. The gym beckons around 7pm; I have a quick drink with a broker at Just St James to catch up on gossip. Having missed Arki Busson's charity evening, which raised £18m in one night in June (it clashed with World Cup trips to Germany), I was dying to know who bid for the yoga session with Sting. If only I hadn't had to listen to the glowing praise for Arsenal's new stadium from one of my Arsenal-supporting brokers who attended the Dennis Bergkamp testimonial last Saturday, I could have called it a good day.

Al Fahunter is a pseudonym

Hedge funds by numbers

$1.5trn Total amount of money managed by hedge funds worldwide

9,000 Estimated number of hedge funds today

$250bn Estimated value of the Asian hedge-fund industry by 2010

$750,000 Amount that GLG Partners was fined for alleged insider trading by its star hedge-fund manager, Philippe Jabre

Research by Daniel Trilling

Terror and Science

2006-08-26T22:36:00.000+01:00

If he's still alive (properly alive, as opposed to being kept alive like Ingsoc kept Immanuel Goldstein alive) I wonder what Whitney Houston fan Osama is thinking about the fact that every time someone makes the least commotion on a transatlantic flight these days a couple of fighter planes are sent up? I bet he's thanking Allah that didn't happen on September 11th 2001 over the North East United States...

It seems that most people here have no faith in the Government telling the truth, or anything like the truth, about The War Against Terror any more. To quote John Arbuthnot from 1735 "All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies", and it seems New Labour has reached the point when it can dig that hole no more.

It seems the same is true in the USA. The piece below by Ted Rall (via Lew Rockwell's blog) draws on an article by The Register which basically suggests that the "plotters" would have had to take over the toilets on the plane for a suspiciously long time for the liquid explosives that were supposed to be at the heart of the "plot" to work...

Americans Shrug at Phony Binary Explosives Threat

LOS ANGELES--Attention, citizens of the national community: stay tuned for a HomeSec alert! A fiendish plot has been uncovered! Terrorists loyal to the sinister forces of Eastasia have been apprehended! It is another glorious victory for the homeland! All hail Oceania!

It was hard not to suffer a 1984 flashback on August 10th, when UK authorities and their rhetorical American partners claimed to have rounded up more than two dozen British Muslims accused of--or so they claimed--participation in an elaborate plot to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." According to Britain's national Crown Prosecution Service the suspects planned "to smuggle the component parts of improvised explosive devices onto aircraft and assemble and detonate them on board" as many as ten passenger jets bound for the United States from England.

The airline industry, long teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe, could easily be shoved headlong into oblivion as the result of harsh new security restrictions. Travelers are being asked to arrive at the airport three hours before their scheduled departure times because of longer lines at shortstaffed security checkpoints. All liquids and gels--staple components of cosmetics, toothpaste, medicine and other toiletries--have been banned from carry-on baggage, adding at least another hour to the trips of carry-on-only passengers who previously never had to wait for their belongings to disgorge upon the baggage carousel.

Industry analysts say travelers aren't afraid of being blown up by terrorists. They're right. Hundreds of millions of people fly each year; very few end up shredded among the wreckage of an office tower. But passengers are afraid. They fear that the government's draconian security measures will make them miss their flights. That real and wholly justifiable fear has already cut ticket sales by as much as 20 percent.

A mere two days after British officials announced that they had foiled the dastardly Islamofascists terror plot, and the Bush Administration crowed that this news somehow proved that they had once again kept us safe, Americans weren't fazed in the least. People polled by Newsweek said, 54 to 26 percent, they still didn't want to give up their carry-on bags. As the Republican Party continued its suicidal stay-the-course mantra into the November midterm elections, the sound of a Great National Shrug greeted the latest triumphalist shrieks from America's telescreens.

Could it be, despite our leaders' long-established record of always telling us the truth no matter what, that we can't be sure there was a plot at all? Or that, if there was a plot, it wasn't viable--certainly not nearly enough to justify the risk to the airline industry or hassling hundreds of millions of travelers?

According to the respected and irreverent British technology publication The Register, the plot--if it existed--was a joke. Smuggling the component parts of triacetone triperoxide (TATP)--the liquid explosive we've been told was the object of the wannabe jihadis' vengeance fantasies--and successfully mixing them into a brew powerful enough to bring down a plane would require skills far beyond the capabilities of, well, anyone.

"First," wrote The Register, "you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water...Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drink bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.

"It's best to fly first class and order champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate...Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide/acetone mixture into the ice water bath (champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

"After a few hours--assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities--you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two."

The conclusion is clear: "Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the lavatory, then we've passed from the realm of action blockbusters to that of situation comedy."

The "plot," or at least the prosecution thereof, is already unraveling. Two "terrorists" have been released. Of the remaining 23, only 11 have been charged. Of those charged, only eight face charges related to the "plot."

Indeed, perhaps the technology which is supposed to make us safer in T.W.A.T. is more dangerous than anything wannabe loverboys of 72 virgins could ever dream up. For example, electronic passports. The piece below (hat-tip to no2id) comes from mobile security firm Flexisis:

In order to increase the security of United States travel documents, the Government has developed a new ‘electronic passport’ system. This new passport system, slated for deployment in October 2006, will contain RFID tags: chips that will wirelessly send passport and biometric information to an inquiring RFID reader. Through extensive research and real world experimentation, Flexilis has discovered a significant issue in the State Department’s proposed solution. This issue, if not immediately addressed, could put American passport holders at increased risk while traveling abroad for the ten year lifetime of the passport deployment.

RFID e-Passport Vulnerability

Starting October 2006, new U.S. passports will contain RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips which hold an individual’s picture and personal information. These chips can be “read” wirelessly from a distance of several feet. In order to prevent thieves from stealing sensitive personal data, the State Department has included several security measures in the proposed passport standard.
Reading a passport’s RFID chip requires a password generated by scanning the machine readable data on the inside front cover. Additionally, a small shield in the front cover is supposed to only allow wireless passport reading when the booklet is open.
The current system prevents attackers from accessing the onboard RFID tag when a passport is fully closed; however, when in a pocket, purse, or briefcase, a passport has a very high probability of being slightly open. Our research has shown that, even when open only a fraction of an inch, the current proposed passport will fail to prevent unwanted RFID communications.

Although the current shield is often ineffective, the chip’s password prevents personal information from being unknowingly disclosed; however, the simple ability for an attacker to know that someone is carrying a passport (and where he or she is carrying it) is a dangerous security breach.

Additionally, it may be possible to determine the nationality of a passport holder by “fingerprinting” the characteristics inherent in each country’s RFID chips. Taken to a logical extreme, this security vulnerability could make it possible for terrorists to craft explosives that detonate only when someone from the U.S. is nearby.

A better solution utilizes a dual cover shield and a specifically designed RFID tag assembly which is able to shield the passport until it is significantly open, not just a fraction of an inch. Thus, even when your passport is slightly open in your pocket, purse, or briefcase, you are protected from malicious data-theft, and (in a pessimistic future) RFID-equipped terrorists.

Even though no personal information is disclosed due to the failure of the current shielding system, such a breach of security has a real potential for people to be hurt, and, given the time until implementation, has a real potential to be corrected with a better solution.

So e-passports may make Americans more vulnerable to terror attacks. Knowing that it's American technology, it'll probably be taken up by our lot here with gusto ("Hey, look, you know, it truly is the People's Passport...").

Stuff on Latin America

2006-08-26T21:19:00.000+01:00

What does one make of Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuala? He seems to get up the nose of the Bush Admin, and he seems pretty popular with the poor of his country.Of course, it hardly goes without saying that much of the hostility of the Bush Admin and its cheerleaders towards Chavez is to do with the fact that Venezuala has a lot of oil.

However, being the non-interventionist Little Englander that I am, I wouldn't support sending troops to support him, just as I wouldn't help the Bush Admin to overthrow him. If people want to volunteer in a private capacity to take part in either, go ahead, put your gun where your mouth (or pen, or keyboard) is, but if it all ends in tears and you lose your passport somewhere in downtown Caracas, you shouldn't expect your local embassy to help you out.

However, as the US is so militarily stretched now, it can't send the Marines and 82nd Airborne Division over to Caracas to sort the upstart out. Support a botched coup d'etat, as happened in 2002, seems to be about the size of it at the moment. Plus I guess the US military top brass probably have no idea if Hispanic American soldiers would be prepared to shoot their fellow Latinos. The same doubts about the loyalty of US troops firing on their own "kith and kin" probably influences US planning vis-a-vis Mexico at the moment.

I suppose the US will have to stick to projecting its "soft power" in Latin America, until further notice (or bring back the draft). For instance, US-backed "people power" will be supported. Any other sort of "people power" will have to be ignored if at all possible, as the situation in Mexico at the moment shows.

'People power' is a global brand owned by America:The US and the western media back protests over controversial elections when it suits them, but are silent over those in Mexico
Mark Almond, The Guardian, Tuesday August 15, 2006

A couple of years ago television, radio and print media in the west just couldn't get enough of "people power". In quick succession, from Georgia's rose revolution in November 2003, via Ukraine's orange revolution a year later, to the tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the cedar revolution in Lebanon, 24-hour news channels kept us up to date with democracy on a roll.

Triggered by allegations of election fraud, the dominoes toppled. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was happy with the trend: "They're doing it in many different corners of the world, places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon ... And so this is a hopeful time."

But when a million Mexicans try to jump on the people-power bandwagon, crying foul about the July 2 presidential elections, when protesters stage a vigil in the centre of the capital that continues to this day, they meet a deafening silence in the global media. Despite Mexico's long tradition of electoral fraud and polls suggesting that Andrés Manuel López Obrador - a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) - was ahead, the media accepted the wafer-thin majority gained by the ruling party nominee, Harvard graduate Felipe Calderón.
Although Mexico's election authorities rejected López Obrador's demand for all 42m ballots to be recounted, the partial recount of 9% indicated numerous irregularities. But no echo of indignation has wafted to the streets of Mexico City from western capitals.

Maybe Israel's intervention in Lebanon grabbed all the attention and required every hack and videophone. Back in 2004 CNN and the BBC were perfectly able to cover the battle for Falluja and the orange revolution in the same bulletins. Today, however, even a news junkie like me cannot remember a mainstream BBC bulletin live from among the massive crowds in Mexico City. Faced by CNN's indifference to the growing crisis in Mexico, only a retread of an old saying will do: "Pity poor Mexico, so far from Israel, so close to the United States."

Castro's failing health gets more airtime than the constitutional crisis gripping America's southern neighbour, which is one of its major oil suppliers. Apparently, crowds of protesters squatting in Mexico City for weeks protesting against alleged vote-rigging don't make a good news story. Occasionally commentators who celebrated Ukrainians blocking the main thoroughfares of Kiev condescend to jeer at Mexico's sore losers and complain that businessmen are missing deadlines because dead-enders with nothing better to do are holding up the traffic. Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko was decisive when he declared himself president, but isn't López Obrador a demagogue for doing the same?

The colour-coded revolutionaries of the former Soviet Union had a pro-western agenda - such as bringing Georgia and Ukraine into Nato and the EU - but in Latin America radicals question the wisdom of membership of US-led bodies such as Nafta and the WTO. The crude truth is that Washington cannot afford to let Mexico's vast oil reserves fall into hands of a president even half as radical as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

But didn't the western observers certify the Mexican polls as "fair", while they condemned the Ukrainian elections? True, but election observers are not objective scientists. The EU relies on politicians, not automatons, to evaluate polls. Take the head of its observer mission, the MEP José Ignacio Salafranca: as a Spanish speaker in Mexico, Salafranca had a huge advantage over many of the MEPs in Ukraine who draped themselves in orange even while en mission - but he is hardly neutral. His rightwing Popular party is an ally of Calderón's Pan party, which is in power in Mexico. Calderón was immediately congratulated by Salafranca's colleague Antonio López-Istúriz on the "great news".

The days of leftwing fraternalism may be over, but the globalist right has its own network, linking the Spanish conservatives, American Republicans and Calderón's Pan party - and they provided the key observer. To paraphrase Stalin: "It doesn't matter who votes, it matters who observes the vote."

Salafranca has a track record as an election observer. In Lebanon's general elections in 2005 he had no problem with the pro-western faction sweeping the board around Beirut with fewer than a quarter of voters taking part and nine of its seats gained without even a token alternative candidate. "It is a feast of democracy," he declared. His mood changed when the democratic banquet moved to areas dominated by Hizbullah or the Christian maverick General Aoun. Suddenly, "vote-buying" and the need for "fundamental reform" popped up in the EU observation reports.

Unanimity on the scale seen across Lebanon suggests that the cedar revolution - despite the hype - did nothing to promote real democratic pluralism. Hizbullah's hold on the south is the most controversial aspect of the sectarian segmentation of Lebanese society, but everywhere local bosses dominate their fiefdoms as before. Similarly, more scepticism about Ukraine's revolution would have left people better informed than the orange boosterism that passed for commentary 18 months ago.

But Mexico is different because it is so under-reported. The cruel reality is that "people power" has become a global brand. But like so many global brands it is owned by Americans. Mexicans and any other "populists" who try to copy it should beware that they're infringing a copyright. No matter how many protesters swarm through Mexico City or how long they protest, it is George Bush and co who decide which people truly represent The People. People power turns out to be about politics, not arithmetic.

Mark Almond is a history lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford
mpalmond@aol.com

Of course, the USA has a lot of blood on its hands in Latin America. If the Soviet Union had treated the populations of its "sphere of influence" in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 the same way the United States had treated & Latin America during the Twentieth Century, the Americans would have nuked Moscow years ago. Most of the military juntas that ruled much of Latin America for much of the Twentieth Century had as much popular legitimacy as the puppet Communist Parties that ruled the Eastern Bloc until the end of the 1980s. If Lech Walesa had been a Guatemalan independent trade unionist activist and Vaclav Havel an El Salvadorean dissident intellectual in the early 1980s they would have soon ended up in ditches courtesy of the local death squads.

It goes without saying that keeping of control of a country in one's "sphere of influence" doesn't have to be crude and excessively violent. The Soviets never really understood that. Sending troops (either Soviet or local) onto the streets was often the first option when the locals got angry in the Eastern Bloc, and the lack of viable alternative means of maintaining their dominance was one of the reasons the Soviets lost control of their "allies" in 1989.(BTW I have a feeling the Communist nomenclaturas in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc would still be in power today if they had established two ruling parties who fought elections against each other mostly on matters of presentation and style and occasionally swopping the positions of government and opposition, defusing most discontent in wider society in the process. Having two parties representing different wings of the ruling class seems to keep things under control in the USA. To quote the old joke: the USA is a one party system, but being the USA, there's two of them). If only the Soviets had men like John Perkins twenty years back, the CPSU would still be in charge and the Warsaw Pact would be working just fine...

A hit man repents: John Perkins didn't wield a gun - he wasn't even a paid-up CIA agent - but he did have nefarious ways of making countries around the world bend to the will of the US. Until his conscience got the better of him and he looked for other ways to change the world
Gary Younge,The Guardian, Saturday January 28, 2006

On November 24 2002, Lucio Gutierrez swept to power in Ecuador's presidential election. It was a momentous victory for the populist, leftwing leader who had pledged support for the poor indigenous Indians in a country where 60% live in poverty.

The way John Perkins tells it, within a week Gutierrez had a visitor. "An economic hit man walked into his office and said, 'Congratulations, Mr President, I just want you to know that over here I've got a couple of hundred million dollars for you and your family if you cooperate with your Uncle Sam and our oil companies. And over here I have a man with a gun in his hand and a bullet with your name on it.'"

Within two months of his election, Gutierrez had apparently made his choice. Implementing a swingeing austerity programme that attacked the very livelihoods of the people who elected him, he raised fuel prices by more than 35% and froze public sector workers' salaries for a year.

"It's a particularly tough position to be in," admits Perkins. "If you're really conscientious, you're probably going to compromise. You're going to say, 'I've got to stay in office. I can do better than anyone else, but somehow I've got to appease these people.' And the whole time that economic hit man is in your office he's saying, 'Remember Noriega, remember Allende, remember Lumumba. Remember, remember, remember.' There's a long list of guys who did not go along and were either overthrown or assassinated ... They may say it more subtly, but the message is very clear."

Two years later, a huge popular uprising forced Gutierrez from office. Now an interim government awaits elections for a new leader. Within a few days of that election, says Perkins, another "economic hit man" will return with another ultimatum.

With his tales of hit men, assassinations and coups, Perkins, now 60, sounds as if he has just slipped off a grassy knoll and landed on the deck of his waterfront home in West Palm Beach, Florida. But for him this is no conspiracy theory. The hit men he refers to are not metaphorical. "I mean literally and physically they will walk into your office," he tells me. And he should know - for a decade, Perkins was one of them.

In 1972 Perkins went to see the then dictator of Panama, General Omar Torrijos. Torrijos was a nationalist who was eager to wrest control of the Panama Canal from the US. Perkins went in to read him the riot act and came out with what sounded like an agreement. Some years later, Torrijos started talking to the Japanese about building a larger, sea-level canal for Panama that would have undermined American influence and corporate interests in the area. One night in 1981 Torrijos died when his Twin Otter aircraft crashed under mysterious circumstances. Perkins is convinced he was killed by US interests who placed a bomb on the plane. Had he lived, Perkins writes in his book, Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, "He would have served as a role model for a generation of leaders in the Americas, Africa and Asia - something the CIA, the NSA [National Security Agency] and the EHMs [economic hit men] could not allow."

Economic hit men resort to such heavy-handed tactics, says Perkins, only when all other means of leverage have failed. The rest of the time they would employ a mixture of bribery, sex, flattery, prostitution, distortion, extortion, abduction and invasion to get their own way. "Sex was a very common tool used by economic hit men," Perkins says. "It was not uncommon for us to seduce wives of oil company executives because that was a way of gaining information and learning things about their husbands."

If the threats of the economic hit men don't persuade, the "jackals" will come in to make good on them. The jackals, says Perkins, are the CIA-sanctioned heavy mob who foment coups and revolutions, murder, abduction and assassination. And when the jackals fail, as was the case in Iraq, then the military goes in.

Economic hit men, Perkins says, work entirely separately but completely in concert with the state. Perkins never once reported to a US government agency - but he is in little doubt that the US government always knew and approved of what he was doing. His task, he says, was to ensure that US business interests came out on top, regardless of who won an election, and that the American wealthy were further enriched, regardless of who was impoverished as a result.

In his role as an analyst for the international consulting firm Main, Perkins worked for what he calls the "corporatocracy" - global big business. His first task was to persuade foreign governments to take large loans for huge engineering and construction projects conducted by US companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel. To achieve this, Perkins produced reports that would vastly exaggerate the benefit such projects would bring to the nation's economic development, thereby making it vulnerable.

Then, he writes, "I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans so that they would be for ever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favours, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources."

For all of this, Perkins earned a substantial wage and through his 20s and 30s lived large on a lavish expense account. Based in Boston, his work took him to, among other places, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Iran, Colombia.

But misgivings that he harboured from the outset grew with his salary. At 36, Perkins was about to be made the youngest partner in Main's history - a promotion that would have made him a millionaire by the age of 40. Fearing the seductive lure of his new position, he decided he had to leave.

He says it was like having an angel and a devil sitting on each shoulder and calling him in different directions. "I had both these guys shouting at me and I could turn either way I wanted. I couldn't turn away from the good conscience. It kept whispering in my ear. But I could live according to the bad conscience because everybody around me was."

The devil kept waving his wallet, but gradually Perkins retreated. He quit Main in 1980, although for several years after he could not resist continuing to accept freelance consulting jobs.

His recruitment into the world of economic hit men sounds like a scene from a James Bond movie. The story began with him as a young man looking for information about Kuwait in a Boston library shortly after he had started working for Main. An attractive, older woman named Claudine, whom he had never seen before, sat opposite him and slid over a book with the precise information he was looking for and her business card. "I've been asked to help in your training," she said.

Perkins, who was married at the time, started an affair with Claudine, who simultaneously inveigled him into the world of economic hit men. "At the time I thought she really cared so deeply for me," says Perkins. "But, of course, now I see it was part of her job."

A few years earlier, he had sought deferment of going to fight in Vietnam by applying for a job at the National Security Agency. After several interviews and a day of psychological profiling, he was offered a job to train as a spy. He never took the job in the end, joining the peace corps instead, but he is convinced that the results of his NSA tests identified him as having the ideal insecurities to be inducted as an economic hit man. Raised by Calvinist parents in an environment as emotionally cold as a New England winter, his vulnerability was not difficult to find. Claudine was there to finish off the job. "She was amazingly effective at what she did and she learned from my NSA tests that I had the three big weaknesses of modern culture - that is, the weakness for money, power and sex - and she exploited all of them. In many respects, she appealed to all my fantasies. And she started by giving me the sexual fantasy."

Her induction speech was melodramatic and definitive. "You're not alone," she told him. "We're a rare breed in a dirty business. No one can know about your involvement - not even your wife. I'll be very frank with you, teach you all I can during the next weeks, then you'll have to choose. Your decision is final. Once you're in, you're in for life."

Claudine disappeared almost as mysteriously as she appeared, leaving Perkins to make his wildly extravagant forecasts designed to corrupt and bankrupt developing nations. He never needed Big Brother or Sister, or any more instructions, after that. He knew the template he had to work to and, so long as he fulfilled the task, everyone was happy and he was handsomely rewarded.

"I wasn't making bucketloads of money," he says. "For many of those years I was making a decent salary, but it certainly wasn't what lawyers were making. But I had phenomenal expense accounts. I was living like a king. I was travelling first class, best hotels, best food, women always there. I could throw money around, but my salary wasn't that great."

He was fully aware of the consequences of his actions. "I knew that building electric power plants probably would increase the gross national product in a country, even if not by as much as I was predicting, but I also knew that it wouldn't help the majority of poor people in these countries because they didn't even have a light bulb. It doesn't matter what the hell GNP does in these countries, because it's not going to help the poor people. So I knew the promise wasn't true."

But Perkins carried on anyway. His conscience piqued him, but with all the positive reinforcement around him, it couldn't quite stop him in his tracks. "There is a great line in the new Harry Potter movie where he says we can do the right thing or the easy thing. And I could do the easy thing for me because it was lucrative and enjoyable... I was being invited to speak at Harvard and other universities around the world on these subjects. I was being patted on the back by Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank. I could convince myself that I was doing a good thing."

But morality would eventually trump venality. Damascene moments are rare in real life. David Brock, the former rightwing muckracker who made a career trashing the Clintons and Anita Hill, and later repented, wrote: "As a young zealot, I disciplined myself to ignore the soft tug of my own conscience and see only what I was supposed to see." And so it was with Perkins. But it was less of a blinding flash of light than an evolutionary process that would eventually turn him inside out - among other things, it sounds as though he just got bored and started growing up.

"I was burned out and I really wanted to start a new life," he says. "There had been a lot of women, but that had also cost me a marriage. I had found a new woman [his current wife] and I was very fond of her. And I was no longer going to live this life of travelling and big expense accounts. I was spending all this time in the office, deciding who gets raises and who sits in the window seat. I had become a top-level manager."

None the less, leaving was an "awful wrench" which left him in a daze. "I spent the next couple of weeks going down to the Quincy market in Boston and I would sit there on one of the benches reading Shakespeare. I was lost and didn't know what to do with myself."

He was rescued from his disorientation by a call from Main. A client had said they would sign up for some work only if he were leading the team. "I jumped and then, as I'm falling through midair thinking, 'Holy shit, what have I done?' a trampoline appears at the bottom and it's my own company again. That got me back into it again. Not exactly back in the game again. Not doing true EHM stuff. Not building empire. But back on the circuit working for corporate America."

It was during this period that Perkins founded an alternative energy company, Independent Power Systems. He remarried and moved to West Palm Beach, on Florida's hurricane-prone coastline, where he will interrupt his descriptions of coups and assassinations to catch the cry of an osprey. The energy project lasted 10 years, until 1990, when he sold his company and turned his attention to working with indigenous Indians throughout the Americas and on protecting the environment. He wrote five books, about indigenous cultures, shamanism, ecology and sustainability. The front page of his website reads, "John Perkins: Dedicated to changing the world."

By then he had become active, if not an activist, in antiglobalisation campaigns. He believes the protests that target the World Trade Organisation meetings and other showcase events of international capital, such as the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, have a big impact. The guardians of global capital are powerful, he says, but they are also mortal and emotionally vulnerable.

"Corporate executives are fear-driven," he says. "They are afraid of many things. One of them is competition. One of them is not making enough money. One of them is not making as much money as somebody else. They're fearful. They're fearful of their board of directors, they're fearful of the next quarterly report, the bottom line, the price of stock. They live in constant fear of what tomorrow is going to bring. That includes being fearful of anything that is critical of their corporations or their way of life. So I think that demonstrations have a very powerful effect. The corporate executives are going to stand there and tell you that isn't true. But once again they are operating from a place of fear. Many of the corporate heads today grew up during the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and they saw the power of that."

With the help of just one thinly veiled threat to keep his mouth shut, Perkins kept his vow of silence regarding the work of economic hit men until September 11 changed his mind.

"Back then, we never conceived of the US being attacked by someone who was living in a cave in Afghanistan," he says. "It was a lot more subtle a world in my time. We never worried about Che attacking us. We did worry about Cuba for a while, but that was the only thing we worried about. Now the stakes have changed radically... Bush is a great catalyst. I think he's pushing us to the edge."

It was then that Perkins wrote his memoir. The book was lionised by the alternative media on publication in the US and took off, despite being ignored by the mainstream media. "The New York Times and the other papers never mentioned the book except on their bestseller list," he says. Today, as he embarks on a book tour, he fears "a crazy man" could shoot him. "It's always a crazy man," he says. "John Kennedy was killed by a crazy man, Robert Kennedy was killed by a crazy man, Martin Luther King was killed by a crazy man. It's the crazy man who walks up to you after you've done a reading at a book store and sticks a gun in your gut and shoots you, and then he gets taken off some place and probably killed by somebody else or put in a straitjacket, and nobody really knows what really happened."

During the height of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower said that even when former communists confessed and turned on their former comrades, he could never quite trust them. They are "such liars and cheats", he told his attorney general, "that even when they apparently recant and later testify against someone else for his communist convictions, my first reaction is to believe that the accused person must be a patriot."

Perkins certainly has the zeal of a convert. "America has to change," he says. "The people of South America have sent a very strong message to America and to the world. Latin Americans have sent us a message. Middle Easterners have sent us a message. The voters of the US have to take the next step. It's up to us now. We must take this seriously. We're a nation of people that represents 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of the world's resources. Simple mathematics will tell you that you can't sell that model to China or Africa or India. But we don't want to hear that. Because if you're one of the 5%, then you're leading a damned good life. Even the poorest among us are leading a much better life than the much less poor in the rest of the world."

At times it seems as though Perkins is using the knowledge he acquired as an economic hit man to assuage the wrongs he committed in the past. "We outlawed slavery back in the 1860s in the US, but we've taken it abroad. If you were to tell an executive at Monsanto or Nike or Wal-Mart that we use slave labour, they would say, 'No, we're paying them $2 a day. That's better than anyone else around them.' But the truth is we always paid slaves. Slaves on the plantations got free room and board. That's more than what most of these people in these other countries are getting; $2 a day probably doesn't buy their families room and board."

At other times it sounds as if Perkins is overcompensating. "Terrorism is a very poor choice of words," he says referring to the terror attacks of September 11. "I am in no way condoning the actions of a man like Osama bin Laden, who killed thousands of mostly innocent people. But, on the other hand, a lot of the people around the world who, in one way or another, support what we call terrorist movements, are basically very nationalistic people. They are fighting for their families, they're fighting for survival, they're fighting for their lives."

Mostly innocent?

"I have no doubt that there were people in the World Trade Centre who weren't innocent and who were part of this whole [economic] process," he says. "But they were probably a very small proportion of the people who were there. Most of the people killed there were innocent."

His analysis of how the "corporatocracy" works hand in glove with the American government to keep profits high and developing nations in check is entirely plausible. Much of it, particularly in Central and South America, is more or less a matter of public record. It's the details - crazy men, a seductress with a dossier on him - that are hard to swallow.

It wouldn't be the first time a powerful country such as the US has gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve its power. Tales of German and Italian nationals (to name but a few) being picked up on the street by the CIA and whisked to third countries where they are tortured, interrogated and then released months later without charge, beggar belief. But they are true. On the other hand, this wouldn't be the first time a good argument and compelling story has been embellished for effect. There is simply no way of knowing.

Softly spoken and articulate, Perkins does not talk like a braggart. You don't get the impression that he's looking for the dramatic and self-serving response to a question.

"The overall scheme is not a conspiracy," he says. "The corporatocracy is ourselves - we make it happen - which, of course, is why most of us find it difficult to stand up and oppose it. Conspiracy means doing something illegal by definition. The overall scheme is not. But within the overall schemes there are plenty of conspiracies going on."

Unlike most men of his age and generation, corporate, anticorporate or otherwise, Perkins listens and engages. In short, he is very believable; it's his story that is challenging. One wonders, for example, why a newly elected leader would need an economic hit man to come into his office and read him the riot act when capitalism delivers a pretty clear warning all by itself. When it was obvious that the leftwing Workers Party leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would be elected president of Brazil in 2002, the invisible hand of the market picked him up by the scruff of the neck and slapped most of the socialism out of him. In the three months between his winning the vote and being sworn in, the currency had plummeted by 30%, $6bn in hot money had left the country and some agencies had given Brazil the highest debt risk ratings in the world.

"We are in government but not in power," said Lula's close aide, Dominican friar Frei Betto. "Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital."

In short, there was nothing an economic hit man could tell Lula that the Financial Times hadn't said already. Lula had choices, argues Perkins, pointing to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as an example of a South American leader from a smaller economy who weathered the storm. "Lula had a lot more control than he admits to having," he says. "The same thing happened to Lula that happened to Gutierrez - he was read the riot act. Today, they are a lot more crude."

And then there is the small question of why, given Claudine's warnings, he is alive to tell the tale?

"The word's out there," he says. "The book's sold 200,000 copies and is translated into 20 languages. What's getting rid of me going to do?"

In short, whatever the United States gets up to Latin America, democracy has as much to do with it as the USSR's behaviour in Eastern Europe had to do with establishing democracy there.

Random thoughts

2006-08-26T20:53:00.001+01:00

Yours' truly above, on Kitsilano beach, Vancouver, September 2004. As you can see, the photo is now proudly at the top of my blog (I still have no idea why the latest post jumps down after a couple of seconds- I hope it doesn't spoil your enjoyment (?!) of the blog).

Briefly on the subject of Vancouver, I bought the Time Out guide to Vancouver not so long back. I am a sucker for any tourist guides (whether in book or article form) of Vancouver- I guess it is a form of soft porn to me. Much of it wasn't too much of a surprise to me. However, the guide did slag off the press in Vancouver, which was a bit of a surprise to me, as I was quite impressed by the papers (both paid and free) when I have been over there. Compare London's Metro to Vancouver's version and there is no contest. Similarly Dose & 24, the other two Vancouver daily freesheets last time I was over, were impressive- I mean, one had a full page article on HL Mencken! I think Time Out's Guide was disparaging as it sees a potential nemesis. That is, a free weekly guide to London on the lines of the Georgia Straight. Time Out magazine is a good guide to entertainment possibilities in London (my advice to visitors to London is buy a copy of that if you want to know what is going on and where to go) but it is a few quid. If someone came up with a free equivalent a la the Georgia Straight for London it would hurt Time Out to say the least.

Anyway, enough such free paper talk. Lots to post, but I did come across this while wandering around the Net this morning. I enjoyed Pulp Fiction when it first came out, although now I do think Tarantino is a bit of a one-trick pony (you can't see him directing a version of War and Peace can you?). Anyway, you may want to test the quiz below...

You are the king of smooth -- enough said.

Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.

Crying wolf once too often?

2006-08-13T22:48:00.000+01:00

I'm thanking my lucky stars that I didn't decide to fly off somewhere in the past few days. Can you imagine having to stand in queues for hours at an airport and having to basically put everything you need for the cabin in a big plastic bag? I hope the airlines/airports made allowances for people having to put loads of stuff into their luggage & not charge for stuff put in the hold for being over the limit.

As for the "plot", in a way I hope that something is found because I think people are getting "war weary." After all the post-September 11th "alerts", arrests that led to those held in custody being released without charge, and the fact that most people know we were led into war with Iraq on the basis of a pack of lies, I think the next "alert" will not be taken seriously by the general public, if nothing turns up this time. It does not help that the Home Secretary John Reid rather resembles Buster Bloodvessel, lead singer of Bad Manners.

John

Buster

BNP= Bomb Nasty Palestinians?

2006-08-13T17:31:00.000+01:00

Well, it seems there will be a ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict in the next couple of days and about time too. Too many innocent people have died in both Israel and Lebanon. Furthermore, it seems that the propaganda war has been won by Hezbollah, as the Israelis have been unable to crush them quickly, as the Israelis thought they would.

Well, war brings together strange alliances and bedfellows, but I've found one on my own doorstep. My piece on the BNP led to a comment being posted by Storm Front, a (Neo-)Nazi website, listing all its latest articles. I had a quick gander, as I do with anyone who leaves a message with me (even all those tedious spambots), & I came across the headline BNP spokesman praises Israel, insults WNs [ie "White Nationalists"]. I had a look and it quoted from an article by the BNP's "independent legal advisor" Lee Barnes. The whole article by Mr. B can be read on the BNP website if you are inclined, but the Stormfront was frothing at the mouth at such bon mots as:

These so called ‘Nationalists’ that attack Israel at the whim of the media can also be found standing shoulder to shoulder with Far Left activists, Communists, the United Nations and various repugnant Islamic terrorist groups, and yet never seem to think about the logic of them doing so. Any ' alliance' that involves nationalists agreeing with the media and communists etc is based either on stupidity or a misunderstanding of the nature of the issue. They should start understanding the future, instead of navel gazing into the past....

For decades the lunatic fringe of the Nationalist movement has said that the media is controlled by the ‘Jews’ and Israel. The reports from the BBC, and the rest of the British media, are so anti-Israel and pro-Hezbollah that such a contention has been revealed to be total rubbish. The fact is that Israel have adopted one of the most restrained invasions in world history. They have leafleted the areas where they are about to strike before they hit those targets. Thats not something NATO did in Serbia when it bombed the Serbs to assist the Kosovan Muslims in their campaign of ethnic cleansing. When they bombed the trains and TV station they did not warn the public and the media beforehand....

As a Nationalist I can say that I support Israel 100% in their dispute with Hezbollah. In fact, I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood. The 21st Century is the Islamic Century. Unless we start to resist the threat of Islamic extremism then within 100 years the West will have become Eurabia....

Israel is the only living organic nationalist state on the planet. They live only as they still have the will to fight and wage war. The West is now a senile culture, it sleeps in dreams of its former glory whilst a new generation of barbarians is beseiging its gates. In its quest for gold it has ignored the real dangers it has created for us all.

I wonder what all those pro-Israelis in the media who denounce anyone opposed to anything Israel does as "anti-semitic" would make of a head honcho in the BNP supporting "Israel 100% in their dispute with Hezbollah"?

Another footnote from the BNP article is the Socialist Unity piece which declared Sean Gabb to be pro-BNP. This is cobblers (I should have said that in the post). I've read one of his books Dispatches From A Dying Country: Reflections on Modern England (2001), and some of his Libertarian Alliance pieces & he is a Libertarian Conservative, not some BNP stooge. Dr. Gabb is not my cup of tea politically 100% (quelle surprise!). However, he is interesting, & anyone opposed to the war in Iraq and say "Today, I feel a greater affinity in important respects with the followers of Noam Chomsky than with people like Kenneth Clarke and Tony Blair, who are supposed to stand between me and the Chomskyites" (Dispatches From A Dying Country, p.xiii) can't be all bad! He also has a website.

I thought I'd show this article below to show that Sean Gabb is not a stooge of Nick Griffin. It is also interesting on two other counts. First, it was published on the Lew Rockwell website. It proclaims itself pro-market, anti-state and anti-war and gives the Bushies a good verbal kicking. I try to ignore its anti-socialist diatribes on the grounds that being Americans, Lew Rockwellies use "socialism" as a swear word for anything they don't like. Second, Dr. Gabb predicts the next few years in British politics. I'm still convinced that the next General Election will probably lead to a Cameroonie/Lib Dem Orange Book/Disaffected Blairite "National Government" coalition who will "modernise" & "reform" us all to death, but a pure Cameron government is still a possibility, as is a Gordon Brown one. Anyway, here's Dr. Gabb's view of where we are going (and his thoughts on the BNP).

Mark Oaten, Rent Boys and the Secret Police: A View of How England Is Governed at the End of Its History by Sean Gabb, January 24, 2006

At a dinner party last Wednesday, I fell into conversation with a friend who is also a friend of Mark Oaten. He – for those of my readers who do not live in England or in the present – was at the time the home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrat Party, and was standing for the leadership of his party. I heard from my friend that Mr. Oaten's office had just been burgled. We passed an interesting ten minutes speculating on which of his rivals had commissioned the burglary, and what might have been found. We agreed on looking forward to Thursday morning for the newspaper reports.

Except for a paragraph in The Guardian, there were no newspaper reports of the burglary. The big news instead was that Mr. Oaten had withdrawn from the leadership contest. The lack of coverage of the burglary, together with concentration on its probable effect, suggested some involvement by the secret police. But why should it matter to them, I asked, who led the Liberal Democrat Party? And what was the nature of the dirt they had found in his office and used against him?

The second question was answered this morning by The News of the World. This revealed how Mr. Oaten had been consorting for some time with male prostitutes, and that these had on at least one occasion been paid to humiliate him with what the reporter described as "a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe." Bearing in mind what sexual acts do get routinely described, and even shown, in the British media nowadays, the mind reels at what Mr. Oaten must have been doing. Not surprisingly, he had already resigned from the Liberal Democrat front bench, and his political career is probably over.

I turn now to the first question. Why should the secret police take any interest in fixing the election to lead the Liberal Democrat Party? Why destroy Mr. Oaten? His views, after all, were about the closest of any of the candidates to those of the other party leaders. He would in no sense have promised any radical departure from the consensus. Yet he has been destroyed, and with a memorable brutality. Why?

My answer is that Mr. Oaten was destroyed because he was foolish enough to stand in the way of the latest stage in the reshaping of our politics. He fell victim to a conspiracy.

I grant – I have no factual evidence for what I am about to say. No one has taken me aside and whispered into my ear, or given me classified documents. Aside from having heard about the burglary last week, I have no more information than anyone else. This being said, the facts as we have them do suggest a hidden cause. I could state the facts and reason back to this cause. However, I am not writing for some learned journal, and I find it more entertaining to assume the cause, and then show how it provides a scheme of explanation for the facts.

I assume that the ruling class of this country – or a significant group within it – has lost confidence in Tony Blair as Prime Minister, and in the Labour Party as a governing force. This, if true, is the main fact in our politics. Indeed, it has become the connecting thread for the whole present narrative of politics in this country.

Now, some of my friends – and one was with me at that dinner party of last Wednesday – believe that there is something called "The Blair Project," and that the content of this is determined by and connected with nothing more than the momentary electoral convenience of Mr. Blair. They laugh at me if I insist that there is any more significant connecting thread for events.

For all they laugh, they are wrong. It is possible to see, during the past 25 years in at least this country, a movement towards a new settlement in politics. This movement has continued regardless of who has occupied which office, and regardless of what party has won which election. It is clear that the ruling class – or that loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, and media and business people who derive wealth and power and status from an enlarged and active state – wants an end of liberal democracy. The desired new settlement is one in which those at the top or with the right connections can enjoy the most fabulous wealth and status, and in which their enjoyment of these can never again be challenged from below. We, the ordinary people, are to be stripped of our constitutional rights – no freedom of speech, no personal or financial privacy, no procedural safeguards in the criminal law. We are to be taxed and regulated to what counts in our own culture as the edge of the breadline. This is on the one hand to provide incomes for clients of the ruling class, and on the other to deprive us of the leisure that might allow us to understand our situation, and of the confidence that might allow us to challenge it. In any event, every organ of the ruling class is at work on promoting ideologies of boundless submission to the new settlement.

At the same time, structures of accountability that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries are to be deactivated. Their forms will continue. There will be assemblies at Westminster. But these will not be sovereign assemblies with the formal authority of life and death over us all. That authority will have been passed to various unelected and transnational agencies. And so far as the Westminster assemblies will remain important, our votes will have little effect on what they enact.

We are passing into the sort of world that existed in much of Europe before the French Revolution – a world of diverse and conflicting sources of authority, all equally unaccountable. The great simplification of authority that happened in Europe after 1789, and that had happened over two centuries earlier in England, was a product of nationalism; and simplification was followed by accountability and then by liberalism. This sort of reaction is in future to be made impossible by promoting movements of people so that nations in the old sense disappear, and are replaced by patchworks of nationalities more suspicious of each other than of any ruling class.

The progress of this counter-Enlightenment can be seen in the statute book – from the removal of the unanimity rule in jury trials in the Criminal Justice Act 1967, to the European Communities Act 1972, to the subsequent Criminal Justice Acts, to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, to the Civil Contingencies Act and the Terrorism Act 2005. In these, we have a clear movement towards despotism. This movement did not begin in 1997. The Election of the Blair Government marked no change of direction – but only of pace. The policies of state we have at present have not been set because they suit the electoral convenience of Tony Blair. Mr. Blair became Prime Minister because he seemed at the time best suited to carry forward policies of state set by others.

But his usefulness is at an end. He is no longer wanted by those who matter, and his party is no longer wanted.

Therefore, the Conservative Party has been brought back from the dead. It has been given a leader who has accepted almost everything done by Labour since 1997, and whose objections are confined to those areas within which the ruling class is itself divided. Because of what he is – or of what he says and does – Mr. Cameron has been cried up by our controlled media as a man of outstanding charm and vision. In contrast, the Government is every day reviled in the media for some new dereliction – alleged "paedophiles" allowed to teach in schools, or complicity in the use of torture by the Americans, for example – that would once have been discussed in terms too restrained to cause instability.

My advice to anyone who likes to gamble is to bet on a Conservative victory at the next election. Do not suppose that this will be a government of conservatives. Just as the Labour victory in 1997 caused no break in continuity, so the replacement of Labour will in turn change nothing fundamental. But there is to be a change of faces at the top.

All that stands in the way of a Conservative revival is the effect on our electoral system of the Liberal Democrat Party. This has benefited since 1997 from the oblivion to which the ruling class and its media condemned the Conservatives. It holds several score seats taken from the Conservatives, and splits the anti-Labour vote in scores of other seats.

Therefore, Charles Kennedy was forced earlier this month to resign as Liberal Democrat leader. The cover story was that he was a drunkard and had been useless in his position, and that the challenge came from Menzies Campbell. So far as I can tell, he had been pretty effective – more so than most party leaders. As for Mr. Campbell – let us, by the way, stop recognising the titles handed round within the ruling class: now that our Constitution is no longer liberal or democratic, its honours are to be regarded again as mere feudalistic baubles – I doubt he is bright enough to tie his own shoe laces. Mr. Kennedy was forced out because he was too effective as party leader for the Conservatives to recover. He was threatened with a personal destruction so horrible that he resigned on the spot and was glad to call himself a drunk in public. Mr. Campbell was then told to get ready to preside over the electoral collapse of his party.

Then Mark Oaten announced he would run for the leadership. Given his public views, he might have thought himself the preferred candidate of the ruling class. He misread the situation. He was probably warned, in the usual elliptical way, that he should withdraw from the contest. He did so too late. The reporters had already been briefed, and the front pages cleared. By then, he had been too much of an irritant, or was too unimportant, to save.

The nature of his sexual tastes had no bearing on the decision to break him. I have never met a Member of Parliament who was not obviously into drink or bribes or unconventional sex. The secret police make sure that no one who cannot at the right moment be pressured into conformity will come close to being elected to Parliament.

Nor have the Liberal Democrats been the only minor party targetted for destruction. The UK Independence Party is dead as an electoral force. There is a limit to how much infighting a political party can survive. UKIP has been torn apart by agents of entry and of provocation, and is headed for collapse. Because of its authoritarian structure, the British National Party is less open to such attacks. Therefore, its leader has been put on trial for political offences that carry a maximum sentence of seven years. Since I believe Mr. Griffin is himself an agent of the secret police who has gone beyond his brief, I suspect the present trial in Leeds will end in a compromise. Do not expect the BNP to continue offering in future the sort of challenge to the new settlement in our politics it seemed until recently on the verge of offering.

So, lucky Mr. Cameron. All he has to do now is ensure the ruling class remains disenchanted with the present Government, and hope that enough of the electorate fails to see what is being done to the country and will continue to legitimise a settlement that in its sordid authoritarianism taints the preceding thousand years of English history.

But if what is happening in England now is distressing and even shameful, it is also compulsively interesting.

BTW, hasn't the whole Tommy Sheridan libel trial left the Scottish Socialist Party shattered almost beyond repair?

I disagree with Dr. Gabb on is his belief that Mrs. Thatcher's economic "reforms" did great good for the country. As far as I'm concerned she was a "useful idiot" (to use Lenin's phrase) of the City and transnational corporations, left us trailing the USA, selling us out bigtime to the EU (despite wrapping herself in the Union Jack), broke the back of our manufacturing industry, wrecked our coal industry and urinated North Sea Oil up the wall. Despite this, Dr. Gabb is not a "useful idiot" of corporate capitalism as this piece from Kevin Carson's website demonstrates:

Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Sean Gabb Gives the Corporatists Nine Kinds of Free Market Hell

From the latest Free Life Commentary. Sean Gabb recently spoke at a debate on "Free Trade vs. Fair Trade" hosted by Oxfam and Christian Aid. Although he expressed some doubts after the fact about his effectiveness (he is not, he said, a good speaker given such time constraints), Sean packed quite a bit of rhetorical force into his short speech. The ASI's Alex Singleton (now of the Globalization Institute) used the first half of the free trade side's time to give a speech that, from Sean's summary, sounds to me pretty much like what you'd expect from that quarter (although that's my characterization, and mine alone). Sean, using the other half of the time alloted to his side, proceeded to preach the old-time free trade religion of Cobden and Bright, and to damn the transnational corporatists to hell. Among my favorite parts:

If you think that I came here tonight to defend multinational corporations and the international government institutions, you have chosen the wrong person. These are dishonest. They are corrupt. They are incompetent. They have blood on their hands.

But do not suppose for a moment that the world trading order as it actually exists is liberal or more than incidentally connected with free markets. A free market is a place where individuals and groups of individuals come together to transact voluntary exchanges without any backing of government force. To call the actually existing order liberal – or “neo-liberal” – is as taxonomically accurate as calling the old Soviet Communist Party syndicalist. That order is based on tariffs, subsidies and a web of other often invisible regulations. The international institutions are a projection of Western states. The multinational corporations are creatures of these states. They shelter behind the privilege of limited liability. They get their political friends to cartelise markets, and do favours in return.

This is not market liberalism. It is a fraud played on us all by our ruling classes – these being those politicians, bureaucrats, educators, lawyers and media and business people who derive wealth, power and status from an enlarged and activist state.

In his later assessment of the speech in Free Life Commentary, he added:

....I grow increasingly convinced that allowing the creation of joint stock limited liability corporations was one of the greatest legislative mistakes of the 19th century. Their existence is based on a separation of ownership from control. The owners are released from all responsibility. The controllers form a separate class of corporate bureaucrats little different in outlook from civil servants. The usual psychology operates. They will commit immoral acts for their organisations they might not consider committing for themselves. The owners will assent. The legal privileges and unlimited lifespan of these corporations let them grow to enormous size and wealth. The opportunities exist for highly effective immorality. Collectively, they become part of the state apparatus, and work to destroy true, unregulated enterprise.

These corporations could not exist in any natural economic order. I have heard other libertarians argue that they might emerge without legal privilege on some loose contractual basis. But I do not agree. The shareholders would still be liable in tort, and that alone would deter them from any involvement with a business that they did not personally control. As for the utilitarian argument, that large undertakings need large companies, I also disagree. So long as it showed an acceptable return on investment, there is no project too big to be taken on by clusters of sole traders and partnerships. No doubt, things like the Channel Tunnel would not have been built – but I fail to see how not having that would have made the world a poorer place. Even if some highly valuable projects might not be undertaken, their lack would be compensated by the greater general innovation to be expected in an order of small, unregulated firms.

Sean concluded his assessment rather modestly:

On balance, it was worth attending. I waved the flag for the Libertarian Alliance. I handed out several dozen business cards.

He accomplished much more than that. The audience included Martin Khor of the Third World Network, along with a whole gaggle of people from Oxfam. Their agenda for addressing the evils of corporate globalization is, as Sean said in his speech, an ineffectual one of "kumbaya socialism." But most of the evils they object to, and much of their analysis of those evils, is right on the mark. It's in their proposed solutions that they go wrong; and I think many in the anti-globalization movement are amenable to rational persuasion, if they ever heard sound economic arguments from a free market advocate they didn't have good reason to distrust. Sean's speech was possibly the first free market libertarian argument they ever heard that wasn't vulgar libertarian boilerplate, nor a disingenuous cloaking of the interests of state capitalist global corporations behind "free market" rhetoric. Perhaps some seeds were planted that night.

posted by Kevin Carson | 5:53 PM

1 Comments:
Larry Gambone said...
Excellent speech from Sean! He does a definitive demolition job on the pretentions of the neocons and their vulgar libertarian bum buddies. While your typical leftist argument only goes half way, exposing neocon talk about free markets and free enterprize as fraud and hypocrisy really knocks them to the ground.

Looks like all of us democrats, "Left", "Right" and "Centre" may have to stand together against the the guns of the "Far Centre" on the one side and the guns of the Religiously and Racially Obsessed on the other...

More on the nature of blogging

2006-08-09T05:11:00.000+01:00

This piece by Marty Kaplan I saw at the Huffington Post:

Pajamahadeen = Chattering Class + Broadband

Chris Matthews to Ned Lamont on MSNBC today: What do you think of the pajamahadeen?

Lamont: Huh?

Matthews: The bloggers. They roll out of bed in the morning, they read something in the paper, they blog about it, they talk to each other about it, people blog back, and pretty soon it becomes the buzz.

(Caveat lector: It's my paraphrase, not a transcript.)

It's funny: the entire District of Columbia is built on the exact same process that Chris Matthews describes, except that instead of people using keyboards, they use phones, and instead of blogging, they use their access to print and broadcast media, and to one another.

I lived and worked in politics and journalism in Washington for eight years, and every day, the inviolable morning ritual was that people read the papers, they watched television, and then all day long they called one another to ask, "What do you hear?" The biggest difference between the daily routine of the Beltway chattering class and the blogosphere is that the Gang of 500 (as The Note calls them) has been replaced by the dispersed and inherently more small-d democratic netroots.

The reason that there are just 500 or so in the elite is that the mandarins who belong to it, plus the MSM employers it's parasitic on, keep a de facto ceiling on its membership. But there's no max to the number of cyberchatterers; their impact depends not on a merit badge system, but on their ability to attract readers.

It's ludicrous to distinguish Beltway blowhards from bloggers by the quality of their thinking. No matter what you think about bloggers' smarts, anyone who's taken the trouble to compare credentialed pundits' pontifications with what actually transpires in the real world will be painfully aware of their lack of accountability. The conventional wisdom their groupthink constitutes (including the contrarians, whose act is just as predictable) is way more often wrong than right.

Nor is there a defensible distinction between bloggers and talking heads on the vitriol front; there's manifest parity between the haters online and the celebrity assassins on Fox.

No, the big differences are about branding (the blogosphere hasn't caught up to the household logos yet), and about access. There's nothing the pajamahadeen are up to today that hasn't already been done before, both badly and well, by the priesthood.

I wouldn't say all columnists in national newspapers over here write self-indulgent, ill-informed rubbish for lots of money, but there are enough. I mean, who looks forward to reading the tripe that "Editor-at-Large" Janet Street-Porter spews out at The Independent? (who looks forward to reading the Indie full stop? Furthermore, they expect you to pay to read online articles from it!) As this post at Bloggerheads suggests, various people at the Indie are not happy about bloggers and blogger culture (perhaps because most bloggers don't expect people to pay for their online outpourings?):

Independent newspaper lashes out at independent publishers

For some reason the Independent is having a go at bloggers...

The fragrantly-hyphenated Janet Street-Porter kicked things off yesterday with this charming piece:

Janet Street-Porter - Editor-At-Large: Blog off... You don't want to know what I weigh today (do you?)

The tastiest comments are hidden behind the subscription wall, but I dare to share:

"The web is fast becoming clogged with blogs; the verbal diarrhoea of the under-educated and banal."
"Blogs are for anoraks who couldn't get published any other way."

And the day after Janet Street-Porter assured her readers that blogs contained inconsequential information published by inconsequential people, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown put her hyphen to work to put forward another case; that blogs contained dangerous information published by dangerous people... before dismissing the whole thing as a fad. Of the inconsequential variety, obviously...

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - Hounded by assaults from cyberspace

Yasmin starts out by assuring us that "the internet has already become a coffee shop for paedophiles and violent fantasists," and follows this wonderful guilt-by-association opener with this charming passage. From her back-passage...

"Where do blog writers and surfers find the time? When do they do the washing, cooking, eating, talking, cuddling, story reading to kids? Do they never help with school homework, go to the theatre, make love, read books, talk to friends, entertain?"

Well, there you have it. I hang out with paedophiles *and* I neglect my kids. Further, I have failed to fulfill certain cultural obligations, and have thus proven myself to be under-educated and banal.

I think I can be excused for thinking there's something coordinated going on here.

Who exactly decided that our cages needed rattling? And why?

Axis of Alliteration

2006-08-04T20:39:00.000+01:00

Not so much "The Hand Of History" (Tony Blair, 1998) as...

"Talk To The Hand" (Terminator 3, 2003).

With his use of alliteration over the years (The Peoples' Princess, The Hand of History, The Arc of Extremism etc) Tony Blair would go far in advertising. (BTW if he was alive today and still plotting revolution, Lenin would be holding down a day job in advertising: What Is To Be Done?, Two Steps Forward- One Step Back, Better Fewer- But Better would make great billboard slogans.)

As it is, Tony is merely a top level marketing man for the Bush Admin and like any marketing campaign, it looks like a "tipping point" may have been reached, as The Friday Thing recognises:

ARC OF THE CONVENIENT

Tony Blair's very pleased with his shiny new 'arc of extremism',
isn't he? After testing it at the G8 summit in July he used the
conflation of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah no fewer than three times
in the speech he gave in Los Angeles this week.

Something was clearly needed to replace the 'axis of evil', Iraq
having left the group with nervous exhaustion and not being due
to rejoin for the reunion tour until its second breakdown has
really taken hold. The 'axis of evil' rolls off the tongue, the
'axis' part summoning images of the World War II's Axis powers of
Germany, Japan and Italy. The 'evil' part metaphorically dresses
Iranians, North Koreans and Iraqis in stormtrooper uniforms
making it morally easier to shoot, cluster bomb and waterboard
them.

The 'arc of extremism' is an altogether more contrived outfit, a
bit like The Monkees being the US's answer to the Beatles. The
band's name belies the fussy pedantry evident in much of New
Labour's thinking and language. But Blair loves a clever label,
even one as unmemorable as this. The simple, literal approach of
'Four Poofs and a Piano' is not for the likes of him.

But it confers almost nothing to the mind in terms of mental
imagery. Pause for a minute and try to picture an 'arc of
extremism'.

No, us neither.

It makes you wonder just what names got discarded in the
obviously-nothing-better-to-do brainstorming session that came up
with it. It's hard to think of anything worse. The 'cat's cradle
of calamity?' 'Trellis of terror?' 'Minestrone of mayhem?'

In the same speech, on the subject of the ongoing unpleasantness
in Lebanon, Blair said: 'We will continue to do all we can to
halt the hostilities'. Or at least all that can be done from
beside Cliff Richard's swimming pool in the Bahamas. Has nobody
told him they have sun and duty free shops in Tel Aviv and
Beirut? (At least, we're assuming Beirut still has them - the
Israeli airforce bombed the city's Rafik Hariri International
Airport back in July.)

The struggle against Hezbollah and global terrorism in general,
says Blair, 'is about hearts and minds about inspiring people,
persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand
for'. The thing is, as Rory Bremner once memorably said, it's
hard to win people's hearts and minds 'when you leave their
hearts in one place and their minds in another'.

It all boils down to 'a struggle between what I will call
Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam,' said Blair, as
if cluster bombs are able to distinguish between Muslims of
either flavour. In case he hadn't noticed - apart from Israel -
the Middle East has had a moderate, mainstream, democratic and
secular (albeit with a significant Muslim population) state for a
little while now. It has a 'sophisticated, educated,
cosmopolitan' people, according to journalist Robert Fisk who's
lived there for 30 years. It's called Lebanon and it's currently
being bombed to shit.

How to sort the reactionary from the moderate in the 750,000
displaced people currently on the move in Southern Lebanon? Tony
doesn't say. Of those who weren't members of the 'arc of
extremism' before this all started, you can probably now lay good
odds that a good number of them will be before it's all finished.
'Kill them all and let God sort them out' - maybe? - as Arnaud-
Amaury, the Abbot of Citeaux said back in 1209 when the crusaders
asked him how they were to tell Cathar heretics from the
Catholics. In that respect, 5,000-lb bombs have a certain 13th
Century vibe.

So how to confront Syria and Iran, the Lennon and McCartney of
the 'arc of extremism'? Again, Tony doesn't say. Asked twice at
his last press conference before going on holiday this week, he
couldn't or wouldn't give an answer. Something to do with
modernisation was mentioned. What this is we're none the wiser.
It's certainly a word to strike fear into the hearts of those
back home who've been victims of Blair's programmes of
modernisation, be it trying to get a fair answer from the tax
credit system, a fair hearing from the immigration system or a
fair trial from the anti-terrorist system. Abroad, it's almost
certain to be something even harsher. 'This is a war, but of a
completely unconventional kind,' said Blair. The weapons that
rained down on Iraq looked pretty conventional to us, Tony.

One of the bigger questions to come out of this though is, is
Blair *really* the right person to be talking about exporting our
'values' abroad, to the dark savages who apparently have none?
Either Blair is stupid or he thinks his audience is. We're
talking about a guy who's helped to level Iraq, who's up to his
neck in a corruption investigation, allows aircraft transporting
bunker buster missiles from the US to Israel (and on, a little
faster, to Lebanon) to refuel in the UK, and has a money-grabbing
wife and a princeling son enjoying the best life has to offer
simply because of who his dad is. Most decent-thinking Britons
don't subscribe to those values let alone those swarthy
foreigners on who Tony hopes to foist them. (He's also got a
brass neck for talking about extremism, being happy, as he is, to
turn a blind eye to creationism being taught in British schools.)

Some people have caught on, however. The United Nations' deputy
secretary general Mark Malloch Brown said that the UK is 'poorly
placed to broker a deal over Lebanon because of their role in
bringing about war in Iraq.' At the UN at least, Tony's about as
welcome as Mel Gibson at a meeting of the Tel Aviv Temperance
Society.

Maybe Blair sees himself much like Moses who, having led his
people through hardship (or in this case, the 'elemental struggle
about the values that will shape our future') to the borders of
the Promised Land (or the very 'future of the world'), is
prevented from entering it himself, because of his sins, by God.

Which is where all the trouble began, isn't it? With Blair soon
to depart to spend more time with the American lecture circuit,
no doubt he's thinking what Moses should have said to God after
his snubbing: 'Well, at least I won't have to clear up the mess.'

Film News

2006-07-31T18:52:00.000+01:00

Just in...Mel Gibson has won the lead role for the blockbuster "Saddam: Lust For Glory" (hat tip to The Huffington Post for pics)...

GIBSON ACCUSED OF ANTI-SEMITIC RANT

MEL GIBSON reportedly threatened police officers with a tirade of anti-Semitic and sexually abusive remarks after being arrested on suspicion of drunken driving yesterday (28JUL06). The 50-year-old PASSION OF CHRIST director was pulled over for speeding at 80 miles per hour on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California where the limit is 55 miles per hour. He failed both breath and field sobriety tests and spent seven hours locked up before being released on $5,000 (GBP2,700) bail. According to the incident report by Los Angeles County Deputy JAMES MEE, attained by TMZ.com, the actor repeatedly said, "My life is f**ked" before launching into an anti-Semitic outburst. The report claims Gibson said, "F**king Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?" The actor is also reported to have threatened, "You motherf**ker. I'm going to f**k you" to the deputy. Mee's report adds the allegation that Gibson told officers he "owns Malibu" and the star would spend all his money "to get even with me". He is also believed to have said to a female officer on the scene, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar t**ts?" Deputy Mee had originally written an eight-page report on the arrest but the sheriff's department deemed it's content too "inflammatory" to release and would merely serve to incite "Jewish hatred". Los Angeles police would neither confirm or deny the contents of the report and Gibson's representative ALAN NIEROB was unavailable for comment. The actor, a dedicated Catholic, has had to fend off anti-Semitic allegations before, after the release of his controversial 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. His case will be further investigated but no court date has been set.
29/07/2006 14:31

Yultide is just around the corner!

2006-07-31T00:21:00.000+01:00

A couple of days back I got my first mailing offering Xmas presents/cards, so I suppose it is time to start thinking about presents for all and sundry. For example, if you know someone who has signed the Euston Manifesto and thinks the occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with control of oil supplies, the book below may be of interest (courtesy of the official Noam Chomsky website):

Remember, it is a lot easier for the Armchair Chickenhawk in your life to slag off Noam Chomsky in print than it is for him (or her) to try and keep the streets safe (outside the Green Zone) in downtown Baghdad ...

Votes at the UN

2006-07-30T22:39:00.000+01:00

When the USSR existed it had two extra votes at the UN. That is, the Ukraine and Belarus (Belorussia as then was) had their own seats at the UN, which meant that the Soviets had two votes more than a conventional diplomatic map of the world would suggest they deserved.

Surely with the votes of Israel and the UK on its side, the US now has the same privilege at the UN?

More oil history from Greg Palast

2006-07-30T19:06:00.000+01:00

This, via The Konformist, is from his new book Armed Madhouse. I should help the publishing industry asap & buy a copy. I wonder how many signatories of The Euston Manifesto will get around to reading it?

Keeping Iraq's Oil In the Ground By Greg Palast, AlterNet, June 14, 2006

World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion
a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are
climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this
war?

Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies?
Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-
five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's
interest that this doubling doesn't happen again. The neo-cons were
hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production. Big Oil's interest was
in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota
or less. This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which
had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for
a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?

It wouldn't be the first time. If oil is what we're looking for,
there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112
billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC
after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy. Even more
important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating
wells... compared to one million in Texas.

That makes the Saudis even unhappier. It would take a decade or
more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double,
bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia's own gargantuan pool.
Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the
Saudis', will drown the oil market. That wouldn't make the Texans
too happy either. So Fadhil Chalabi's plan for Iraq to pump 12
million barrels a day, a million more than Saudi Arabia, is not, to
use Bob Ebel's (Center fro Strategic and International Studies)
terminology, "ridiculous" from a raw resource view, it is ridiculous
politically. It would never be permitted. An international industry
policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since
1927. We need again to visit that imp called "history."

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"-- Calouste Gulbenkian --
who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country
recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian's "Iraq
Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq's oil.
Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil
giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the
Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The
remaining slice Calouste kept for himself -- hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq's oil than drilling it --
not drilling it. The oil bigs had bought Iraq's concession to seal
it up and keep it off the market. To please his buyers' wishes, Mr.
5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel
room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil
fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered
in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line -- vowing not
to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one,
therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil. All of
Iraq's oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would
enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British
Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from
Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-
American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling
to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from
Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line
Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group --
and drilled no more.

The following was written three decades ago:

Although its original concession of March 14, 1925, cove- red all of
Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Co., under the owner- ship of BP (23.75%),
Shell (23.75%), CFP [of France] (23.75%), Exxon (11.85%), Mobil
(11.85%), and [Calouste] Gulbenkian (5.0%), limited its production
to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country's
total area. During the Great Depression, the world was awash with
oil and greater output from Iraq would simply have driven the price
down to even lower levels.

Plus ça change...

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would
stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to
drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them
where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking
oil." This systematic suppression of Iraq's production, begun in
1927, has never ceased. In the early 1960s, Iraq's frustration with
the British-led oil consortium's failure to pump pushed the nation
to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields.
Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad, but a cooler, wiser man in
the White House, John F. Kennedy, told the Brits to back off.
President Kennedy refused to call Iraq's seizure an "expropriation"
akin to Castro's seizure of U.S.-owned banana plantations. Kennedy's
view was that Anglo-American companies had it coming to them because
they had refused to honor their legal commitment to drill.

But the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to
the maximum was swiftly taken away from them by their Arab brethren.

The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq's
production at a sum equal to Iran's, though the Iranian reserves are
far smaller than Iraq's. The excuse for this quota equality between
Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn't. To keep
Iraq's Ba'athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia
simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam's war against Iran
and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of
Iraq's oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that
Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report
of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil
companies refused to add pipeline capacity. Muskie, who'd just lost
a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The
Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in
Iraq's oil production. Iraq's frustration under production limits
explodes periodically.

In August 1990, Kuwait's craven siphoning of borderland oil fields
jointly owned with Iraq gave Saddam the excuse to take Kuwait's
share. Here was Saddam's opportunity to increase Iraq's OPEC quota
by taking Kuwait's (most assuredly not approved by the U.S.).
Saddam's plan backfired. The Basra oil fields not crippled by Iran
were demolished in 1991 by American B-52s. Saddam's petro-military
overreach into Kuwait gave the West the authority for a more direct
oil suppression method called the "Sanctions" program, later changed
to "Oil for Food." Now we get to the real reason for the U.N.
embargo on Iraqi oil exports. According to the official U.S.
position:

Sanctions were critical to preventing Iraq from acquiring equipment
that could be used to reconstitute banned weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) programs.

How odd. If cutting Saddam's allowance was the purpose, then
sanctions, limiting oil exports, was a very suspect method indeed.
The nature of the oil market (a cartel) is such that the elimination
of two million barrels a day increased Saddam's revenue. One might
conclude that sanctions were less about WMD and more about EPS
(earnings per share) of oil sellers.

In other words, there is nothing new under the desert sun. Today's
fight over how much of Iraq's oil to produce (or suppress) simply
extends into this century the last century's pump-or-control
battles. In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress,
has done its damned best to keep Iraq's oil buried deep in the
ground to keep prices high in the air. Iraq has 74 known fields and
only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools
of oil"), only 125 drilled.

And they won't be drilled, not unless Iraq says, "Mother, may I?" to
Saudi Arabia, or, as the James Baker/Council on Foreign Relations
paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq." And believe me, Iraq
wouldn't want that. The decision to expand production has, for now,
been kept out of Iraqi's hands by the latest method of suppressing
Iraq's oil flow -- the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion. And
it has been darn effective. Iraq's output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was
less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program.
Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has
resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89
billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002. That
suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil's profits are
up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted
contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40
million.

That would make our president "Mr. 0.05%."

A History of Oil in Iraq

Suppressing It, Not Pumping It

1925-28 "Mr. 5%" sells his monopoly on Iraq's oil to British
Petroleum and Exxon, who sign a "Red-Line Agreement" vowing not to
compete by drilling independently in Iraq.

1948 Red-Line Agreement ended, replaced by oil combines' "dog in the
manger" strategy -- taking control of fields, then capping
production--drilling shallow holes where "there was no danger of
striking oil."

1961 OPEC, founded the year before, places quotas on Iraq's exports
equal to Iran's, locking in suppression policy.

1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Iran destroys Basra fields. Iraq cannot meet
OPEC quota. 1991 Desert Storm. Anglo-American bombings cut
production.

1991-2003 United Nations Oil embargo (zero legal exports) followed
by Oil-for-Food Program limiting Iraqi sales to 2 million barrels a
day.

2003-? "Insurgents" sabotage Iraq's pipelines and infrastructure.

2004 Options for Iraqi Oil.The secret plan adopted by U.S. State
Department overturns Pentagon proposal to massively in crease oil
production. State Department plan, adopted by government of occupied
Iraq, limits state oil company to OPEC quotas.

Traditional English Folk Music aka The Sex Pistols

2006-07-30T18:44:00.000+01:00

"Never trust a hippy..."

Decent Sex Pistols websites with lots of links can be found at...

http://www.sex-pistols.net

&

http://www.thefilthandthefury.co.uk

Quick comment on Nineteen Eighty-Four

2006-07-30T18:14:00.000+01:00

The world in 1984...

For many people, Orwell's novel is an anti-Communist tract par excellence, or, at the very least, an anti-totalitarian piece. However, it is worth noting a press statement Orwell issued via his publisher Frederick Warburg in the summer of 1949 in response to a widespread belief that Nineteen Eighty-Four was an anti-socialist novel and Orwell had abandoned socialism (quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, Penguin, 1992, p.566):

"George Orwell assumes that if such societies as he describes in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR come into being there will be several super states....These super states will naturally be in opposition to each other or (a novel point) will pretend to be much more in opposition than in fact they are. Two of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American world and Eurasia. If these two great power blocks line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents and will not dramatize themselves on the scene of history as Communists. Thus they will have to find a new name for themselves. The name suggested in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the USA the phrase 'Americanism' or 'hundred per cent Americanism' is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish."

Just think if the name of The Party in the novel had been abbreviated to TOTALAM, and Britain had been reduced to an offshore "Airstrip One" for a US dominated Empire. Inconceivable!!

Greg Palast on the Middle East

2006-07-30T16:54:00.000+01:00

“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as
their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds
another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at
bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to
cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits
of a siege or tempest.” Samuel Johnson

I remember when Saddam Hussein misread the signals from Dubya's dad and invaded Kuwait in 1990 some high up in the Bush Senior Adminstration saying that if Kuwait produced carrots not oil "no-one would give a shit about Kuwait." Well, I should have known that oil has a lot to do with stoking up the temperature throughout the region at the moment, as Greg Palast explains...

Blood in Beirut: $75.05 a Barrel
The failure to stop the bloodletting in the Middle East, Exxon’s record second-quarter profits and Iran’s nuclear cat-and-mouse game have something in common — it’s the oil.

I can’t tell you how it started — this is a war that’s been fought since the Levites clashed with the Philistines — but I can tell you why the current mayhem has not been stopped. It’s the oil.

I’m not an expert on Palestine nor Lebanon and I’d rather not pretend to be one. If you want to know what’s going on, read Robert Fisk. He lives there. He speaks Arabic. Stay away from pundits whose only connection to the Middle East is the local falafel stand.

So why am I writing now? The answer is that, while I don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, I am completely fluent in the language of petroleum.

What? You don’t need a degree in geology to know there’s no oil in Israel, Palestine or Lebanon. (A few weeks ago, I was joking around with Afif Safieh, the Palestinian Authority’s Ambassador to the US, asking him why he was fighting to have a piece of the only place in the Middle East without oil. Well, there’s no joking now.)

Let’s begin with the facts we can agree on: the berserkers are winning. Crazies discredited only a month ago are now in charge, guys with guns bigger than brains and souls smaller still. Here’s a list:

– Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s approval rating in June was down to a Bush-level of 35%. But today, Olmert’s poll numbers among Israeli voters have more than doubled to 78% as he does his bloody John Wayne “cleanin’ out the varmints” routine. But let’s not forget: Olmert can’t pee-pee without George Bush’s approval. Bush can stop Olmert tomorrow. He hasn’t.

– Hezbollah, a political party rejected overwhelmingly by Lebanese voters sickened by their support of Syrian occupation, holds a mere 14 seats out of 128 in the nation’s parliament. Hezbollah was facing demands by both Lebanon’s non-Shia majority and the United Nations to lay down arms. Now, few Lebanese would suggest taking away their rockets. But let’s not forget: Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a fundamentalist street gang. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can stop Hezbollah’s rockets tomorrow. He hasn’t.

– Hamas, just days before it kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers, was facing certain political defeat at the hands of the Palestinian majority ready to accept the existence of Israel as proposed in a manifesto for peace talks penned by influential Palestinian prisoners. Now the Hamas rocket brigade is back in charge. But let’s not forget: Hamas is broke and a joke without the loot and authority of Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah can stop these guys tomorrow. He hasn’t.

Why not? Why haven’t what we laughably call “leaders” of the USA, Iran and Saudi Arabia called back their delinquent spawn, cut off their allowances and grounded them for six months?

Maybe because mayhem and murder in the Middle East are very, very profitable to the sponsors of these characters with bombs and rockets. America, Iran and Saudi Arabia share one thing in common: they are run by oil regimes. The higher the price of crude, the higher the profits and the happier the presidents and princelings of these petroleum republics.

This Thursday, Exxon is expected to report the highest second-quarter earnings of any corporation since the days of the Pharaoh, $9.9 billion in pure profit collected in just three months — courtesy of an oil shortage caused by pipelines on fire in Iraq, warlord attacks in Nigeria, the lingering effects of the sabotage of Venezuela’s oil system by a 2002 strike… the list could go on.

Exxon’s brobdingnagian profits simply reflect the cold axiom that oil companies and oil states don’t make their loot by finding oil but by finding trouble. Finding oil increases supply. Increased supply means decreased price. Whereas finding trouble — wars, coup d’etats, hurricanes, whatever can disrupt supply — raises the price of oil.

A couple of examples from today’s Bloomberg newswire are:

“Crude oil traded above $75 a barrel in New York as fighting between Israeli and Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon entered its 14th day… Oil prices rose last month on concern for supplies from Iran, the world’s fourth largest producer, may be disrupted in its dispute with the United Nations over its uranium enrichment … [And, said a trader,] ‘I still think $85 is likely this summer. I’m really surprised we haven’t seen any hurricanes.”’

In Tehran, President Ahmadinejad may or may not have a plan to make a nuclear bomb, but he sure as heck knows that hinting at it raises the price of the one thing he certainly does have — oil. Every time he barks, ‘Mad Mahmoud’ knows that he’s pumping up the price of crude. Just a $10 a barrel “blow-up-in-the-Mideast” premium brings his regime nearly a quarter of a billion dollars each week (including the little kick to the value of Iran’s natural gas). Not a bad pay-off for making a bit of trouble.

Saudi Arabia’s rake-in from The Troubles? Assuming just a $10 a barrel boost for Middle Eastern mayhem and you can calculate that the blood in the sand puts an extra $658 million a week in Abdullah’s hand.

And in Houston, you can hear the cash registers jing-a-ling as explosions in Kirkuk, Beirut and the Niger River Delta sound like the sleigh-bells on Santa’s sled. At $75.05 a barrel, they don’t call it “sweet” crude for nothing. That’s up 27% from a year ago. The big difference between then and now: the rockets’ red glare.

Exxon’s second-quarter profits may bust records, but next quarter’s should put it to shame, as the “Lebanon premium” and Iraq’s insurgency have puffed up prices, up by an average of 11% in the last three months.

So there’s not much incentive for the guys who supply the weaponry to tell their wards to put away their murderous toys. This war’s just too darn profitable.

We are trained to think of Middle Eastern conflicts as just modern flare-ups of ancient tribal animosities. But to uncover why the flames won’t die, the usual rule applies: follow the money.

Am I saying that Tehran, Riyadh and Houston oil chieftains conspired to ignite a war to boost their petroleum profits? I can’t imagine it. But I do wonder if Bush would let Olmert have an extra week of bombings, or if the potentates of the Persian Gulf would allow Hamas and Hezbollah to continue their deadly fireworks if it caused the price of crude to crash. You know and I know that if this war took a bite out of Exxon or the House of Saud, a ceasefire would be imposed quicker than you can say, “Let’s drill in the Arctic.”

Eventually, there will be another ceasefire. But Exxon shareholders need not worry. Global warming has heated the seas sufficiently to make certain that they can look forward to a hellacious — and profitable — season of hurricanes.

Preface to a Free Market Anti-Capitalist Manifesto?

2006-07-30T15:41:00.000+01:00

This from Larry Gambone...

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Withdraw Corporate Life Support

It isn't necessary to control corporate capitalism with legislation that restricts its harmful aspects. Simply pull the plug on it – abolish corporate law, patents, eliminate all forms of government assistance, no more state as capitalist goon squad, repeal all anti-worker legislation.

What about corporate law? Limited liability shifts the burden of debt away from the officers of a corporation to the corporation itself. If a corporation with limited liability goes belly-up, you can't grab the CEO's personal bank account and mansion. Small shareholders might lose everything, and the workers their jobs and pension funds, but not the bosses.

Limited liability creates a situation like a gambling addict with a rich parent who funds the addiction. When the gambler loses, the parent pays, when the gambler wins, he keeps his winnings. Corporate officers have a free hand to speculate with other people's money. Such speculation can lose, but it can also win big. Such "big wins" inflate the market share and size of a corporation, furthering the process of concentration and centralization. Put another way, without limited liability, corporate officers would be very conservative with other people's money and high-risk speculation would not exist. Corporations would tend to be a lot smaller and many would not exist at all.

Eliminating the fraud known as the corporation as the “fictitious individual” would have far-reaching effects. Rights and freedoms were meant for INDIVIDUALS, not corporations. In order to give corporations these rights they invented the lie that a corporation is an individual. Thus, attempts to control corporate advertising and Korporate Krap Kulture are met with loud shrieks of censorship, and since the corporation has the rights of an individual, it cannot be touched. With rights reserved only for living, breathing people, changes might occur within corporate media. If a corporation is no longer an individual, and thus no longer has rights, corporate media can no longer directly censor the editorial staff. The real living individuals working for them could then demand THEIR freedom of speech.

Patents are harmful because they allow the patent holder a monopoly. With a monopoly they can gouge customers through artificially high prices or inferior goods. Patents waste a lot of energy as people invent procedures to get around the patent. A royalty system, like that of song-writing, would allow inventors a good return without these harmful effects. Patents made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. Without patents, he would still be rich, but not anywhere near the same extent.

Government assistance to Big Business comes in a host of ways; tax breaks, cheap loans, free land, government paid R and D, corporate-aiding infrastructure. The right-wingers want to cut government expense, well start here. The fact remains, that without the state hog trough, many corporations wouldn't exist at all.

Stop the state from acting as a goon squad for the corporations. No more injunctions, no more rubbish about “illegal” strikes. Yes, the government can mediate if it wishes, but quit taking sides with the corporations. No more using the police to break up picket lines or bully demonstrators. The police should only intervene if an actual crime is being committed, and then only with the individual doing it. One person smashing a window should not be an excuse for beating and arresting 50 people. The procedure for union recognition is absurd and only helps the bosses. The moment the majority in a shop are signed up, they become the union, period. No dragging it out for months allowing the boss time to bully the employees.

Freed from state restrictions on striking and union recognition, free from state thuggery, the labor movement would begin to seriously challenge the corporations.

Without its state provided life support systems, corporate capitalism would gradually disappear, in the same way the Mom and Pop hamburger joint faded away thanks to MacDonalds. Only this time the evolution would be in the opposite direction. Nature abhors a vacuum, with the state's vicious pets dying off, small businesses, small farms and local production would return. I suspect many new ventures would be cooperatives. With a high level of local production and local consumption the vagaries of the corporate created world market would lessen and we could evolve into a “steady state economy” rather than the ecological insanity of “growth as God.”

Hey Greens, Hey NDP, are ya listening?

A book I had heard a lot about over the past decade but never actually got around to buying/reading until a couple of months back is David C. Korten's When Corporations Rule the World (1999 [1995 original edition], Earthscan Books, London). What follows is not so much a review ("It's good- read it yourself!") as taking various facts/quotes/arguments in it which others may find of use/interest. I wouldn't call the Korten's work a free market anti-capitalist tract, as Korten in one of many on "the Left" who confuses "corporate capitalism" with "the free market". He calls those who support corporate capitalism "corporate libertarians"; clearly no genuine libertarian should be apologising for the corporations! This caveat aside, Korten recognises that the vision of a market economy proposed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo is the antithesis of the racket run by the corporate behemoths who now bestride the globe.

Anyway, here's some Adam Smithisms Korten cites (page numbers from When Corporations...):

"It is to prevent this reduction of price and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established."- Wealth of Nations(p.56.)

Smith believed that trade secrets confer a monopoly advantage and are contrary to the principles of a free market(p.74).

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." Wealth of Nations (p.75).

"By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he [the entrepreneur] intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand, to promote an endwhich was no part of his intention." Wealth of Nations (p.77). Note that the "invisible hand" for Smith only works for the benefit of society at the level of the domestic, national economy. To say such an "invisible hand" works through the vehicle of transnational corporations operating on a global scale is a complete travesty of Smith's arguments.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Wealth of Nations (p.222).

It seems clear from Korten's work that Adam Smith would hardly be a fan of Actual Existing Capitalism. Neither does it appear that David Ricardo would be enthusiastic about it. As Korten shows (p.78), Ricardo writing in 1817 said that three conditions were needed for free trade between two countries to work for the benefit of the people in both:

(1) capital must not be allowed to cross national borders from a high-wage to a low-wage country;
(2) trade between the participating countries must be balanced; &
(3) each country must have full employment.

Are there any examples of these three criteria for free trade existing under Actual Existing Capitalism?

Korten also shows that the rise of the corporation took place during the Nineteenth Century. He identifies the American Civil War as the period when corporations in the USA started to dominate the economy and quotes Abraham Lincoln in evidence (p.58):

"Corporations have been enthroned....An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavour to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people...until wealth is aggregated in a few hands...and the Republic is destroyed."

Korten identifies the moment when the corporations took their modern form as 1886 (p.59). This was the year that the US Supreme Court ruled in the Santa Clara County V Southern Pacific Railroad case that a private corporation is a natural person under the US Constitution. Consequently a corporation is entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech and other constitutional protections extended to individuals.

Over a century later, Korten argues, we are living in a world dominated by the corporations. Furthermore, the corporations will fail, Kortern asserts, due to their similarity to the so-called Marxist regimes failed in Eastern Europe (p.89):

"Both lead to the concentration of economic power in unaccountable centralised institutions- the state in the case of Marxism, and the transnational corporation in the case of capitalism.
"Both create economic systems that destroy the living systems of the earth in the name of economic progress.
"Both produce a disempowering dependence on mega-institutions that erodes the social capital on which the efficient function of markets, government, and society depends.
"Both take a narrow economistic view of human needs that undermines...the community of life that is essential to maintaining the moral fabric of society."

To combat the corporations, Korten recognises the need for a new anti-corporate, anti-big government political movement (p.116):

"The time is ripe for a realignment of political alliances, which is likely to come into full flower only when the true populists [of "the Right"?] realise that their enemy is not only big central government but also the giant corporations that owe no allegiance to place, people, or the human interest."

Thoughts on the latest Mid-East war

2006-07-30T14:27:00.000+01:00

Well, we have a proper 1980s revival: Israel bombing the hell out of Lebanon with implicit US backing. With the Gaza/West Bank situation, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sabre rattling over Iran and India basically blaming Pakistan for the recent Mumbai bombings, we have, to use a phrase of Zbigniew Brzezinski's from the equally groovy 1970s, an "Arc of Crisis" in the Near East.

I have mixed feelings about the whole Israel/Lebanon situation. I refuse to see it as a battle between Democracy V Terrorism. Nor do I see it purely as Western Imperialism V Islamic Resistance. The only two things I do know is (1) there should be an immediate ceasefire & (2) it has nothing to do with us (classic Little Englander worldview there). In the media here, among both the columnists and the letter writers, both the Israelis and Hezbollah have their cheerleaders. My attitude towards these armchair generals is: if the fighting over there is such an important matter for you, why won't don't you go over there and fight? However, as George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia (back in the 1930s writers did put their rifles where their pens were and physically took part in fighting for causes they professed to believe in): "The people who write that kind of stuff never fight: possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours" ["embedded reporting", as it is known these days](Penguin, 2000 edition, page 209).

I don't like the way a lot of people over here seem to automatically line up behind Israel or however is fighting them. Some people think that because they are Jewish or Muslim, they should cheer on or condone whatever actions, including quite sickening atrocities, "their side" takes, because to use that old lie, "the ends justifies the means". I think that because you are Jewish or Muslim you should be supporting uncritically Israel or Hezbollah is total cobblers. It's like saying that because you have Irish blood (like my good self) you should have supported everything the IRA and other Irish Republican groups did during "The Troubles". It's an utterly cretinous line to take.

Moreover, no-one seems to take heed one of the great lessons of Twentieth Century warfare: if you want to win the hearts and minds of your opponent's civilian populations, don't try and bomb them into submission. Whenever civilians are the targets of bombing (whether from the air or in bars/trains/buses/the street etc) they rally around their national leadership. Every Israeli civilian killed justifies the IDF going further into Lebanon, most Israelis believe; every Lebanese civilian killed hardens Lebanese support for Hezbollah.

I just hope the killing and wounding stops, and that includes, Israelis, Lebanese and everybody. It would also help if those who get a guilty pleasure from seeing Israelis/Arabs being killed by "their" side in the war would shut up. If you must, have your Two Minute Hate in private!

The Joy of Idleness

2006-07-30T13:24:00.000+01:00

"Beneath the paving stones - the beach!" - Sous les paves, la plage! - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968.

English Bay Beach, Vancouver

"Since 1991 we've been through massive cultural, social, technological changes, and the only thing that protects me or you or anyone, the only thing that can protect you in all this is figuring out what it is you like to do, and then sticking with it. Because once you start to do what people expect you to do, or what your parents expect you to do, or whoever in your life thinks you should do, you're sunk."-Douglas Coupland, Vancouver native and resident (easier said than done, Doug, but the sentiment is sound).

When I was away in Brugge, one of the books I read as the heavens bucketed it down was Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Idle. Well worth a read if you can be bothered to wander down to the bookshop and buy it. My main caveat is, subversive tract as it is, don't take all the recommendations to heart, otherwise you will end up staying in bed all day with a glass of beer by the side of the bed. ("What's wrong with that?", I hear you cry...) However, there is a lot of sage advice from Hodgkinson. For example (I'm currently lending my copy to another wannabe idler, so I paraphrase), instead of joining a gym to keep fit, walk a mile to a decent pub, have a few drinks and walk back. In the process, you walk two miles (every adult is supposed to walk 3 miles a week to prevent obesity, or so I've heard) and you have an enjoyable few hours in the process.

On a slightly more serious note, I'm old enough to remember back in the 70s people being told that, with so much new technology coming along, by the start of the Twenty-First Century (apart from walking around in space suits) we'd have so much free time to do what we want. It hasn't turned out like that, though, has it? We tend to be either time rich and money poor or vice versa. Perhaps I'm being hopelessly naive, but surely we can all aspire to something better than that?

Anyway, here's some stuff by Mr. Hodgkinson. As well as being editor of The Idler magazine, he has been given a weekly column in the "Work" section of Saturday's Guardian. I'm not sure if his subversive outpourings makes the "time is money" types who I imagine read "Work" pause for thought. However, anyone who can positively namecheck some of the icons of Punk deserves an airing...

Idle thoughts: Teenage rebels and philosophers alike used to protest against the dull daily grind - and they had it easy compared with modern wage slaves. Tom Hodgkinson predicts a riot
The Guardian,Saturday June 24, 2006

'Ne travaillez jamais". That was the graffiti scrawled on a Paris wall in 1953. This fine piece of anti-work propaganda was the work of the Situationist International, a group of hard-drinking French intellectuals who attacked consumer capitalism, the jobs system and the leisure industry.

The situationist Raoul Vaneigem also wrote: "From adolescence to retirement, each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion."

It was this sort of anger which led to the Paris riots of 1968, a revolt against boredom, work, suffering, loneliness and humiliation. The next really significant outcry was a few years later, in the great literary, artistic and political movement called punk. The Sex Pistols and the Clash took up situationist themes: "I don't want a holiday in the sun" sang Johnny Rotten. "We don't work, I just feed, that's all I need." And Joe Strummer shouted defiantly: "I won't open a letter bomb for you," and "London's burning with boredom now."

The Buzzcocks and Iggy Pop both sang about boredom, too.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse. The 60s and the 70s now look to us like a veritable paradise of dossy jobs and everyday freedoms. Unions were strong and therefore wages were often high and conditions often good. You could smoke wherever you wanted and kids played on the streets. There were no CCTV cameras and there was a nice relic of dandyism in men's clothing.

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: "What do you do?" is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality.

"What have you been thinking about?" - that is what we should ask. And if asked: "What do you do?" simply reply: "I'm a neo-situationist currently engaged in a total overhaul of the oppressive wages system."

Someone has to, before we all die of boredom.

The following piece is a review by Tom Hodgkinson of various "How to be a great manager" tomes.

The winner takes it all: Management guides claim that anyone can make it, if they work hard enough. By promoting this false dream, such books threaten to turn us into slaves. By Tom Hodgkinson, New Statesman, Monday 3rd July 2006

Winning: the ultimate business how-to book
Jack Welch with Suzy Welch HarperCollins, 372pp, £12.99
ISBN 0007197675

You Can't Win a Fight With Your Boss and 55 Other Rules for Success
Tom Markert HarperCollins, 146pp, £9.99
ISBN 0007227515

The Servant Leader: unleashing the power of your people
50 Cautionary Tales for Managers Peter Honey, How To Books, 262pp, £12.99
ISBN 0749445335

Bonjour Laziness: why hard work doesn't pay
Corinne Maier, Orion, 208pp, £6.99
ISBN 1400096286

In 1736, the American Puritan Benjamin Franklin published a pamphlet called "Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich"; this was followed in 1748 by "Advice to a Young Tradesman". In these early management training guides, Franklin outlines the principles of a new kind of capitalism, then in its infancy: riches are to be pursued for their own sake; it must be remembered that "time is money".

Franklin goes on to recommend hard work and stresses the importance of appearing industrious: "The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day . . . it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest tradesman."

As Max Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Franklin promotes avarice, hypocrisy and the accumulation of wealth as if they were ethical principles. The emphasis is on how you are perceived. It doesn't matter if you go to the tavern - just don't let your boss see you there. Qualities such as honesty are promoted not because they are essential virtues, but because they might be useful business tools.

Nearly three centuries later, the same principles are being taught to the young and ambitious. Greed is good. Everything you do must be in the service of profit, growth and share price. Today this ideology is promoted through management books, which in recent years have become a publishing phenomenon (nearly a million are sold in the UK each year; many more are sold in the US). Clearly there is a huge desire to discover the secrets of "doing well" in business. Unfortunately these books are unlikely to help anyone discover them. What they promote is one of the central myths of capitalism - that, purely by virtue of hard work, anybody can get to the top.

The books under review recommend all sorts of immoral actions. In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch's Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover - despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate. Welch became CEO of General Electric after beginning his corporate life in plastics. He is well known in the business world as a "great CEO" - which, roughly translated, means that he has made loads of money. So now he feels qualified to advise young men and women how to "win". As Welch explains in his grammar-free prose:

"And that is what this book is about - winning. Probably no other topic could have made me want to write again! Because I think winning is great. Not good - great."

But why is "winning" so great? Because, says Welch, it enables people to make lots of money which . . . erm . . . enables them to "get better healthcare, buy vacation homes, and secure a comfortable retirement". That's it. Those are the three goals of our mortal existence, otherwise known as more pills, more mortgages and more burglar alarms. Whatever happened to joy, pleasure, brotherhood? Whatever happened to enjoying life? Whatever happened to creativity? Whatever happened to love?

To be fair, Welch does think workers should be happy. Except that, in his world, happiness is called "employee satisfaction results". The better the results, the more money is made. Therefore, happiness is a good idea. It's the same with honesty. "I have always been a huge proponent of candor," he says, before going on to explain why honesty is the best policy in business. Displaying his trademark Franklinesque hypocrisy, he advocates honesty in your dealings with others not because it is ethical, but because it can be useful for making money.

Some of the traits Welch looks for in potential staff are a little worrying: "They're sports trivia nuts or they're fanatical supporters of their alma maters or they're political junkies." Nuts, fanatical, junkies: in the everyday world, being insane, a fundamentalist or a drug addict might be considered bad; in business, it seems, the crazier you are the better. All of which summons up a picture of a madhouse office, with grinning employees giving each other high-fives, shouting "whoop!" and exploding with joy because they have just beaten someone else to a pulp. And Welch warns that you can't be too mad: "Hire and promote only true believers and get-on-with-it types . . . ferret out and get rid of resisters, even if their performance is satisfactory."

The problem with this is that not everybody can be a winner. There is no room at the top of the pyramid. For every feudal overlord like Welch, there are a million toiling serfs, sweatshop workers, hamburger flippers and debt- ridden losers. It's a similar story in You Can't Win a Fight With Your Boss, in which Tom Markert, described as "global chief marketing and client service officer for information giant ACNielsen", tells us to work, work, work, because time is money: "You can forget lunch breaks. You can't make money for a company while you're eating lunch . . . if you don't put in the hours, someone just as smart and clever as you will. Fact of life: the strong survive." Life is a brutal competition: ignore Markert's rules, "and you might just end up as roadkill - lying dead by the side of the corporate highway as others drive right past you". The man even takes pride in behaving like an arsehole: "I have always made a habit of walking around early and late to personally see who's pumping it out. If they are getting results and working harder than everyone else, I promote them."

Markert shares Welch's view that certain moral qualities can be useful in business - sincerity, for example, when sucking up to the boss ("The trick is to simply be sincere and charming"). He advises that "having friends at work is not a great idea", and he offers a staggering homily about plane travel. Markert claims that he always introduces himself to the person sitting next to him on the plane. Oh, that's sweet, you think. But then he explains this is "not to be nice"; it's because he wants to find out whether the other guy is a competitor before he gets out his laptop and displays confidential information. In such a world, even eating is seen as a business tool: "I'm a recent convert to eating well . . . food is fuel. Fuel is an element of performance. Bad fuel means low performance."

In The Servant Leader: unleashing the power of your people, Robert P Neuschel trots out more of the same. The book's philosophy is based on the following goals: "become the best . . . come out a winner and stay alive". The goal of "survival" is frequently mentioned. Again, there is a euphemistic reframing of moral virtues in the language of competitive commerce. What most people would describe as friendliness Neuschel calls "success in interpersonal relations".

The same tenets are repeated in these books: all variety in life is subservient to the goal of making money; individual character traits are fine so long as they don't hinder profits and share prices. "Eccentricities are welcome provided they do not have a detrimental effect on people's performance," warns Peter Honey in 50 Cautionary Tales for Managers. None of these authors ever mentions what the company he works for actually makes. Not once does Welch or Markert talk of quality of craftsmanship or the satisfaction of creativity; their sole interest is in growth, success and profits. Where the profits come from is immaterial. It could be cat food, computers or cars, any old stuff - as long as it makes money.

Given that only a tiny handful of us can ever "win", it is clear that the real function of these books is to act as sophisticated whips for slaves. The idea that we will one day be "successful" keeps us working hard. "Every call for productivity under the conditions chosen by capitalist economics is a call to slavery," wrote the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in his great 1967 book Traite de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations, whose title is a brilliant parody of these advice-to-a-young-tradesman-type books. "Nowadays ambition and the love of a job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission."

These architects of misery never exhibit the slightest concern for ecological issues: these are the sorts of guys who have been wrecking the planet, yet they present themselves as heroes. Nor, unsurprisingly, do they acknowledge the role of good fortune in business. They never say: I was just lucky in that, for 20 years, the markets went my way and I have no idea why.

We should be grateful, then, for Corinne Maier's Bonjour Laziness: why hard work doesn't pay. Written by a French intellectual who worked for many years for a big corporation, it picks up the Situationists' credo of "ne travaillez jamais". Maier exposes the reality behind the myth promoted by the rest of these books: the capitalist dream is, in fact, a nightmare for most. The good news is that, of all of these works, Bonjour Laziness is proving most popular, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in 30 countries. Maybe we are realising that the road Franklin led us down is a dead end.

Bilderberging it

2006-07-30T13:20:00.000+01:00

This from UKIP Uncovered...

A written question submitted to the European Commission by Jeffrey Titford MEP [UKIP], is as follows:

To ask the Commission whether Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes attended the Bilderberg Conference in Ottawa on 8-11 June 2006. If so, did she attend in her official capacity, as is implied by her listing on the official list of participants?

If she was present, please provide details of the items on the agenda to which she contributed (the items themselves and the substance of her contribution). What specific tasks was she given during the conference?

If Respect is the answer, it must have been a fu...

2006-07-27T22:56:00.000+01:00

Respect's Annual Conference applauds George Galloway by videolink. Meanwhile new Respect member W. Smith wonders "Is chess institutionally Islamophobic?"

If the only "radical" alternative to the BNP is Respect, I might as well leave the country now. Seriously, how can an organisation which wants to relive the Bolshevik daydream AND embrace political Islam going to do well outside of the Muslim ghettoes of a few inner cities?

Dave Osler's blog shows that the SWP's political trajectory is one which embraces Allah rather than Marx:

Socialist Worker on Somalia
So ... has Britain's largest revolutionary socialist organisation really adapted its politics to Islamism since establishing Respect?

Let's consider this portrayal of the recent takeover of Mogadishu by the Union of Islamic Courts, published in the latest Socialist Worker:

'For the first time for many years there is a sense of relief and hope among many people in Somalia,' we are told in the opening sentence, which pretty much sets the tone of the entire article. There is not one single word of critique, not one indication that this development is anything other than entirely positive.

True, it is incontestable that the UIC have considerable popular support. The SWP attributes this to what it sees as the organisation's quasi-social democratic politics. The UIC are depicted essentially as armed reformists, delivering pavement politics through the barrel of an AK-47:

'Key to the success of the UIC was the fact that it was already an established and accepted presence in local communities, with a demonstrated social welfare policy.

'Apart from bringing security to areas under its control, through its own militia and justice system, it had also set up farms, schools, water points, health clinics and orphanages.

'Although the UIC did not initially have strong popular support, there was a feeling that it upheld moral standards and discipline, and had a unifying and familiar ideology in Islam ...'

Read that again. Slowly. Upholding moral standards and discipline, eh? Sound chaps. Most rightwing Tories would approve. But is it truly the job of revolutionary socialists to cheerlead for such moral standards as forcing women to wear the veil and the amputation of the limbs of thieves?

It's also open to question whether or not the UIC are capable of mounting a challenge to the clan system, as the SWP maintains. All but one of the Islamic Courts are associated with one single clan, the Hawiye.

And class analysis is nowhere to be seen. What is the movement's social basis? In the interests of which classes does it operate? We are not told. An astonishing omission on the part of what still claims to be a Marxist publication.

Ultimately, the definitive evaluation of what the UIC represents, from a socialist perspective, will have to wait until it has been in power for some period of time. Let's just see what the future brings, although I have to say the portents don't look too promising.

But even as a preliminary assessment, the SWP's position is at the very least imbalanced. The article's final sentence explains why any sense of perspective has been lost:

'There is no doubt imperialism has suffered a blow.'

And that's all anyone needs to know.

Meanwhile, Tribune journalist Paul Anderson's blog shows that George Galloway would do well as a member of Ingsoc's Inner Party...

GEORGE GALLOWAY, STALINIST SCUMBAG – 2,453

My thanks to Ken Weller for alerting me to this, a nasty little piece by Galloway in...Counterpunch to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish civil war. It purports to be an appreciation of John Cornford, the communist poet who died while fighting for the International Brigade in Spain at the age of 21 – but it is laced with venom.

“But for a bullet in the brain on the Ebro,” he declares, “Rupert John Cornford might have loomed as large as George Orwell in the British left-wing lexicon.” Fair enough. I’m not a great fan of Cornford as a poet, but he’s undoubtedly worth reading (and Orwell thought so too). But then Galloway goes on:

Orwell would probably have informed on him to his bosses in British Intelligence. For Cornford was a Communist.

And he continues, a propos the volunteers for the International Brigades:

their memory has been sullied by Orwell's slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom.

This is disgusting Stalinist drivel. Orwell did not have “bosses in British Intelligence”, and he did not inform on anyone: the famous list he handed over in the late 1940s to his friend Celia Kirwan, then working for a Foreign Office propaganda operation set up by a democratic socialist Labour government, was of people he considered should not be approached to write for it because of their pro-Soviet sympathies. Big deal.

And Orwell did nothing to sully the memory of the International Brigade volunteers. He did expose the vile role of the Stalinists in suppressing the Spanish revolution in 1937 – and his disgust at the failure of the British left to recognise what they did remained with him throughout his life. But that is not the same thing. There is not a word against the International Brigades volunteers anywhere in his work. Indeed, he became friendly with at least two veterans of the brigades, Hugh Slater and Tom Wintringham – both of whom parted company with the Communist Party soon after their experience in Spain and played key roles in the Home Guard in 1940-41 when the CP was defending the Hitler-Stalin pact. In the leftist jargon of the time, which of course Orwell hated and would never have used, his attitude to the International Brigades was that they were lions led by jackals. Which is a bit like the ordinary members of the Respect coalition.

Thinking about the BNP

2006-07-27T22:13:00.000+01:00

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"
—Bertie Wooster speaking to Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, in The Code of the Woosters

As a race-mixer (although on the whole I prefer curvy blondes with...sorry, I'll stick to the point) I have no wish, particularly as I don't like being a hypocrite, to see the British National Party come to power. The fact that the BNP are doing better than any race-obsessed political party has done for decades shows what a state politics has got into here. The rise in support for the BNP in recent years is partly to do with "traditional" working class Labour voters seeing themselves betrayed by New Labour. At the same time, I think a fair share of BNP voters are "traditional" working class Conservative voters, who have been disorientated by the collapse of the Conservative Party since the early 1990s. Nick Griffin, the post-modernist Roderick Spode, is a well-spoken pulbic school & Cambridge educated middle-class type with a Tory background. It seems that the BNP see a Blair/Cameron clone, sacrificing some of the Party's traditional sacred cows, will get them somewhere politically.

To be frank, the response of "the Left" has been pretty pathetic towards the rise of the BNP. Just calling them "Nazis" and telling people not to vote BNP has hardly stopped them. Showing how awful BNP councillors are when they win office seems to be one way of making people think twice. However, there are a lot of issues where "the Left" hasn't a clue. No-one seems to see how multi-racial "England" sports teams embarrass the BNP. Also being an all-British party, does no-one on the left see that the mass flying of England flags at the time of the World Cup is potentially a challenge to how the BNP operates? Instead we get ridiculous claims that anyone who flies a Saint George flag is a de facto racist or BNP supporter. Patriotism is the antithesis of racism: will you need Nick Griffin to be given the keys to Number 10 before certain people realise this?

The following piece comes from the Socialist Unity website. It shows that some people on "the Left" have woken up.

Is the BNP Nazi? No, it's worse: it isn't, by Andrew McKibben

With the increased BNP vote in the last local elections, a chorus of 'these Nazis must be stopped' has gone up, along with suggestions concerning what organising tactics might be effective against it. Unfortunately, most such tactics are presently handicapped by a misapprehension about the BNP that leads well-intentioned activists into ineffective tactics. This suspicion is bolstered by the failure of the brave and sincere efforts of Stop the BNP (publisher of Searchlight magazine), Unite Against Fascism, the Anti-Nazi League, and others to stop the party's growth.

The problem? While it is morally satisfying to call the BNP Nazis, and while their ideology is indeed racist, xenophobic, and abhorrent, it's starting to become clear that this rather slippery political beast has in fact shed its old skin, and is no longer plausibly describable as a Nazi, or fascist, party at all. Why is this 'worse'? Because, although one must rejoice in the abandonment of this diabolical ideology by anyone, it also increases their chances of success.

The likelihood of real, live, goose-stepping Nazis actually winning much support in Britain is far less than that of some better-packaged and locally-palatable variety of racist extremism. Unfortunately, after 40 years (if you count its National Front predecessor) the BNP seems to have finally figured this out. So the Nazi business has been junked. This is logical: racial hatred is their only political bedrock, and the swastika is just one expendable way of expressing it.

Before I discuss the evidence they really have done this, it's important to remind ourselves that 'Nazi' isn't just a word to toss around, even at people who richly deserve any insult they get. Nazism is a real, historical, political ideology, like Marxism, with a specific content and specific criteria for who is one. It is National Socialism, the philosophy of the National Socialist German Workers Party. There's some leeway to include people who don't literally fit, but not every racist demagogue is a Nazi, not even remotely. Some, especially in foreign countries that fought Hitler in WWII, are even anti-Nazi.

Why care about being so precise? Because attacking the BNP for being Nazis will backfire, if they're not. It only invites them to prove to the public that they aren't, and, because this is now probably technically true, they can then just sit back, smile, and say to the public, 'See. Our opponents told you we were bad because we were Nazis, and we've now proved we're not Nazis. So we must not be bad. Furthermore, our opponents are liars and you can't believe anything else they say about us.'

This is not good. When the public hears, 'don't vote for them, they're Nazis,' and then, partly out of sheer titillation at the naughtiness of somebody daring to be such an evil thing, goes and looks at the BNP website and starts reading their propaganda, they will discover fairly quickly a group that has gotten rid of the old swastika trappings, and adopted the image of nice British patriots. If they are taken in, they may then conclude they're a legitimate party, merely being attacked by silly and hysterical left-wing cranks who exaggerate things.

I realise some readers will believe the BNP is still Nazi, and maybe they really have taken it deep enough underground that I'm fooled. But I think not, as some signs are just tell-tales. One of them is the reported expulsion of hardcore Nazis from the party, something loudly complained about on openly-Nazi websites, accompanied with howling accusations of betraying their cause directed at BNP chairman Nick Griffin. Another is the BNP's sudden change in attitude towards Jews, after having vilified them since the earliest days of the National Front. Basically, they now seem to be openly proclaiming they don't consider them evil anymore, and have even publicly mocked Nazi and other anti-Semitic ideas about Jewish world conspiracies and the like.

Take a look at this article by their chairman, for example:

http://www.bnp.org.uk/columnists/chairman2.php?ngId=30

Excerpt:

' If the neo-cons didn’t have the baggage-laden anti-Semites, especially in America, as bogeymen, they’d have to invent them… The neo-cons are mainly Jewish, but they are not “the Jews”. When it comes to Middle Eastern policy, they are a particular faction, an unofficial overseas agitprop department of Israel’s ruling Likud party. To oppose their war is not to oppose “the Jews”, but only one group of Jews and their Christian-Zionist and plutocrat allies….'

One could read the above words in the Guardian! Something is definitely going on. Or look at this article by John Bean, one of the longest-lived right-wing cranks in Britain, and a major BNP ideological guru:

http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/judeo_obsession.htm

Excerpt:

' … there is no factual basis for anti-Semitism, i.e. the belief that Jews are intrinsically our enemy. The worst one can truthfully say of the Jews is that they are intrinsically opportunistic. To survive in other people's countries for 2,000 years, they obviously have to be. But this doesn't make them intrinsically bad; only people who will, like anyone else, pursue their self-interest according to the circumstances of the time. We shouldn't surrender to their pursuit of self-interest . We should, naturally, pursue our own, but in a calm and rational way in the same manner as we deal with other foreign societies, without hatred, mythology, or hostile intent.'

Unless this is completely invented out of whole cloth, something fundamental has changed. And I suspect it isn't a complete put-on, as at least one (extreme right-wing) Zionist magazine seems to have picked up on it, and seems to believe it, or most of it:

http://www.think-israel.org/locke.bnp.html

Excerpt:

'… today [the BNP] is, by world standards, a fairly conventional right-wing populist ethno-nationalist party, having abandoned the fascistic trappings, tendency to violence, and weird obsessions that once characterized it. The party's transformation is not wholly complete as of this writing. Some of the rank-and-file membership is clearly not as far along as its leadership. But, after four years of reform, the BNP seems to have managed a decisive break with its past …The BNP's new ideological complexion is generally denied by its opponents, both on the left and on the establishment "right" … but it seems to be real. The accusations of "sell-out" hurled at present BNP leadership by devotees of the old ways make this clear, if nothing else does.'

Now a change like this doesn't just happen. I think some kind of deal has been done between the BNP and some extreme-right-wing Zionists. It's a pity that a people who suffered so much from fascism should produce fascists of their own, but we have all seen enough of Israel's behaviour in recent years to know that some Jews are not exempt from this.

It's obvious that the BNP's foaming-at-the-mouth Islamophobia must have something to do with this unexpected rapprochement. Even they are bright enough to appreciate the logic of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. They may, in fact, be rather jealous of the treatment Israel routinely hands out to its Muslim population on the West Bank. Or perhaps the anti-Semitic mind just needs someone to hate, and they just find Muslims a juicier target these days.

The BNP still says it's not pro-Israel – they claim to be isolationists, who don't want to side with either side – but one has to wonder, if they're resolutely uninterested in the whole thing, and simply want to ignore Jews entirely, why they've gone to the trouble of making sure everyone knows. The giveaway: they've made clear statements that they're against Britain's funding the Palestinian Authority, which is a de facto pro-Israel position if anything is, given that we currently do fund it, through the EU.

Maybe they've been paid to do this, maybe it's pure ideology, I don't know. But don’t be surprised if this apparent new alliance lasts. Israel and Zionists have been happy to do business with any number of extreme-right parties, from the Afrikaner Nationalists in apartheid South Africa to the Falangists in Lebanon to the Kuomintang in Taiwan. Historically, actual fascists (as opposed to Nazis) can go either way on the Jewish Question: some have been raving anti-Semites, others blasé about Jews, or sympathetic to fascistic elements in Zionism. Extremes do meet.

So should we simply substitute the word 'fascist' for 'Nazi' in anti-BNP campaigns? Unfortunately, I don't think the BNP is really fascist, either. Fascism means espousing a lot of things, like military glory and massive accumulation of state power, that the BNP sniffs at these days. Whether or not it is sincere, it has become so good at playing this tune that it has even managed to con a significant section of libertarian opinion in the UK, like Sean Gabb, into supporting it, at least tacitly. So calling it fascist suffers the same liability of calling it Nazi: it's too easy for them to convince people they're not.

In the end, I think our best bet is simply to classify the contemporary BNP as a right-wing populist racist and xenophobic party, of no stable ideological substance beyond that. Don't try to fit it into a box in which it doesn't really belong, and will wriggle out of if accused. The truth about it is bad enough, without having to dress it up in an ideological costume drama from 1936.

'Racist' is good enough for me, adding 'xenophobe' when one needs to elaborate. And, of course, there's always 'thuggish' and 'criminal'. This sheep smells bad enough without having to tell people it's really a wolf.

Yo! Is Ohio Big?

2006-07-27T20:59:00.000+01:00

Of course, it may be that life isn't fair because it's fixed. This is the article wrtten by Robert F. Kennedy Jr for Rolling Stone which makes a solid case for arguing that the 2004 US Presidential Election was stolen by the Bushites. Again, thanks to The Konformist.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting
ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John
Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., Rollingstone.com, Jun 01, 2006
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about
it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents,
sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election
watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls,
which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten
it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive
lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal
evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided
anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases
in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions,
did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington
Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy
theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no
evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that
something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of
the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their
ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the
Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to
file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul &
Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to
register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered
shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was
decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously
failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000
ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged
with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots
were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100
cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical
battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral
college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters
from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by
Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they
allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that
could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical
church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-
eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland
recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In
Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent
terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote
count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting
system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county
and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in
2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and
Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty
elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000
independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was
their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt
John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the
evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a
massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in
2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party
stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to
fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in
Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of
them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have
their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the
results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's
Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from
the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote
in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not
listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented
flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even
take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which
indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted
instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes --
enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft
reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral
abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their
ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the
wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of
state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm
terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even
the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as
dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father
of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and
votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in
those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They
stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November
2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and
actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the
mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by
their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy
favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact
science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are
thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which
voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the
future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an
action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate:
Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by
more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost
never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked
for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such
surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as
guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World
countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in
the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19)
And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the
Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor
Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities
in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had
commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an
embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story
meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results
from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers
that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote
count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the
mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were
their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom
Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004
election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't
work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to
be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news
organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -
- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22)
whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in
1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of
Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll,
Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) --
approximately six times larger than those normally used in national
polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus
or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks
were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed,
had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309
electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.
(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating
his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls
showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including
commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and
a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing
down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North
Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of
Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit
polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst
declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show
implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit
polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins
departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift
favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating
Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election
results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also
tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in
Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University
of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds
against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in
660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is
impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies
between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical
battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to
chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw
polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not
even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey
expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit
polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the
2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and
the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the
polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the
election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its
methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the
electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply
disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) --
displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that
skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent
nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's
leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder''
hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official
report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult
to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters
were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush
voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman
and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the
theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who
were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election
Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found
that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey --
compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The
data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate
it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit
polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In
precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote,
the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast,
in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the
exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a
pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the
ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data
that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes
Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states,
higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with
greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in
states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these
are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been
utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of
mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a
nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against
the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled
by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half
of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from
the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread
discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of
the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry.
The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky
numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those
surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received
sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified
tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds
against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually
irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the
experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would
have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had
accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman,
vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola
University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can
explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost
uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds,
are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote
shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The
state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since
Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with
television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to
register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled
to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than
to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage:
The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-
chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's
secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and
implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for
everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct
of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio,
he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate.
Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system
adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he
witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris,
the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.
(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) --
is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in
the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists,
he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief
cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans
employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly
denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and
during the 2004 election he used his official powers to
disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic
strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a
federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same
result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not
throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland
who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in
2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state
election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was
conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow
up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud,
Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in
Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.
(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that
outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and
anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes,
were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much
of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers
told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of
Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We
could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high.
Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever
happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan
attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim
as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone
interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact,
his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before
Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen
involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election
officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive
purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more
than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous
two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for
Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between
2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the
names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But
thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of
their constitutional right to vote -- often without any
notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the
polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more
than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only
7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely
disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only
one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day --
a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is
30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast
ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of
the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of
volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed
the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October
4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats
were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times
analysis before the election found that new registrations in
traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to
only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The
Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the
ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The
Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National
Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of
thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls
through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon
as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings
to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and
Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing
to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP
targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered
letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-
five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the
election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also
chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to
invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to
sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66)
Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic
strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond
to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the
letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college
students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than
1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But
the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new
registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being
stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the
election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at
Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands
of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election
official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that
anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right
to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out
impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very
addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to
the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky
County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to
investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)
--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory --
Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11,
2004.

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election
Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.

3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,''
June 2005, page 11.

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside
U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration
Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former
workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job
was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis,
MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico
State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,''
Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of
the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots &
Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States
Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited
throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights
Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June
22, 2005. Page 5

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998
and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The
Hill, November 4, 2004.

19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New
York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,''
Associated Press, December 11, 2004.

Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive
Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December
4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential
Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official
Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.

23) Mitofsky International

24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the
Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004
Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of
the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.''
FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey
Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll
Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005.
Page 3.

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00
p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data
Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count
Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most
Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.

43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,''
Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus
Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger
(Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates
Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-
Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About
Delivering Ohio to Bush.''

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of
Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al.
v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of
the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers,
Jr.), January 5, 2005.

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton
counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of
Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade,
January 9, 2005.

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing
States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural
Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The
Washington Post, October 29, 2004.

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR,
All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.

66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George
Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason
for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October
27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of
State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and
Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County
Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,''
The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

They Saved Reagan's Brain...Yo!

2006-07-27T19:59:00.000+01:00

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."- HL Mencken.

Those of us (I guess that I speak for not just myself) who think that the current President of the United States is several sandwiches short of a full picnic were given rather a lot of ammunition by The Chimp's behaviour at the recent G8 Summit in Russia. The whole "Yo Blair!" routine was beyond embarrassing. In previous ages I'm sure wars were declared for less.

All the stuff below is taken from The Konformist. Quite arguably, all very unfair, but life's not fair is it? Otherwise, how could Bush possibly become President?

The Ugly Truth About the President
By Cenk Uygur, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on July 19, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/39164/

You know it, I know it and the American people know it. But everyone
is afraid to say it. They say it privately, but people are afraid of
saying it publicly because you will be branded as a liberal, elite,
intellectual snob. But believe me, you don't have to be an
intellectual to see how painfully stupid our president is.

Just look at the conversation he is having with world leaders at the
G-8 summit. Mikes picked up the casual talk between the world
leaders. Forget that Bush appears to have three sandwiches in his
mouth while talking. Forget that he calls out to the Prime Minister
of Britain as if he is Flounder in "Animal House." Forget that he
uses profanity. I don't give a shit about those things.

I thought it was ridiculous that people made fun of George H. W,
Bush for vomiting on the Japanese Prime Minister. What was he going
to do? He had to puke, so he puked. It happens to the best of us,
and more importantly, has nothing to do with his intelligence or how
capable he is as a leader.

But his son's verbal vomit does have a lot to do with his ability to
lead this country and the world. What I found to be the most damning
is the least quoted part of Bush's comments. As you read this
transcript, remember that this is not a small child talking, but the
President of the United States of America:

The camera is focused elsewhere and it is not clear whom Bush is
talking to, but possibly Chinese President Hu Jintao, a guest at the
summit.

Bush: "Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight. Go to the
airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are
you going? Home?

Bush: "This is your neighborhood. It doesn't take you long to get
home. How long does it take you to get home?"

Reply is inaudible.

Bush: "Eight hours? Me too. Russia's a big country and you're a big
country."

At this point, the president seems to bring someone else into the
conversation.

Bush: "It takes him eight hours to fly home."

He turns his attention to a server.

Bush: "No, Diet Coke, Diet Coke."

He turns back to whomever he was talking with.

Bush: "It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours. Russia's
big and so is China."

Russia's big and so is China??????? This guys sounds like a third
grader. Do you know anyone who would have a conversation like this
with their neighbor, let alone a business associate, let alone a
world leader? Who's proud to know that Russia is big and so is China?

Can anyone now credibly claim that Bush is secretly working on a
master plan behind the scenes and that he's just playing cowboy for
the cameras? I hope the master plan doesn't involve figuring out how
long it takes to get to China.

If someone is this ignorant, they're usually embarrassed and try not
to talk much. But this guy is so dumb he has no idea how dumb he is.
This sounds like a conversation you might have with a child, a
mentally challenged child. Johnny, do you know how big Russia is?
How about China?

This would all be unfortunate if George was your dentist, or worse
yet, your accountant. But he is the leader of the free world. This
man makes life or death decisions every day. If you say you're not
scared about that, you're lying.

Would you let him do the books for your business? Would you trust
your company in his hands for eight years? (No matter how Republican
you are, you know you just said no to that question.) Would you
trust him to be your kids' guidance counselor and take his advice
seriously? If your kids were in the Army and he was their field
commander, would you feel good about putting their lives in his
hands?

Come on, no one is crazy enough to say yes to that. Yet, he has all
of our lives in his hands. The emperor has no clothes. The emperor
has no clothes. It's about time someone in the mainstream media said
it.

In the old empires, there would be a lot of marriages between the
royal families. And from time to time, these inter-family marriages
would produce a mentally challenged son who would inherit the
throne. This would set the empire back for hundreds of years. I'm
not saying anything, I'm just saying. Russia is big and so is China.

The Democrats for a long time have felt embarrassed about pointing
out the obvious. The emperor has no brain. This is what I can't
understand about the Democrats, they're always playing patty cakes
while the Republicans are ripping their face off. John Kerry should
have stood at the lectern during the debates and pointed to George
Bush and said, "The leader of this country has to be the best and
the brightest. If any of you think that he is the best and the
brightest America has to offer, go ahead and vote for him!"

The theory is that people would be turned off by that. The theory
assumes that people are also idiots and they love their cohorts.
That is simply not true. Everyone understands that they have a
friend they'd like to go fishing with and a friend they can trust to
look after their affairs - and they're not necessarily the same guy.
And that your fishing buddy might not be a great choice for
President of the United States of America.

Kerry should have embarrassed Bush, made people feel sorry for him.
It would have hurt in the short run and given him a temporary
downward blip in the numbers, but in the end, when people went into
that voting booth, they would have felt pity for Bush - in that
scenario, Kerry wins easily. Nobody votes for someone they pity.

Unfortunately, right now we are in the position of being pitied by
the rest of the world. We have third grader for a President. And
worse yet, the Vice President has him convinced he is the second
coming of Winston Churchill. Scared yet?

Cenk Uygur is co-host of The Young Turks, the first liberal radio
show to air nationwide.

*****

Hughes for America
Our dumb president
By Joseph Hughes
Jul 18, 2006
http://houseoflabor.tpmcafe.com/blog/joseph_hughes

You know, every time the president's intelligence comes up for
debate, the right wing is quick to tell everyone that, in fact,
President Bush isn't an ignorant moron. What's more, not only is he
not an ignorant moron, but he's also not an arrogant boor, his
behavior on the world stage not a cause for embarrassment. He's a
Yale man, after all, with a Harvard MBA to boot! Well today, I'm
calling "bullshit" on the right wing. The president is all of those
things ... and more.

The ignorance, the boorishness, the embarrassing behavior were all
on display at this year's G8 Summit, which concluded Monday. Between
the president's stuffing a roll in his mouth to his use of "shit" in
an exchange with Tony Blair to his witless banter with world leaders
to his more-than-awkward surprise "massage" of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, our dumb president has never been dumber or more
embarrassing. Or, for that matter, more AWOL when the world needs
our leadership most. But that's alright, his defenders will say,
he's just being himself, being authentic. Great. Our president is an
authentic jackass.

It was the "shit" heard 'round the world. In fact, it drew top
billing with many news outlets at a time when the world appears to
be unravelling as we speak. Bush, who, like Blair, didn't know their
conversation was being recorded, called the British prime minister
over at the luncheon that closed the summit. "Blair," Bush
asked, "what are you doing? You leaving?" When Blair shifted the
conversation to trade negotiations, Bush shifted it back, thanking
Blair for a sweater he gave the president as a gift, most likely for
his recent birthday. Then, the conversation shifted to the Middle
East. After a brief exchange, and while continuing to talk with his
mouth full of what appeared to be a roll, the president said, "See,
the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to
stop doing this shit, and it's over."

While using profanity and speaking with your mouth full are by no
means nothing new - just ask my girlfriend, who could tell you both
have been a part of my daily repertoire for years - I'm not the
president. I'm not this nation's top ambassador to the rest of the
planet. I'm not the public face of the United States of America. I'm
just an average American and a blogger. I write things about people
ranging from morons like Brad Stine and Ann Coulter to role models
like Edward R. Murrow and Al Gore. I don't have my finger on the
nuclear (or the "nucular") trigger. I don't travel in Air Force One,
nor do I have a Secret Service detail. And I don't attend summits
where I'm expected to, at the bare minimum, act like I've been there
before. But Bush is all of these things; I'd just love to be able to
dress him up and take him out without him embarrassing himself - or
us.

So the president said "shit" and couldn't hold a conversation
without stuffing his face. We've all done it. But what's as
concerning to me, if not more, was the manner by which the president
spoke with his fellow world leaders in an unguarded moment caught on
tape. Hint: Like an idiot. When asked by someone, most likely an
aide, something about whether or not the president wanted a prepared
statement to close the meeting, Bush replied, "No. Just gonna make
it up. I'm not going to talk too damn long like the rest of them.
Some of these guys talk too long." Then, the president shifted his
conversation to, quite likely though the exchange wasn't on camera,
Chinese President Hu Jintao. "Gotta go home," Bush said. "Got
something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and
go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home?" Continuing, Bush
added, "This is your neighborhood. It doesn't take you long to get
home. How long does it take you to get home?"

Though the reply was inaudible, Bush then said, "Eight hours? Me
too. Russia's a big country and you're a big country." As the
Washington Post indicates, it's at this point that the president
apparently brought someone else into the exchange. "It takes him
eight hours to fly home," Bush said, telling a server that he wanted
a Diet Coke. "It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours.
Russia's big and so is China." Russia's big and so is China? Just
gonna make it up? Is he, as Cenk Uygur said, a third grader? Do you
feel a lot safer knowing that you voted for a man whose idea of
tableside conversation is asking world leaders how long their ride
home is and marveling at the size of their countries?

When he wasn't showing his grasp of global geography, the president
was busy doing things that would normally trigger a workplace sexual
harassment workshop. Cameras captured the president walking behind
Merkel and giving her an impromptu shoulder massage. Her look, which
mirrors the look of any unsuspecting female in a bar when a drunk
gets touchy-feely, was priceless. Bush's look, coincidentally,
matched the look of that drunk. I mean, what the fuck? Somehow, I
don't see former presidents Bush or Clinton doing this with Helmut
Kohl. Nor, also, do I see either Bush or Clinton asking their
secretary of state for permission to use the restroom, as this
president has in the past. But a massage? Seriously? I know these
summits can be tiring, tedious affairs, but does that fact warrant
our president acting like the office letch? I doubt it.

Let's face facts: Our president is dumb. He doesn't know what he's
talking about. He doesn't know how to act in public. And it's always
been that way. It's been more than 70 years since "... the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself". More than 40 since "... ask
not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your
country." And, in that time, we've gone from the measured words of
true statesmen to "Russia's big and so is China." Let me be the
latest to ask: What the hell happened? When did flipping pancakes,
taking hunting trips or throwing a football become more important
for our presidential candidates than knowing what the hell they were
doing? More specifically, when did we, as Americans, decide that
that was what we wanted out of our presidents?

I'd sure like to know, because, as I've said before, "Isn't it a tad
insane that we care more about whether we can have a beer with our
president than whether we think he can save us from a fucking
disaster or actually knows the difference between his asshole and a
hole in the ground when it comes to foreign policy?" Who cares if
the president would be a great guy to have a drink with? Hell, this
one isn't even supposed to have a drink. Or, maybe he's not supposed
to but he has, which would go a long way to explaining Bush's
behavior at the G8 Summit. Either way, he was an embarrassment. And
he always has been.

***

Bush - Stoned? Drunk? Medicated? Retarded? Presidential Tester for
the Pharmaceutical Industry? You Decide........
Wed, 07/19/2006
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Ruth Lopez

Bush is fried. He's either drinking, smoking pot, medicated, or some
combination of all of them. Either that or the man has taken a one-
way trip to crazy town.

Watch his gibberish at the G8, especially the bizarre stuff about
how long the plane flights to various countries are. If you take out
the comments of the other leaders (because they actually sound
intelligent and not like drunken bar talk) and just read what Bush
says, he sounds just like someone who is more than half looped.

"Gotta go home. Gotta do sumthin tonight. Get ona plane. Go home.
It's a long flight. How long is your flight? That's a long flight.
Your country is big. His country is big too." Retarded or stoned,
you decide.

This is the kind of mindless bar drivel that drunks who can't shut
up drone on with. They just keep running their mouths, totally
disconnected from the non-verbal clues of the people around them.

Watch the press conference where Bush couldn't stop talking about
the pig roast. It didn't matter what anyone asked him, he just kept
saying whatever his addled brain was looping on, in this case, the
pig. Typical stoned behavior. It reminded me of the time Bush went
to Canada and couldn't get off the subject of the mouth one of the
Canadian Prime Minister's staff members! "You've got a purty mouth."
Not once but several times. "You've sure got a purty mouth."
And, "Your mouth is prettier than my Scott's mouth." (The poor guy's
name was Scott.) Who does this? Outside of bars or institutions, I
mean.

Watch Bush's body language at the table with Blair talking over his
shoulder. Bush is sitting, almost slouched back in his chair, like a
guy at a barbeque on his second or third 6 pack, chomping on his
food with his mouth open, and making minimal effort to intelligently
keep up his end of the conversation by occasionally throwing in
something he mistakenly thinks is sufficient.

Watch the body language of the other leaders and the way they react
to him. With the exception of Blair, they act very restrained and
controlled around Bush, maintaining a public facade of geniality
while holding back from actually being engaged with him. What seems
to be obsequiousness from Blair may actually be him simply trying to
get through the fog around Bush's brain to penetrate with a little
reality without setting him off. Meanwhile, Bush's social modus
operandi with everyone, including other world leaders, is to overuse
forced jocularity and pretend intimacy to convey a relationship that
does not exist.

When he walked up behind the German leader and started giving her an
unsolicited shoulder massage, her body tightened up and she actually
grimaced. She wasn't enjoying that, she was enduring it. Before that
Bush can be seen wandering aimlessly around the room while the rest
of the grown-ups were conducting the business they were there for.

This is not normal behavior. Watch him closely sometime when he's
having trouble staying coherent and you can see his eyes come in and
out of focus. He does it at the table when Blair is speaking to him
and he's looking out across the room as he chomps open-mouthed on
his food. This is a distinct change from Bush's speech and behavior
at other times. In fact, radical variations in his behavior and
speech can be seen by watching him when he is unscripted. Sometimes
he's coherent, other times he looks like staying coherent long
enough to get a sentence out is almost beyond him, (these are the
times he seems to get mean-drunk angry when anyone dares to question
him), and sometimes he is just off-the-wall bizarre.

I'll say it again; the man is plastered, stoned, or medicated. This
goes a long way to explaining how he is so incredibly disengaged
from war, disasters and their destructive effects: he is too out of
it to relate. Drunks and addicts are incapable of empathy,
everything is about them and their next high. When Cheney shot that
guy, Bush acted like he had just found out about it days after it
happened. Same with New Orleans. Bodies were rotting in the ruins of
the city, when Bush had been warned that it could, and likely would
happen, happen, and Bush's response was to reminisce about partying.

There are bizarre internet rumors of a personal portable toilet for
Bush to use when overseas, (to prevent foreign analysis of his
excrement) http://www.rense.com/general72/fexc.htm. Normally I would
blow them off as some of the wilder of conspiracy theories, but
watching Bush's actions over the last week, I can't help but wonder,
to what lengths would they go to hide it if it were true? If he is
too incapacitated?

What would they do to keep up the appearance of his functionality?
Who could or would step up and do anything about it if he is unfit
to serve? The people around him are not people willing to part with
the power they have granted themselves, and that's an
understatement. And with Bush at the top of the chain and out of the
loop, or just plain looped, who is holding anybody below him
accountable? His staff? Congress and the Media have abdicated their
responsibilities, who will do it?

Hell, they're all trying to give him, and therefore themselves, even
more unlimited power than they have already taken. As long as they
can keep up the illusion that he's functioning.........you decide.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Phew!)

2006-07-27T19:23:00.000+01:00

One consequence of the extremely good weather we've had for weeks is that I didn't see as much of the World Cup as I would have liked to. There were a few very good games which I missed, but at the same time there were some rubbish matches (always are every tournament) and I would have resented watching an awful game when I could have been in the park getting browner.

I don't have a TV in my flat. To be honest, apart from the World Cup I can't say I miss having a TV. I did read a survey in the paper a few months back saying that "the young" (basically anyone less than 25) are giving up the goggle box for the internet (I read something in Canada last summer along the same lines and my limited viewing of Canadian TV makes me very sympathetic towards young Canadians swapping TV for the Net!). I'd rather look at something interesting on the Net than anything on the TV. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic here, but perhaps the only TV that will really survive the challenge of the Net is the good stuff: good comedy, good documentaries, good drama etc...and the World Cup.

Something worth subscribing to on the Net is The Friday Thing, which is sent out as an e-mail every Friday (quelle surprise!). Basically it's a quite witty commentary on current politics & culture, and I like this piece from a few weeks back on how dire ITV, the main commercial channel here, is these days.

ITV: RIP

'And now on ITV1, in place of tonight's John Pilger-fronted
condemnation of government Middle-Eastern policy, Ant and Dec
present Emmerdale Coronation Heartbeat Love Island. Starring
David Jason. Forever.'

Poor ITV.

And poor the viewing public.

The observant amongst you, i.e. the small percentage of our
readership that switches their PC off every now and then for an
evening of hellish boredom in front of the idiot box, may have
noticed that British commercial television is in crisis. A crisis
they'd rather not talk about, pointing gamely to huge soap
ratings, claiming that everything is peachy, just as long as
another Saturday night hit rolls along.

Around the edges, though, it's all looking frayed. They're skint.

If you stay up late enough, you will find ITV's night-time
schedule devoted to 'ITV Play', a dreadful, brain-melting quiz
show that's chewing up bandwidth on digital television. A true
cash cow, once-principled public service broadcaster Channel Four
is also on the bandwagon, cunningly allowing punters to pay for
the programming, a quid a go.

You might also notice that kids' programming on ITV is
disappearing, just as fast as Ofcom slashes public service
requirements. These days, World Cup notwithstanding, children
arrive home from school just in time to catch the end of their
programmes, in lieu of something dreadful from the archives and
the delights of Joe Pasquale. Or, they could switch to the CITV
channel, but nobody ever does. Fred Dinenage died for nothing, on
a weekly basis.

The problem ITV has with kids' TV is a simple one. It costs
money, for very little return. They would much rather repeat
'Heartbeat' ad nauseam, as it does at least guarantee advertiser
income, than innovative children's content, where sales are
limited. Public service or not, unless they fashion a hit of
'Teletubbies' proportions, childrens' TV just doesn't make
business sense. A digital channel, on the other hand, might,
simply because repeat fees are minuscule.

The digital explosion means that the market is spread ever
thinner. Why watch a single episode of a pisspoor cartoon import
on ITV when they're wall-to-wall elsewhere? Then there's
Internet, computer games, mobile video-on-demand, real life.
Children, after all these years, really have switched off their
TV sets and gone and done something less boring instead. In our
day, the only alternative to 'Magpie' we had were pages 200-230
of the Great Universal catalogue.

Speaking at a recent get-together for industry bigwigs, grande
fromage followed chief executive saying that the only way to
survive this increasingly cut-throat environment is to make and
broadcast your own high-quality content. ITV, trying to save a
£100 million shortfall, is doing exactly the opposite, closing
in-house production, to the despair of writers, production staff
and ultimately, viewers. In an ideal world, then, they would have
continued making half-decent programmes, and not pissed £120
million up the wall on Friends Reunited.

Friends Reunited. What were they thinking? If we had 120 million
burning a hole in our pocket, we would have spent it on something
useful, such as 12 billion penny chews, or Burkina Faso. We would
not, except perhaps for stalky purposes, have bought a database
of virtually every adult in the UK, who having discovered that
everybody else in their class is now married and 'really enjoying
myself in the world of industrial plastic's!', never logs back
in, ever again. It's like buying the entire works of Ron Jeremy
on DVD, and trying to explain it to the wife as you sneak it into
the house:

'What's that under your arm?'

'Errr... nothing.'

'No, no... you can't fool me, there's something hidden under
your coat.'

'OK, I own up. But it was a bargain, and really, really
useful.'

'How much?'

'mumble mumble 120 million mumble...'

'Oh God. You've bought Friends Reunited, haven't you? Why
can't you just buy porn like normal people?'

'Sorry.'

'Sorry? It's too late now. What are we going to do with it?
You realise we can't simply make a programme about C-list
celebrities getting their old school-mates together, saying
through gritted teeth how great they are whilst building a new
sports pavilion?'

'Why not?'

'Because we're already doing it. And it's shit.'

'Ah.'

'I don't suppose you can get our money back?'

'Bloke inna pub.'

So: entire programme budget gone on shonky web investments, and
there's only so much Ant and Dec the public can take before
there's a baying hate mob at the doors and their prize asset is
hanging upside-down from a lamp post. Here's hoping.

The whole debacle is made worse by government dithering on a junk
food advertising ban. Of course, this is first-order state
nannying, having created the moral panic of TV-bound fat kids
watching Spongebob eased between adverts for Turkey Twizzlers and
Chocolate-flavoured lard, they're now coming to our rescue to Ban
This Immoral Filth. As CITV exists solely from high-fat, added-
sugar income, they might as well give up when this well-meaning
but knee-jerk ban finally happens. So they will, and personal
responsibility dies another death.

Wheels are already in motion, with government quietly weighing
and measuring every eleven-year-old in the country - without
parental consent, we might add - to produce the statistics they
need to prove that we are breeding a nation of blobs. There are,
of course, just as many fat adults as fat kids, but there's no
rush to follow up 'Jamie's School Dinners' with 'Jamie's Pub
Lunches Followed By Six Pints Of Vodka and the World's Biggest
Kebab'.

Gone will be original drama for teens, and home-produced,
imaginative educational programmes for pre-schoolers. That's
business, kids. If only they made programmes that reflected these
harsh realities:

- 'My Parents Are Accountants'
- 'Sesame Wall Street'
- 'Rent-a-Groat'
- 'Tracy Broker'

Still, we all get to blame fat-tongued Jamie Oliver, which, in
the short term, is fine by us.

And don't get us started on the BBC.

BTW has there EVER been a decent ITV sit-com? (Anyone who suggests "Never The Twain" will get 500 pieces of spam in their inbox per day until the day they die...)

Blogger's block beaten

2006-07-27T19:13:00.000+01:00

At last I'm back blogging. Apols for the radio silence. The main reason I haven't blogged is the weather. It has been seriously hot during recent weeks, so in my spare time the allure of going to the park and getting a serious suntan has somehow beaten the idea of sitting at home and typing away.

Anyhow, I have plenty of stuff to post up.

A Canuckophile Writes...

2006-06-14T12:03:00.000+01:00

Below is the article I wrote for the Viewsletter of Devolve! back in January and has just been published. I've been made part of the editorial team and so have to supply articles as often as possible. Anyhow, I hope the piece below is of interest and/or use...

Canadian lessons for English Regionalism?

There are two main impulses behind me writing this article. First, I am a Canuckophile. I have been to Canada (in particular, Vancouver) several times in recent years, and on the whole I like Canada and the Canadians.

Second, I think Canada’s political system should be of interest to English regionalists, in that it combines a British system of government with a federal system. One problem English regionalists have had in recent years is rebutting the claim that regionalism is “unEnglish” or “unBritish” (when it is really only anti-Norman!). Rebutting such claims have not been helped by a tendency to put forward models for a federal/regionalist England/Britain based upon European federal models, most notably Germany and Spain. Consequently, it is easy for anti-regionalists to condemn regionalists as being part of a “Euro-plot” to break up Blighty (where’s my cheque from Brussels then?). However, much of the sting could be drawn from such accusations if regionalists could show that a British style system of government is compatible with federalism/regionalism. Hence, the importance of Canada.

This article barely touches the surface of Canadian politics. I have left out a lot. I will briefly discuss the evolution of Canada’s system of government, followed by some suggestions about the applicability of Canada’s system to us.

The Canadian System of Government: An Overview

The preamble to the 1867 British North America Act (BNA) that created the modern Canadian state stated that Canada was to have a “Constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom.” In many ways Canada’s system of government is still very similar to that we live under. The British Monarch is head of state, represented by the Governor-General. The Canadian Parliament consists of a House of Commons, with MPs elected by the first-past-the-post electoral system, and an appointed Senate. Canada’s supreme judicial body is the Supreme Court.

However, Canada is also a federal state. The 1867 BNA created a union of four British colonies (the present day provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec) to make a “Dominion of Canada”. Canada was legislated into existence by Westminster at the request of Canada’s colonial legislatures, fearing that they would be swallowed up by a resurgent, post-Civil War USA. Since then Canada has come to incorporate the provinces of Manitoba (1870), British Columbia, Prince Edward Island (both 1871), Alberta, Saskatchewan (both 1905) & Newfoundland (1949), while incorporating three territories run by the Federal government: Northwest Territories (1870) Yukon (1898) and Nunavut (1999). Each province has its own single chamber parliament and supreme court.

How much power do the provinces have in relation to central government? The BNA is different from most other federal constitutions in that it listed the powers allocated to the provinces and left the rest to the centre. The BNA created a federal system in which the central government had a clear preponderance of power over the provinces. This was deliberate. Canada was meant to be a highly centralised federal union, as the American Civil War was seen as a consequence of having a too decentralised federal system. With foreign and defence policy decided in London, central government was left with exclusive jurisdiction over trade, commerce and criminal law; the right to any form of tax; and anything not specifically reserved to the provinces was to be part of a general federal power to legislate for the “peace, order and good government of Canada.” Furthermore, Section 56 of the BNA gave the central government the “power of disallowance”; enabling it to annul provincial legislation it disapproved of.

In contrast, provincial governments had jurisdiction over “all matters of a strictly local or private nature in the province”: hospitals, charities, local works, property and civil rights and municipal institutions. Hence, from the very beginning, local government in Canada has been the creature of provincial, not national, government. As for revenue creation, under the BNA provincial governments had the power to raise direct taxation and to use “shop, saloon, tavern, auctioneers and other licences.”

Despite the best intentions of the BNA’s architects, Canada now has one of the most decentralised federal unions in the world. This has occurred despite there being no mechanism in the BNA to amend the relationship between the provinces and the centre. The move towards a decentralised federal system began in 1892 when the British Privy Council, which was Canada’s Supreme Court until 1949, explicitly repudiated the notion that provincial governments were subordinates of central government. Furthermore, in 1895 the Privy Council’s Judicial Committee ruled that the central government could only exercise its residuary powers in wartime. Since 1867 there have been a number of decentralising and centralising forces within Canada. Pushing Canada towards greater decentralisation has been varying patterns across the provinces of economic development; a lack of a strong Canadian identity; and the presence of largely French-speaking Quebec. The increase in provincial governments’ powers since 1867 has also been helped by the increasing importance of healthcare and direct taxation.

Moves to establish a more centralised federal system have been aided by efforts over the years to establish national standards in social services and civil rights, as well as a desire to protect Canada’s economy and culture from US domination. In 1941 central government obtained exclusive rights to raise both income and corporation tax. After 1945 tax-sharing arrangements were made with the provinces, which included complex equalisation arrangements for the poorer provinces. The exception was Quebec, with the central government obliged eventually to agree an abatement of central income tax in order to allow Quebec to raise its own taxes.

After much wrangling, and rejection by Quebec, the 1982 Canada Act came into existence, containing a complex amending formula which works on the principle that the provinces and central government must agree on changes to the division of powers between the centre and the provinces. The modern Canadian system can be seen as a contract between two levels of government, with neither level being able to change the terms of the contract on its own. However, with Quebec rejecting the Canada Act, more years of tortuous negotiations between the centre and the provinces followed, to try and find a way of addressing Quebec’s concerns. However, too many Canadians rejected the so-called “Meech Lake” and “Charlottestown” Accords in the late 1980s and early 1990s for these proposals to be viable and the narrow rejection of Quebec independence in the 1995 Referendum means that the future of centre-province relations in Canada is very much in cold storage.

In the meantime, relations between provincial and local governments have hardly been harmonious. As mentioned previously, under both the BNA and the 1982 Canada Act, sub-provincial government in Canada is the creature of the provinces. There are over 4,600 municipalities in Canada, responsible for policing, fire protection, roads, public transport, water supply and sewerage, land use, economic development, parks, recreation, libraries and other cultural facilities. However, the evolution of provincial-local relations has meant mostly increasing provincial supervision, influence and control. For instance, in Ontario in the 1990s almost 400 municipalities, around 45% of the total number on the province, were abolished. In response, since the early 1990s municipal associations in a number of provinces have pushed for provincial charters that would force provincial governments to recognise the existence of a separate level of local government. Combined with grass roots opposition to the merger/abolition of municipalities [i.e. “In spite of Quebec Liberal Party rigging the vote (a 35% hurdle required) 15 former towns voted on June 20 to de-merge from their respective megapoli after being forced to merge contrary to the wishes of their citizens.” ANY TIME NOW #20 Summer 2004. A Canadian evolutionary anarchist magazine at http://www.atnzine.net] there has been limited success is stopping the provinces overwhelming local government beneath them, but this has been very much against a centralising grain.

Lessons for English Regionalism?

At the moment, just to get people aware that it is possible to reconcile a British style political system with federalism is possibly enough. This brief overview of Canada should be supplemented with information about other English-speaking countries with federal systems. What about Australia, New Zealand etc? However, at some point professional anti-regionalists will start to pull holes in any federal model even from places that have the Queen’s head on its currency!

I think that Canada’s applicability rests a certain deal on whether we want a Federal Britain or a Federal England. Quebec is a distinct society in a way that Scotland and Wales are. However, even quite enlightened Canadians I’ve met both over there and elsewhere seem bored senseless with the debates over Quebec’s future. If people here see a Federal Britain as being like a Federal Canada, with endless debate over Scotland and Wales’ place (if any) within it, I think a lot of people will plump for the status quo. On the other hand, if we want a Federal England, such problems would disappear. There are differences between the different parts of Canada ie “Western alienation”, particularly in Alberta, and there are various separatist groups, but I think the primary identity in Canada outside of Quebec is definitely Canadian.

The best aspect of Canada’s federal system is that it recognises that the Provinces cannot have their powers limited or extended by central government without the mutual consent of both sides. If we had a constitutional model like Canada’s it would have been impossible to abolish the GLC and Metropolitan County Councils in the 1980s.

The worst aspect is that that the provinces are able to interfere in local government with impunity. One of the factors that led to the “No” vote against a regional assembly in the North East in November 2004 was the fear that the assembly would take powers away from local councils. With Canada’s model the possibility of the provinces taking away all the powers of local government is enshrined in the Constitution. Despite the considerable leeway for the Provinces under the Canadian system, it can quite legitimately seen as a very “top-down” model of federalism, reflecting the centralist impulses contained in the original constitution. Like its British parent, the Canadian system of government still has no place for direct democracy (referendums occur when national or provincial governments want them to happen) and hangs onto a first-past-the-post electoral system despite having four main parties (Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois).

To conclude, I think the Canadian example of federal government is good for English Regionalists, simply because it shows that a federal system is compatible with “the British model of democracy”. However, unless the Canadians tackle the gaping “democratic deficit” soon, which appears unlikely for now, English Regionalists will have to draw upon other models and their own ideas for further inspiration.

Sources

My overall understanding of Canada’s system of government came from three main sources:

Patrick Malcolmson & Richard Myers (2002) The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Parliamentary Government in Canada (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadway Press);
Bernard Burrows & Geoffrey Denton (1980) Devolution or Federalism? Options for a United Kingdom (London: Macmillan); &
Wikipedia, particularly its sections on “Politics of Canada” & “Provinces & Territories of Canada.”

For understanding local government in Canada my main source was C.Richard Tindal & Susan Nobes Tindal (2004) Local Government in Canada (Scarborough, Ontario: Nelson).

For helping me towards my conclusions I must tip my hat to the comments of long-standing Canadian Anarchist Larry Gambone (http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com) about Canada’s federal system. To understand where Canada is politically I would also recommend reading “Limits of Political Parties”, a chapter in Naomi Klein’s 2002 collection of essays Fences and Windows (London, Flamingo), pp.228-233:

“Listen to the most economically and socially excluded Canadians and you hear an idea absent from the mainstream left: a deep distrust of the state.”

Save England- Destroy The Two Party System!

2006-06-06T20:18:00.000+01:00

Almost as daft as those Labour people who believe that Gordon Brown will usher in a new dawn for socialism are those Tories who think David Cameron will lead Britain out of the EU. This piece from the UKIP Uncovered blog should be enough to disabuse such notions:

Thursday, April 27, 2006: EU Withdrawalists banned from Tory front bench

A very important blinkered policy statement, linked here, in yesterday's Daily Telegraph begins as follows:

David Cameron threw down the gauntlet to Eurosceptic Tory MPs yesterday by declaring that anyone who advocated withdrawal from the European Union would not serve on his front bench.

On the eve of the launch of a pressure group promoting withdrawal, the Tory leader effectively warned backbenchers not to get involved if they valued their careers...

Tony Tony Tony!! Out Out Out!!

2006-06-06T18:23:00.000+01:00

It goes without saying that I'll be happy if/when Tony Blair leaves 10 Downing Street, but the whole atmosphere of reducing politics to the rise and fall of individuals at the moment reminds me a lot of the late 1980s. Then people on "the Left" were desperate to get Margaret Thatcher out. Hence the famous slogan "Maggie Maggie Maggie!! Out Out Out!!" It seems to me (hence the title of this post) that matters have reached the same point with Tony Blair. (I'm pretty sure the "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!..." chant was a product of the Socialist Workers' Party. In the mid-1990s I distinctly remember an SWP poster asking "Why Doesn't Blair Fight The Tories?" Perhaps because he is one, you daft gits....) Basically the line is that anyone is better than Thatcher/Blair. In the Thatcher case, we got John Major and in Blair's case...

I think Gordon Brown is a shoe-in as the next Labour leader. Various odds and sods are sometimes put forward in the media as a Blairite challenger to the post once the Dear Leader has ascended to Heaven but all of them are pretty interchangeable men in suits. Brown is the last senior mainstream Labour figure who seems to have any ideas of his own (the late Robin Cook was the only other one in recent years who had seemed to have read a non-fiction book with no pictures in it since 1997).

However it seems to me a lot of Labour Party people, mesmerised by Brown's statements about abolishing global poverty and using the words "socialism" and "comrades" on Labour and trade union platforms, think he will lead them towards a new democratic socialist path. It just ain't going to happen! As novelist and one-time New Labour confidante Robert Harris wrote last month in The Guardian:

...there seems to be a peculiar - one might almost say touching - view prevalent on these pages that Brown, once he becomes prime minister, is suddenly going to provide an entirely different kind of Labour government. Once again, one has to pay tribute to Brown's skill as a political operator: to have convinced some sections of the party and the media that he has actually been radicalised by nine years at the Treasury is a considerable achievement.

But he has never, as far as one knows, as a passionate Atlanticist, emitted a grunt of opposition to the Iraq war; rather, he has declared that he would have done exactly the same as Blair. On pensions, his enthusiasm for means testing is more Gradgrindish than the prime minister's. He has been globalisation's most proselytising friend. And if you think Blair's No 10 has been over-fond of soundbites, over-centralising and anti-democratic - well, brothers and sisters, judging by the Treasury's record, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that Brown has been possibly the Government's leading supporter of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), as George Monbiot reminded Guardian readers the same day as Robert Harris published his article:

An Easter Egg Hunt: The £95 million that private companies extracted from a hospital project was not a mistake, but a deliberate gift from the government.
George Monbiot, The Guardian, 9th May 2006

Whenever a new scandal about the private finance initiative (PFI) emerges, the government and its friends in the financial press blame it on “teething problems”. When the first contracts permitting private companies to build and run our public services were signed, the argument goes, our civil servants didn’t understand that they were being fleeced. If only they had known then what they know today, they would have obtained better value for public money.

This, for example, was the argument made by the Financial Times last week, in response to the latest revelations about the “refinancing” of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital – which allowed a group of private companies to carry off a windfall of £95million. “Acquiring wisdom can be an expensive business,” its leader sighed. “Public sector and private companies now know much more about the private finance initiative than they did when it began”(1). The “hard lessons” they learnt will ensure that such mistakes will not happen again.

This story, though endlessly repeated, is nonsense. The bonus the corporations found in the hospital contract was not a mistake. It had been left there deliberately. It was a sweetener, hidden from the public, which was designed to make the private finance initiative attractive to private capital.

The new report on the hospital’s refinancing, published last week by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, explains how the Octagon consortium – a collaboration by Barclays, Serco, John Laing, 3i and Innisfree – managed to treble its rate of return on the hospital scheme, from 19% to 60%(2). In 2003, five years after signing the contract, the corporations renegotiated the loans they used to build the hospital, obtaining lower rates of interest while increasing the payback time. This enabled them to extract their money – to great financial advantage – at the beginning of the project, rather than taking it gradually all the way through. In doing so, they managed greatly to reduce their own financial risk, while increasing the risk to which the hospital trust is exposed.

The trust, understandably, felt it was entitled to a share of the new money. But because there was no provision in the contract granting it any rights to a refinancing windfall, it had to make the most extraordinary concessions to obtain the miserly portion – £34 million – it eventually extracted. It agreed to pay up to £257 million more than it would otherwise have done if it ends the contract early. To help the investors extract more money, it agreed to extend the length of the contract from 34 years to 39. As it is impossible to predict clinical needs so far in advance, this increases the risk that the NHS will end up paying for services it cannot use. Unlike the companies, which took their share of the new money immediately, the hospital trust will receive its portion over 35 years. The chair of the public accounts committee – a Conservative who seldom loses sleep over excessive corporate profits – described the deal as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”(3).

All this appears to position the Norfolk & Norwich NHS trust – which negotiated the contract – somewhere on the spectrum between naïve and raving mad. But it was nothing of the kind. It knew that the original deal offered terrible value for public money. But it had no choice. It was instructed to accept the corporations’ terms by the Department of Health. Because this information was not included in the committee’s summary, it was ignored by the press. But it is a theme to which the rest of the report keeps returning.

“Although the Department was aware of the potential for refinancing when entering this contract,” the MPs reveal, “there was no contractual arrangement to share in refinancing gains”(4). Once the re-negotiation began, the hospital was unable to demand more than 29% of the new money because “the Department … considered that it would have been inappropriate for the Trust to seek a larger share”. The trust decided to take its money over 35 years, rather than immediately, “under guidance from the Department”. As one of the Labour members of the committee, Ian Davidson, pointed out to the man from the health department, “it seems to me that you were tying hand and foot the trust in terms of what the limits of their expectation ought to be.”(5)

Last week a spokesman for the hospital trust told me that it was “very much alive to the prospects of refinancing and wanted to include it in the contract. The advice centrally was to drop that issue. The Department was not keen to frighten the horses.”(6)

After the report was published, another of the committee’s members, the Conservative MP Richard Bacon, spelt it out still more clearly on his website. “The Department of Health would not allow the hospital to include a refinancing clause in the original contract. This meant the hospital had no right to receive any proceeds from the refinancing at all, let alone the 29% share it eventually secured. And that right was only obtained by taking on huge extra potential liabilities.”(7)

“The Treasury had guidance specifically saying there should be no refinancing clauses,” he told me. “It was a lure to get the private sector involved. ... Ultimately it all stems from Treasury guidance. It was the Treasury prohibiting refinancing clauses.”(8)

The deal, in other words, was an Easter egg hunt. In order to persuade the corporations to participate, the government left an extra £95m in the contract for them to find. This money represents the difference between the financial risk the government claimed they would carry and the far smaller financial risk (attracting lower rates of interest) to which they were actually exposed. While the drafting of the contract began under the Tories, it was completed, by Labour, in 1998. By forcing the trust to strike a bad deal, the government appears to have been negotiating on behalf of the corporations and against the public interest.

The Treasury’s press office wouldn’t answer my questions on the grounds that it was “a Department of Health issue”(9). The Department of Health told me that the government had not demanded a refinancing share in its early PFI contracts, because that would not have offered “value for money”(10). If the department believes that letting private companies walk off with £95 million of free money represents good value, it’s not surprising that the NHS is in crisis.

If it is true that this handout was a deliberate government policy and that the Treasury was ultimately responsible, this surely provides more evidence that those who see Gordon Brown as the radical alternative to Tony Blair are deceiving themselves as much as those who believed that Blair was the radical alternative to John Major. Brown did not invent the private finance initiative, but he keeps it alive, however many scandals it produces. His record on this issue suggests that he has established his reputation for prudence by two means: by loading future generations with debt in order to balance the books today, and by filling the coffers of the corporations to win himself friends in the financial press.

While I will join the dancing in the streets when Tony Blair goes, I am mystified by the left’s enthusiasm for his successor. Why should we welcome the appointment of a man who treats public services as a pension fund for fat cats?

References:

1. Leader, 4th May 2006. The high price of the PFI learning curve. Financial Times.

2. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 3rd May 2006. The refinancing of the Norfolk and Norwich PFI Hospital. The Stationery Office, London.

3. Edward Leigh, 3rd May 2006. Quoted by BBC Online. MPs condemn ‘capitalist’ NHS deal. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/4966996.stm

4. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ibid.

5. In oral evidence to the Committee of Public Accounts, 16th November 2005. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ibid.

6. Andrew Stronach, 5th May 2006. Press officer, Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust.

7. Richard Bacon, 3rd May 2006. PFI company walks away with £95m as Norfolk & Norwich hospital struggles. http://www.richardbacon.org.uk/parl/norfolkandnorwichpfi.htm

8. Richard Bacon, 5th May 2006, pers comm.

9. Treasury press office, 8th May 2006.

10. Ben Lewis, 8th May 2006. Press officer, Department of Health.

To conclude, although I think that Brown is a much more impressive figure than Blair, I doubt whether there will be many substantial policy differences when the Grinning Loony leaves Number 10. Much of the divide between the two are questions of personal power and personality differences. For people who regard themselves as socialists (which I do, although of a particular stripe) to do nothing and wait for Blair to be replaced seems a criminal waste of time, especially if a newly crowned Brown calls a virtually immediate General Election to secure a mandate from the voters.

Ramblings on Globalisation

2006-06-06T17:41:00.000+01:00

Being neither a "send them all back" nor a "let them all in" type I try and avoid getting involved in debates on the Net and elsewhere about immigration. The former would castigate me as a "traitor", the latter a "racist", and I don't think myself as either! I believe, for what it's worth, that I'm a supporter of controlled immigration, as I think most people here are.

However, I do find it funny people who want everything foreign (cars, clothes, food, music, tv, films etc) here except foreign people themselves. Furthermore, there seems to a lot of people who object to living next door to someone from abroad, yet have no objections to an overseas company setting up in their area, a company that might pull out not that long afterwards and cause more disruption to the local social fabric than a new next door neighbour ever could.

At the moment it seems that Britain has the "up for sale" sign for the whole world. Nowhere outside the political fringe does anyone seem to care that the UK economy is being increasingly "globalised". This might be just the bleatings of someone who is a "protectionist" (although why is "protection" seen as "a good thing" in everything but economics?), but I think it will ultimately not do us a lot of economic good at all.

This takeover free-for-all just isn't delivering the goods: There is scant evidence that selling off British companies has given our economy the edge over its European competitor
Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Thursday March 30, 2006

Twenty years ago there were demonstrations in St Helens when the glassmaker Pilkington was threatened with a takeover bid. At the zenith of Thatcherism, the town was mobilised to fend off a hostile approach from BTR. Pilkington's own history describes how employees, the local community and parliamentary opinion defended the company's "long-termist approach to running its business".

Early this year Pilkington was sold off to a Japanese glassmaker, Nippon Sheet Glass, with barely a whisper. Pilks was in a strong position to defend itself. It was a world leader in glass technology and was also two-thirds of its way through a restructuring plan under which it had hit every target for cost reduction. Nevertheless, the board at Pilkington - a very different board from that of 1986 - had little hesitation in cashing in its chips.

The culture change in the past two decades is stark. If a Spanish company wants to bid for BAA, let it do so. If a couple of investment trusts from Canada and Singapore can raise £2bn to make an offer for Associated British Ports, let's see the colour of their money. If Gazprom fancies Centrica, what's wrong with one of Britain's gas-distribution companies being in the hands of the Russians, provided the price is right? Today's orthodoxy is that Britain is open for business - and a good thing too.

According to the government, free-market UK is leaving the rest of Europe for dead. Not for us the narrow nationalism of the French or the Germans. The argument in favour of putting companies "in play" is that it forces management to pull its socks up. Greater efficiency means lower prices for consumers, and a blast of competition does wonders for those sleepy old boards that have failed to maximise returns for their shareholders. And since more than half of us, by virtue of our pensions, are arms-length shareholders, we all benefit from an environment in which takeovers are not just permitted but welcomed.

Although the crisis in pensions would appear to undermine this argument, there have been studies showing that, when it comes to management, Britain has plenty to learn - particularly from the US. The financial problems of the NHS are the result of a failure of management in certain trusts. No question, management could be improved in both the public and private sectors. Takeovers can sometimes be beneficial, though there are ways of improving performance short of a full-blown takeover.

There are three reasons, however, for being sceptical about the free-for-all in the UK. The first is the lack of reciprocity. French firms can buy up UK electricity companies, but UK firms can't buy French companies. This is the least compelling economic argument. If a liberal approach is the way ahead, it shouldn't matter to Britain if it acts unilaterally. Politically, though, it does matter - because the climate in which business operates is profoundly influenced by the message it gets from government.

The second reason is one of economic security. Within 10 or 20 years, western Europe - including Britain - will become increasingly dependent on natural gas from Russia, which has the world's largest reserves. It is in the interests of the Russians to buy up distribution companies in Europe so that it controls the supply chain. Governments in the rest of Europe clearly have concerns that this will make them vulnerable. Every government has no-go areas: bits of the economy it considers so strategically important that they are not for sale. The US - witness the row over control of its ports - is closer to mainland Europe in this respect than to Britain.

Finally, there is the matter of whether the liberal approach actually works. It definitely works for the movers and shakers of the financial sector, though it is harder to find evidence of benefits to the economy as a whole. Take the question of research and development, a subject close to Gordon Brown's heart. One of the arguments against foreign takeovers in the 1980s was that they would turn Britain into a screwdriver economy, with R&D taking place back at company HQ in Detroit or Osaka. The government's latest data seems to bear out these fears. More than 50% of the UK's R&D is accounted for by just two sectors - pharmaceuticals and aerospace - and they just happen to be the two in which the government retains some control through the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. In other sectors, Britain is nowhere.

Work by Karel Williams and his colleagues at Manchester University has shown that big mergers and takeovers have had no impact on company performance. Over the past 25 years sales and profits of FTSE 100 companies have risen by about 3% a year - broadly in line with the growth rate of the economy - but salaries in the boardroom have gone up by 25% a year. Where share prices have gone up, it is not usually the result of a new broom sweeping clean but more often of lower interest rates and irrational exuberance.

Williams's point is that the liberal attitude to takeovers is indicative of an environment where "national success is no longer indicated by production, employment and trade balance but by consumption, labour-market flexibility and financial-market priorities, so that it is the latter group of indicators that generally get most attention".

There are precious few institutions left in which shareholder return is subservient to other concerns. The NHS is one. The BBC is another. This newspaper is run by the Scott Trust (on which I sit), and that prevents a tycoon moving in with a plan to sweat the Guardian's assets. Our stakeholders like it that way. There's not much demand from the readers for a takeover from Bertelsmann or News International. Nor would the staff fancy it much.

But elsewhere the neoliberal revolution is complete. Modern Britain is a Shangri-la for speculators in which firms are there to be bundled up and bought and sold. Keynes warned us many years ago: "Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise ... But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done."

So how well is the job being done? Here's a test. Which country out of Germany, France and the UK has seen manufacturing output stagnate since 1997 and is now running a trade deficit of 6% of GDP? Clue: it's not Germany. Or France.

Larry Elliott is the Guardian's economics editor
larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

It seems that our ruling elite are the only one of a major economic power not to give a damn about who buys them up. Even the USA, often seen as the main force behind globalisation, is wary of being too dominated by overseas companies. Hence it's not just "Old Europe" (any term popularised by Don Rumsfeld has got to be fundamentally cobblers) who have qualms about the unintended consequences of making the planet one big playpen for transnational corporations...

Americans, having trumpeted globalisation, are suddenly bleating about what it means for jobs and sovereignty
Lindsey Hilsum, New Statesman, Monday 10th April 2006

The French understanding of history is in jeopardy. I know this because an earnest young man pulled my arm during one of the many protests in Paris over the past couple of weeks to tell me that the archaeologists were on strike.

"Please report that," he said. "The archaeology departments in the universities are closed."

"No archaeology!" I exclaimed. "Zut alors!" That got me thinking - are les manifs, as the French call these demonstrations, ahistorical? That's what les Anglo-Saxons tend to think. We hated Margaret Thatcher, but even some New Statesman types are secretly grateful because her loathed-at-the-time economic strictures dragged us into the 21st century. Now we have only 5 per cent unemployment, while it is 9 per cent for the French, rising to 23 per cent among the under-25s.

About five years ago, I asked Daniel Cohn-Bendit to describe the legacy of the 1968 rebellion in Paris, which he had led. "Socially, we won," he said. "But economically, we lost." Now a German Green MEP - he had dual citizenship and the French didn't want him - he said that history would see 1968 as the beginning of profound social change across Europe. It paved the way for feminism, the gay movement, a breakdown in rigid family structures and a wider tolerance of sex before marriage, ideas now widely accepted. Yet the socialist economic model of the '68 revolutionaries was exposed as a failure even before the Berlin Wall fell, when we finally understood that the Marxist idea of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" was a utopian vision, not an economic policy.

This theory explains British politics of recent years. The Tory party was ahistorical when it rejected the socially libertarian, economically liberal Michael Portillo in favour of "family values" candidates. Labour rode the historical post-'68 tide by embracing social change at the same time as accepting capitalist realism. David Cameron may yet be too late.

Cohn-Bendit describes the actions of French protesters as "defensive, based on fear of insecurity and change". I think he's right. It is hard to sympathise with the students when a majority declared in a recent poll that their highest ambition was to become a civil servant. The slogan "Non à la précarité" ("No to insecurity") is scarcely compelling as it shouts for cradle-to-grave benefits rather than revolution.

We like to mock the French, who are delightfully easy targets. Where else would les intermittents - intermittently employed actors - go on strike? In a wonderfully headlined article, "Les intermittents contre l'hyperflexibilité", Libération revealed that they were late for the strike, presumably because they couldn't get up in time.

None the less, I suspect that les Anglo-Saxons may also be late and ahistorical. The Americans, having trumpeted globalisation and free trade, are suddenly bleating when they find out what it means for jobs and sovereignty. They don't like outsourcing when companies sack expensive US-based workers in favour of cheaper labour offshore. Congressmen blocked a deal whereby a Dubai-based firm would run US ports, even though it was clearly capable. It was racism pure and simple - this company is Arab, so, politicians concluded, there must be a risk of terrorism. Similarly, a bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a state-owned company, to buy the US firm Unocal was withdrawn in the face of opposition. Free trade and the open market are fine until perceived as bad for American interests.

What no one predicted in '68 was global economic integration and the coming issues of immigration and race. In the joyless suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, centre of November's anti-establishment riots by black and Arab youths, I found little interest in this year's demonstrations. Sitting in a smoke-filled Turkish café, Youssef Bouzide, a thoughtful, sad-eyed man of Moroccan origin who founded the "Collective Association of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity United Together", was more concerned about improving education for deprived children, and an anti-racism exhibit he is organising. Young men hanging around the bleak shopping centre were not heading for Paris to demonstrate - although they were vaguely against anything the government proposed - because they did not feel part of French society, with its ritual manifs and sense of historical vindication.

In the end, France, Britain and America are living the same historical moment. What the establishment fears is the Other - L'étranger, as Camus put it - whether it be the black and Arab youths of Clichy-sous-Bois, Dubai Ports World, or Britain's post-colonial, alienated Muslim youth. Yet those issues are already nearly history. The US and Europe are about to be hit by the economic power of China and India, and the pressure of well-educated Chinese and Indians pulling economic levers across the world. This is their century, not ours. The French may be behind the times, but we may all soon be swept away by the tide. Smugly, we might feel that the French demonstrators are bogged down by an old social model while we slip ahead. But the pace of economic change is now so fast that even keeping still makes no difference. We are all marching backwards from the Place de la République to la Bastille, and who knows where after that.

I'm just looking for a New England...

2006-06-06T16:56:00.000+01:00

One of the best novels I've read in recent years is Julian Rathbone's The Last English King (originally published in 1997, I have an Abacus 2001 edition). It tells the tale of Walt, the last surviving member of King Harold II's bodyguard in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and the Norman takeover of England. Walt travels towards the Holy Land in the hope of redemption and in the process tells the story of England from the end of Danish rule in the early 1042 until 1066.

It is told in modernish English vernacular, contains some minor but not annoying historical inaccuracies & anachronisms, and contains enough swearing, sex and violence to make it a worthwhile read! However, it is quite clear where Rathbone's sympathies lie. That is, with the "freeborn" English, not the "Norman Yoke" that was imposed upon them after 1066. When I say about one day my writings perhaps helping to create an English Mutualist Party, Rathbone's description of pre-1066 English society will have played its part (p.99):

"...while the country was, yes, an intricate web of interconnections and interdependencies seen both horizontally from farmstead to manor, from village to burgh, from sheep-farmer to fisherman, from charcoal-burner to iron smelter, or vertically from the King to serf, each community accepted responsibility for itself and all its members- the aged, the sick, the women, the children and even the wrongdoers. Step out of line in a way the community felt brought it into disrepute and it could well treat you more harshly than the laws of the land.
"There had to be a word to describe this interlocking of self-interest and genuine altruism. The Latin words mutuus and communis suggested themselves. English society could be said to live and act per mutua, mutually: thus Mutual Help was the process by whihc it all worked."

Furthermore, Rathbone outside of his fiction has identified "two Englands", whose origins stretch back to the Norman Invasion. The talk below was made a few years ago on behalf of the British [sic] Council:

I am not a scholar or an academic. I am not a historian, sociologist, ethnologist, anthropologist... or even a cultural critic. I am an undisciplined creative artist, more specifically a writer, a novelist. I am also emotionally if not intellectually, a Romantic - as will become apparent. I'm here because I have written two books that, amongst other things, explore my ideas of Englishness, The Last English King(1997) and Kings of Albion which was published by Little, Brown in May 2000.

A general assertion: a culture is self-perpetuating as long as nothing intervenes to change or destroy it. At a micro-level you can see this in schools where the entire pupil population can change every five years but traditional patterns of behaviour repeat themselves over decades, even centuries without being codified or imposed - the songs sung at the back of the bus that takes teams on trips to away matches, initiation rites, and so on. There's a PhD thesis waiting to be written about back-of-the-bus subcultures. Therefore my thesis that what is English has its roots in pre-conquest culture, though warped horribly by the Normans, is not vitiated by the thousand years that separates us from that terrible date.

The English. There are two strands in Englishness which I believe achieved a sort of uneasy meld, uneasy because of the basic contradictions between them, by about 1450, and remain dominant right down to present times. They derive from two cultures.

First, the Anglo-Saxon-Danish. The Anglo-Saxons were teutonic, Germanic. When their conquest of what we now call England began they were a split culture - the males were warriors and focussed on their leader or king. Women lived in an almost separate realm where they were powerful and respected. It is arguable that the Freudian conflict between war and work on one side and hearth and sex on the other was not entirely resolved. On the male side at least obedience and loyalty were the most highly-rated virtues.

The Danes, whose more or less assimilated descendants amounted to at least a third of the population by 1066 but had their own traditions and laws, the Danelaw, were also a warrior culture but perhaps based on smaller units whose size was circumscribed by the number of men in a long-boat. They valued individualism and individual feats more then the Anglo-Saxons did, individual pride over-rode a loyalty that could become servile in the Anglo-Saxons.

The political organisations of both retained strong traditions of a democracy an anarchist like Peter Kropotkin would have found congenial. A sort of mutual-aid ran through village-based society, moots or meetings at all levels took decisions after endless discussion, all principal offices including kingship were elective, and so on...

Then came the Normans who were, and are, like their leader, bastards. It is true that they were descended from Norsemen who had arrived in northern France a hundred or so years earlier, but during that hundred years they had lost their language and most of their way of life. If I may interpose a thought here, I think historians generally have failed to make enough of the effects of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered. Conquerors rarely bring their women with them and certainly never enough women. The Danes arrived in England and intermarried into a culture that in many ways was significantly similar to the one they brought with them, and they thus retained much of their own identity. The Normans, from the same roots, arrived in a France where the culture was very different, and within a hundred years no longer lived, nor even looked much like the Norsemen they were descended from.

Following 1066 the Normans imposed a rigid hierarchical, ethnically-based authoritarian bureaucracy on the anarcho-democratic systems they found. They were anal, dull, cruel. They practised ethnic cleansing in the West Country and South Yorkshire, in the latter case reducing a well-populated, prosperous area to what the Doomsday book itself, twenty years later, called a barren wasteland. They did not assimilate. Laws were not written in English until the 1390s, and the first postconquest king to speak English easily was Henry V. Imagine Germany had won the last war. It is as if the official language would not revert from German to English until 2,300.

However, the Normans were few in number, not more than 10,000 initially, maybe less, and they brought few women with them. They therefore relied on Anglo-Saxon collaborators to fill the minor posts of government and the lower echelons of the church, and to some extent they interbred - initially by rape.

The result of 1066 is the English: two, possibly three conflicting strands which I believe are with us today and make us what we are. On the one side individuality and the rights of the individual are more highly valued here than almost anywhere else in the world. Most of us object to government, do not respect politicians, hate and fear bureaucratic interference. We are hedonistic, pragmatic, empirical, pluralist, hate dogma. We like a good time. We do not understand spirituality because we reject the duality that is a precondition of the concept of spirituality. We are Roger Bacon, William of Occam, John Wycliffe, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and the Lollards; Langland, Milton and the Levellers; Blake, Tom Paine and the Chartists; Turner and Darwin. We are lager louts and we hate the French. We are adventurers. We believe a change is as good as a rest.

On the other side we are Normans. We are superior, we rule by right, we obey the rules, though we congratulate each other when we get away with breaking them. We are one of us. We are control freaks. We are bossy. We like systems so long as we are in charge of them. We march, we do not amble, we fire as one and not at will, and we take our hands out of our pockets when we speak to me. We tabulate, order, divide. We are deeply prejudiced (God is an Englishman - a Norman actually) and intolerant.

And worst of all, somewhere in between, we are collaborators- In exchange for security, a certain status, we will keep order for the Normans, we fear change, we are tidy, we clip our hedges, we keep off the grass (pun intended), we do as we're told.

With these contradictory strands, no wonder we don't know who we are, but I believe, in spite of 1066, we are at best Vikings with some of the stolidity, reliability, even dullness of the Anglo-Saxons, and, well, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, fuck the Normans and the collaborators. I really do believe that at last, like the House of Lords, they've had their day.

Most "debate" on the Net is a waste of time

2006-06-06T15:33:00.000+01:00

Well my few words on the Euston Manifesto got a response from Paulie who said I hadn't read it at the time of posting (v.true- I haven't read the Koran cover to cover either, but does that invalidate criticisms I may make of Islam?) and called me a "donkey". I wasn't happy about this and said a few choice things back in reply.

I'm still waiting for Paulie to return with some devastating Oscar Wildeish wit, the sort it is obvious he is so good at. I've also read the Euston Manifesto several times since then, and my initial thoughts are:

(i) It doesn't mention the C-word "capitalism". For a bunch who seem to feature quite a few ex-Marxists and people who have made their names as critics of Actual Existing Capitalism, this is quite an omission.

(ii) it doesn't mention another C-word: China. Let's not beat around the bush here, China is the biggest and worst totalitarian regime on the planet. It has Weapons of Mass Destruction on a scale Saddam Hussein could only dream of; it pursues ethnic cleansing in Tibet and elsewhere on a scale Slobodan Milosevic could only dream of; and allows no democracy, free trade unions or freedom of speech worthy of the name. However, does anyone call for "regime change" for China? Does anyone think that the 2008 Beijing Olympics should be boycotted? (BTW I'm opposed to all cultural/sporting/academic/artistic boycotts of anywhere full stop.) If, as the Euston Manifesto argues, we should confront totalitarian regimes and tendencies everywhere [do I understand that right, Paulie? See, I'm such a donkey...], surely we must start with the worst of the lot ie China? Of course, without China's booming economy, global capitalism would quite possibly be going down with all hands on deck by now, but as the Eustonies seem to deny the existence of capitalism the (very profitable) "constructive engagement" the West pursues with China is a bit of a problem for them to explain.

(iii) the whole style of the document reminds me of the awful stuff the "Marxism Today" faction in the old Communist Party of Great Britain published at the end of the 1980s (anyone remember "Face/Facing the Future?" or "Manifesto for New Times"?). Considering how the CPGB ended up (i.e. dissolved at the end of 1991) it hardly bodes well for the Eustonies.

Anyway, I doubt anything I say will influence the Thoughts of Chairman Paulie much. Conversely I doubt whether anything he may add to this blog will change my opinions one iota. This is where this post starts to make some connection with the title at the top of it. I don't think the Net does change people's opinions much. What it is good at is providing information to strengthen and refine people's existing opinions, and to be frank, prejudices. I'm come across a fair few blogs and websites which have contained material which I've thought, "ah, that interesting- just as I've been thinking". However, if it is a place in cyberspace whose opinions I totally disagree with I tend to move onto something more palatable (after all, you only have much time in your life to go on the Net).

I think the Net is good for propagating things like the Euston Manifesto. It is a very good place for giving your version of the world as you see it. To quote Nye Bevan (and Manic Street Preachers Album title) the comment "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours" could be the best description of most "political" blogs/websites on the Net. If you like what some or all of what I post on my blog fine; if not, start your own!

BTW I did see a factoid recently which said that most bloggers give up after 3 months. If you a reading this and reaching the 3 month point- keep going! If your creative juices are slow at this point return when you feel like it. I did so little in the first few months of my blog ie early 2005 but I eventually got back to doing it. I do have a life outside of my blog so there are times I just can't do anything on it at all. However, there are short bursts of activity (like this one). Blogging is a creative act and like all creative acts it is not something you can shoehorn into neat Mon to Fri 9 to 5 spaces.

Anyhow, if I change anyone's opinions one iota on anything with this blog it will be a bonus. As for arguing ad nauseum with people on the Net (I've seen on the Net plenty of instances of people going hammer and tongs at each other in arguments for weeks at a time if they are allowed to. If anyone does that on my blog I will say "Get each other's e-mail addresses and communicate with each other directly, you intellectual poseurs!") it is really a waste of time. I find that people who keep arguments going don't really want to change opinions, but to get a semi-sexual satisfaction in getting one over someone else at whatever cost. That is, to get the last word in and, as Karl Marx said to his housekeeper on his deathbed, "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

I saw the piece below by the generally great Charlie Brooker the other day which sort of sums up my attitude towards arguing ad infinitum on the Net. If you don't agree with it, I can't be asked to argue with you!

Supposing ... There's only one thing worth debating online
Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, Friday June 2, 2006

Last week I wrote a load of nonsense about flags and idiocy; as well as appearing in print, it also turned up on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog-o-site, where passersby are encouraged to scrawl their own responses beneath the original article.
Some people disagreed with the piece, some agreed; some found it funny, some didn't. For half a nanosecond I was tempted to join in the discussion. And then I remembered that all internet debates, without exception, are entirely futile. So I didn't.

There's no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional "live audience" quickly conspire to create a "perfect storm" of perpetual bickering.
Stumble in, take umbrage with someone, trade a few blows, and within about two or three exchanges, the subject itself goes out the window. Suddenly you're simply arguing about arguing. Eventually, one side gets bored, comes to its senses, or dies, and the row fizzles out: just another needless belch in the swirling online guffstorm.

But not for long, because online quarrelling is also addictive, in precisely the same way Tetris is addictive. It appeals to the "lab rat" part of your brain; the annoying, irrepressible part that adores repetitive pointlessness and would gleefully make you pop bubblewrap till Doomsday if it ever got its way. An unfortunate few, hooked on the futile thrill of online debate, devote their lives to its cause. They roam the internet, actively seeking out viewpoints they disagree with, or squat on messageboards, whining, needling, sneering, over-analysing each new proclamation - joylessly fiddling, like unhappy gorillas doomed to pick lice from one another's fur for all eternity.

Still, it's not all moan moan moan in NetLand. There's also the occasional puerile splutter to liven things up.

In the debate sparked by my gibberish outpouring, it wasn't long before rival posters began speculating about the size of their opponent's dicks. It led me to wonder - has the world of science ever investigated a casual link between penis size and male political leaning?

I'd theorise that, on the whole, rightwing penises are short and stubby, hence their owners' constant fury. Lefties, on the other hand, are spoiled for length, yet boast no girth whatsoever - which explains their pained confusion. I flit from one camp to the other, of course, which is why mine's so massive it's got a full-size human knee in the middle. And a back. A big man's back.

Anyway, if we must debate things online, we might as well debate that. It's not like we'll ever resolve any of that other bullshit, is it?

Click. Mine's bigger than yours. Click. No it isn't. Click. Yes it is. Click. Refresh, repost, repeat to fade.

More Vancouver (at last!!)

2006-06-02T22:30:00.000+01:00

The thoughts on Vancouver below were originally typed up at the start of May. It went a bit political in the middle, and apols for that (what, you wanted more politics on my blog?!), but I thought if I didn't post it now it would never see the light of day. The next chunk on Vancouver will arrive eventually- probably soon after my next visit to Vancouver...

Apols for not getting back to this after I left my thoughts on the City of Glass back in November. As I think I've said before, if I get my callup papers for Iran I am on the next plane to Vancouver, and if need be hide in Stanley Park until it's all over (one way or other). Apparently there are about 100 people living in the depths of Stanley Park, and one thing I would advise anyone visiting Vancouver: don't go there after dark, or at best stick to the seawall (you'd be ok on a night that has fireworks) as it can be a place where no-one can hear you scream...

I'll try and keep this posting as non-political as possible for once but I think if I was to end up in Stanley Park or some other part of BC avoiding a campaign to singe the President of Iran's beard I don't think I would be alone amongst the natives. Canada was a place where a lot of deserters from the US fled during the Vietnam years, and BC was one of the most popular destinations. In Vancouver at least there seems no enthusiasm for The War Against Terror (Think Bush: Think T.W.A.T...sorry Mum- pardon my use of northern Anglo-Saxon crudity). Basically no-one likes Bush there. A piece of info from my friend's fiance was quite interesting: there are no Canadian army recruitment offices in the whole of BC. When I flew to Victoria by sea plane (do it! It's worth every penny- about £100 return) to go whale watching (you can go whale watching from Granville Island, but unless you like getting there for 7.30 in the morning, go to Victoria instead) I did notice there is a Royal Canadian Navy base and recruitment office in Victoria harbour, but I don't think the Canadian Navy will be serving in Afghanistan any time soon...

Along with being anti-war I think there is a definite political tendency in Vancouver (ok my two friends and their partners, but there seem to be part of something more general) which is libertarian in a good sense. That is, socially liberal, basically letting people get on with their own private lives as long as it hurt others, and a great suspicion of state and corporate power. There is a spirit of public service and community spirit in Vancouver which living in the commuter village that is West Hampstead I am envious of (although the East Side and the likes of Burnaby are evidence that nowhere, even Vancouver, is a perfect place to live) and there is much truth in Vancouverite Douglas Coupland's comment in City of Glass that "I think we should franchise ourselves and put Vancouver all around the world- it's actually not a bad idea."

Enough politics for once. I return to the Grand Tour of Vancouver.

Yaletown I could describe as one big building site, but that would be unfair. The architecture of the area I really like- the nearest comparison I can think of is the area in Barcelona that they are developing at the bottom of the Ramblas next to the beach- there is something about white stone used well. However, the place is rather souless- very yuppified (a sign I grew up in the 80s). It is full of people who like making money and buying pointless stuff. There are plenty of decent bars and restaurants which are far from hideously expensive (Yaletown Brewery supplies both good food and good beer) but the area has no soul.

"I will return to the subject in hand soon" as Karl Marx probably said after Volume 2 of Das Kapital. If you want opinions on where to go (or not) in Vancouver if you visit I can give you advice & I know people over there who can help you out further.

Have You Read The Euston Manifesto? (Yawwnn..)

2006-06-01T17:22:00.000+01:00

I've said nothing about the Euston Manifesto at all so far, mainly as it is the same old stuff from the "pro-war Left" (the Post-Modern Mussolinis). I noticed in the latest edition of Red Pepper that the Manifesto was drawn up in a garish "Oirish" pub (I found one in Brugge on my trip. I was outraged. Talk about shipping coal to Newcastle, or to use a modern analogy, shipping shoes to Shanghai) not far from Euston station. If I was going to draw up a world-historic political manifesto, or a manifesto with such pretentions, in a pub, I would make that pub classy (ie Greenwich Union, mentioned in my last post) or authentically proletarian (ie the Colin Campbell on Kilburn High Road, where you'd get a real Irish Guinness), not some garish tourist trap.

I could go on a long rant about the Eustonies, but I'll stop myself from doing so on this occasion. However, I think if they are to be any more than the proverbial nine day political wonder, the Eustonies will have to find some social or political movement on which they can hang their "ideals" to.

One of my favourite political bloggers in Dave Osler, a self-styled "libertarian Marxist" with a Trot past. Of course, I don't agree with everything he says (the only person you should agree with 100% is yourself, and even that should be provisional!) but Dave O writes some good stuff on his blog & is no fan of the Euston Manifesto. Moreover, he may have spotted one way the Eustonies may go, thanks to one of the Manifesto's supporters (more or less): "Fatboy Dave" Aaronovitch...

David Aaronovitch: communists for Cameron

'I could vote for David Cameron,' writes David Aaronovitch. And in those six words, the one-time eurocommunist becomes the latest ostensibly radical commentator to come up with a half-arsed justification for voting Tory.

It's not that he's moved right, of course. No, no, no. Certainly not. What you have to understand is that the very terms 'left' and 'right' no longer have any meaning. Hardly an original Aperçu, but hey, let that slide.

In Aaronovitch world, that hoary old paradigm has been replaced by a division between 'progressives' and 'reactionaries'.

And gosh, here's a thing. 'Progressives' include the New Labour leadership, the Orange Book Lib-Dems and the Notting Hill Set Tories. Or - to look at it another way - the neoliberals in all three parties.

Indeed, Aaronovitch even gets in a snide dig at those dinosaur lefties who still consider neoliberalism something to oppose, rather than to glorify.

After all, if the word simply describes 'flexible labour markets, movement of capital etc' - and that's what Aaronovitch explicitly maintains - then what's not to like?

Trouble is, it means a hell of a lot more than that. Anyone even momentarily convinced by the pundit's reasoning could do worse than read David Harvey's stunning recent book 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism'.

Harvey brilliantly dissects the doctrine and illustrates how it boils down to a twin-track project, dedicated to the restoration of both the power of the ruling elites and the conditions for capital accumulation.

Emasculation of the power of organised labour is perhaps the key precondition for its success. The genuine left still sees socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Proponents of neoliberalism - however you want to slice it, and whichever party leader acts as its figurehead - constitute the 21st century right.

I don't know what they taught 'em in the CPGB in the 1970s. But elementary class politics does not seem to have been on the cadre school agenda.

• In an interesting aside, Aaronovitch also asserts that 'reds' of old were 'turned on by women with peace symbols painted on their bare breasts'. I know it's whatever floats your boat, Dave. Just don't presume to speak for the rest of us, you old hippy.

So could the Eustonies become ideological outriders for a "progressive" coalition of Blairites, "Orange Book" Lib Dems and Cameroony Tories after the next election? After all, the Eustonies call for "a fresh political alignment" which reaches out to "egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment".

Maybe not, but it is clear that the "pro-war Left" have lost faith in the Dear Leader who has overseen the mess British troops are now facing in Iraq. The following article was Peter Wilby's media column in the New Statesman of the 24th of April, which does cover the Euston Manifesto, the trials of the "pro-war Left" now Blair is starting to lose his Midas touch and a discussion of media bias, the final piece of which I concur 100%.

The Times particularly favours writers who claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views. This allows Rupert Murdoch to have his cake and eat it, writes Peter Wilby

Tony Blair's troubles get worse. The Blairite apologist Stephen Pollard has joined the deserters. Pollard is one of those mysterious commentators - Oliver Kamm is another - who claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views. Such writers are particularly favoured by the Times, presumably because they allow Rupert Murdoch to have his cake and eat it: he stays onside with the party in power by giving space to its alleged supporters, but keeps his papers ideologically on the right.

Pollard has long hailed Blair as the ideal Labour leader because he favours wealth creation and competition. That may sound like a Tory to you and me, but let it pass. He and Kamm both voted Labour in last year's election because they saw it as "a referendum on the veracity, judgement and ethics of the Prime Minister".

Pollard used to be an NS contributor. Then we ran a cover headed "Dictator of Downing Street", with a picture of Blair made up to look like Stalin. It was to illustrate a piece by the Oxford historian Robert Service, who drew a parallel between the PM's governing style and that of the Soviet dictator, though obviously not between the numbers they had murdered. Pollard said that, after this disgusting calumny, he would never darken our pages again. I (then editor) replied that I was sorry he had become so pompous. A few years earlier, he had used the first letter of each paragraph in his final Express column to spell out a rude message to the paper's proprietor, Richard Desmond. He was due to join the Times staff as a leader writer but this was considered inappropriate conduct for such an august position, and Pollard had to resign before he started.

Now this admirable mischief-maker was denouncing my mischief. Yet his latest piece, in last Monday's Daily Mail, compared Blair to Richard Nixon - not Stalin, admittedly, but bad enough. The cash-for-honours affair is unfolding rather as Watergate did, he argued: trivial misdemeanours by people of slight importance lead to a scandal that engulfs the top man. Blair, wrote Pollard, was "up to his neck" in it, and held "the country in contempt". It is as if Eva Braun had deserted Hitler (just kidding, Stephen).

The Prime Minister has some crumbs of comfort, however. After a brief wobble, his hagiographer John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is back onside. The honours business is just a "media hoopla" he informs us, and Blair's main problem is "to hold off the growing weight of our abiding culture of cynicism". More importantly, Irwin Stelzer (aka Rupert Murdoch thinking aloud) seems to have hardened on his doubts about Gordon Brown. The Chancellor's latest Budget showed that he will use "any conceivable excuse to expand the reach of government", Stelzer wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday. Blair had "an obligation" to stay, he argued. Moreover, the Murdoch court clearly hasn't given up hope that a credible new Labour alternative to Brown will emerge or that David Cameron will (as those who disapprove of such youthful frivolities as saving the planet put it) mature. Either could happen, Stelzer suggested, if Blair stays long enough.

I shall not quarrel with the Euston Manifesto, launched in the NS last week. Its list of supporters, combining the passion of Nick Cohen with the intellect of John Lloyd and the wit of Francis Wheen, is enough to daunt any criticism. They seem to say it was OK for me to be against the Iraq war - though I shouldn't, apparently, go on about it - so I may even sign up.

But I am fascinated by their belief that their views are "significantly under-represented in the mainstream media" and, indeed, "at dinner tables". As I don't get out much these days, I can't speak for the dinner tables, though I am surprised that, even in Islington, these should require BBC-style political balance. On the media, however, it seems odd for people who have columns almost everywhere (Cohen, Wheen and Lloyd all appear regularly in the London Evening Standard, as well as elsewhere) to complain they feel "isolated".

The claim of unfair media treatment is a comfort blanket. The American right argues that the media in the US are dominated by "liberals"; the American left that they are full of White House lackeys. No British government I can remember thought the BBC gave it a fair hearing. New Labour insists it has no true supporters in the national press. James Delingpole, of the Telegraph/Spectator stable, has made a cottage industry out of claiming he hardly dare reveal his "unfashionable" right-wing views. My fellow NS columnist John Pilger swears the media suppress news of western atrocities and marginalise views like his; I have written in his support.

I still think Pilger has the better case. But we are all a bit like footballers griping about biased referees. Shouldn't we drop it, and just get on with the arguments?

We're going down the pub

2006-06-01T15:18:00.000+01:00

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline."- Frank Zappa.

Belgian beer is good, as long as it is not Stella Bleedin' Artois, which has the nickname "Wifebeater" here for very good reasons. Apart from the Irish with their stouts and the Czechs with their Budvars and Pilsners most countries export their rubbish beers. For instance, Budweiser from the USA; Molson from Canada; Heineken from Holland; Kronenbourg from France; Steinlager from New Zealand; Fosters & Castlemaine from Australia; & Stella from Belgium.

I'm not sure what the English export abroad to be honest. I don't go abroad to drink beers I can easily get here, so what's the point of keeping track of what we export? The trouble is too many English people are under the impression that a lot of the beers other countries dump on us are native to our soil. Carling for example was originally Canadian but has somehow managed to wrap itself up in the Union Jack (the Conrad Black of beers?), and I'm not sure you can get any of their stuff in Canada any more. If so, lucky Canada...

Anyway, decent beer and other decent alcohol should be supported and defended the world over. Such pleasures are under attack from an unholy alliance of the anti-drinkers (often religious in their inspiration- but what about JC turning the water into wine at that wedding?) and the transnational corporations who spew out gassy tasteless pisswater (sorry Mum for the language!) to inflict on the unwary and uncaring. I'm convinced after my visit to Brugge that the world would be a much better place if everyone had a decent lunch with a couple of decent drinks followed by a couple of hours of siesta. Perhaps such a lifestyle would make the Presidents of Iran and the USA calm down a bit.

Anyhow, to fight the good fight the following guide from the pages of Red Pepper may be of use:

GUERILLA GUIDES: That will be the booze talking by Fiona OslerThere’s no longer any need to wait until the pub closes to start the revolution with a guide to ethical drinking

Support independent breweries
The Society of Independent Brewers reckons that some 85 per cent of beer in the UK comes from just four companies – Scottish and Newcastle, Interbrew, Carlsberg Tetley and Guinness. Before the first world war, some 6,000 pubs brewed their own beer but material shortages ended this and the practice has never recovered.

A few ‘brewpubs’ exist, such as the Porterhouse in London’s Covent Garden or the Marble Arch in Manchester, home of Marbles Beer – a vegan, organic microbrewery (www.marblebeers.co.uk). The independent brewers, St Peter’s Brewery, have their own pub, the historic Jerusalem Tavern, in Clerkenwell, London, where customers can drink in the ghostly company of various former bar proppers such as Handel, Samuel Johnson and William Hogarth (www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk).

Some microbreweries prefer the trendier term ‘craft’ brewery but the principles are the same – non-chain, independent, innovative, traditional, cask-conditioned real ales. For a list of microbreweries, visit www.quaffale.org.uk.

Vegetarian and vegan

Beer and wine are ‘fined’ (clarified) with isinglass (fish bladders) or even blood and gelatine. Many wine producers now label their wines as vegan or vegetarian and supermarkets such as the Co-op and Waitrose stock a reasonable range, but for more variety check out www.purewine.co.uk. Samuel Smith breweries produced only vegan beers and are registered with the Vegan society
(www.merchantduvin.com/pages/5_breweries/samsmith.html).

Champagne Gordon

Gordon Brown has the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) hopping mad over his 2006 budget, freezing duty on champagne while increasing it on beer. Join Camra’s campaign (www.camra.org.uk).

Health benefits of booze

We all know about the ‘French paradox’ and the benefits of moderate red wine drinking; now it seems beer may have the same rejuvenating qualities. Beer contains anti-inflammatory components and other antioxidants such as polyphenols, B vitamins and minerals. Well, how else do you explain students surviving on ‘the beer diet’?

Stick a cork in it

Plastic stoppers and aluminium screw tops may be great for the weak-wristed, but they are not doing much for the environment. Natural wine corks come from the bark of the cork oak, Quercus suber, grown in Portugal, Spain and parts of north Africa. Cork oak forests are rich in wildlife, including endangered animals like the Barbary deer, Spanish Iberian lynx and imperial eagle. Cork farmers sustain the woods but if the trade becomes uneconomic it spells disaster for these woods. Chelsea manager José Mourinho is fronting the Portuguese Cork Association campaign, having been chosen for his, er ‘sophistication and appeal’.

Boycott wine (again?)

This is what the United Farm Workers Union (UFWU) did last year with Gallo wines, the world’s second biggest wine maker – and it worked. It is not just Gallo who exploit workers rights, however. Vineyard pruners all over the world are paid piece-rates and encouraged to work without concern for their health and welfare. Vines are sprayed with hazardous chemicals and there is little job security. Buy Fairtrade wine from a number of suppliers, including Traidcraft and the wonderful Vintage Roots (www.vintageroots.co.uk), who do a great line in vegan, vegetarian and biodynamic wines at reasonable prices.

Support the cheese eating surrender monkeys

The US boycott of French wine over the Iraq war has cost the country an estimated £64 million in wine revenue, with a 26 per cent slump in weekly sales. Go to www.vinceremos.co.uk for some great organic French wines.

Bruiser not Breezer

One of the biggest political booze battles of all time must be Barcardi v Havana Club (note that Red Pepper is open to donations of Havana Club at any time). Barcardi, in connivance with the US government, have worked some dark arts over the years against Cuba and by extension Havana Club (www.havana-club.com). This has included alleged involvement with paramilitary groups and terrorist attacks, as well as links with the CIA and the Bush administration. For more information check out Bacardi: The Hidden War by Hernando Calvo Ospina (Pluto Press).

Smells like teen spirit

‘There cannot be too much vodka, there can only be not enough vodka.’ So says an old Russian saying from long before vodka became the favourite tipple of teenagers in the west.

Vodka packs a real political punch; the entire history of communism is wrapped up in it. Lenin believed vodka to be a major obstacle for communism. So he banned it. Stalin, on the other hand, was a big advocate encouraging the Russian state vodka industry. Interestingly, his predecessor in terror, Ivan the Terrible, established the first state-run vodka industry in the 16th century. It flourished until Gorbachev, a near teetotaller, tried to ban it to combat alarming rates of alcoholism.

Vladimir Putin brought vodka back under state control, but not before the mafia got a serious grip on distribution. If you’d rather not contribute to Russian Mafia profits try UK5 organic vodka (www.uk5.org).

Political booze (part 1)

The Alternative Beer Company (www.alternativebeer.co.uk) was set up in 2004 to import Taybeh beer from Palestine. The company also supports Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the Israeli refuseniks charity, Yesh Gvul. Shipment is a bit hazardous – they describe their beer as ‘the most difficult to import in the world (probably)’.

Political booze (part 2)

Moreno Wines (11 Marylands Road, London , W9 2DU, Tel 020 7286 0678) help fight the good fight by donating wine for various Red Pepper events and fundraising activities. Thanks Manuel!

Political booze (Part 3)

The Workers Beer Company has helped thousands of non-profit groups, NGOs, trade unions (and Red Pepper) through its beer tent scheme at festivals and other events. WBC also runs the Bread and Roses free house in London (www.breadandrosespub.com).

Of the above I would definitely recommend Sam Smith's beer (the English version; I think there's an American one as well, which might be just as good). Sam Smith's Pale Ales and Wheat Ales are definitely worth tasting, and their pubs (all over the place for a West Yorkshire Brewery. I've drunk in several in London, one in Chester and another in Morecambe over the years) are extremely cheap places to get ratted (like the Eskimos/Inuit vis-a-vis snow, there must be at least 25 different expressions to be found in the British Isles for being under the influence of alcohol).

I've been to the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham not so long ago and it is worth visiting. If you are in London for whatever reason there are two independent London breweries, Fullers and Youngs, that are well worth supporting for the quality of their beers, and they have pubs all over the place (perhaps Fuller's London Pride and Young's Special are the best to have at their respective watering holes). If you are around Greenwich please visit the Greenwich Union (56 Royal Hill, Greenwich SE10 8RT) owned by Meantime Brewing . If you want pints of chocolate or strawberry beer, as well as more conventional types of ale, this is a good place to go (Meantime beers are also available in Sainsbury's if you look).

I did read an article a year or two back in the Financial Times (of all places) about Meantime's founder Alistair Hook. Basically he wanted to introduce German style lager beers into England, and he learnt his craft over in Germany. As a student he had gone up to the leading academic establishment in the UK for studying beer, Herriott-Watt University in Edinburgh, but what he learnt was purely negative. Hook was told by his lecturers that the best beers in the world are those which sold the most. Yeah, right. Hook was also forced by his lecturers to make a blind tasting of several beers. They all tasted the same and was told that was the whole point of making beer. This is the sort of corporate propaganda against decent tasty alcohol the discerning drinker worldwide is up against!

Hook also has had problems with the like of CAMRA. The Campaign for Real Ale is a body I've thought about more than once of joining but I've been put off because although I think diversity and quality in the making of beer should be wholeheartedly supported, there is a lot of accompanying gumph with CAMRA I can't stand. For example, CAMRA doesn't want much food in pubs. I can't stand gastro-pubs, where everyone is forced to sit down and eat expensive pretentious rubbish (sorry- that's a restaurant with pretentions of proletarian authenticity ie sausages and mash with Thai grass for £30 a head), but I do like pubs where you can get a decent bit of stodge along with your pints. Also CAMRA seem to make a fetish of "old scrote" pubs where most of the clientele have been sitting in the same seat for the last 40 years nursing their half of bitter while reading the Racing Post.

Getting back to Meantime's Mr. Hook: he had been trying for years to get his very good beers into competition at the Great British Beer Festival, run by CAMRA every August at Olympia in London. However, he was barred on the grounds that his beers were lagers. Blimey, we're not talking here about mass produced rubbish like Stella or Hoffmeister (no German I've ever met has come across this monstrosity- I think it's strictly for export. I remember the adverts from the 1980s, with some poor bloke dressed up in a George The Bear outfit complete with snazzy yellow jacket and pork pie hat telling the viewing public "For Great Lager, Follow The Bear"- presumably to have a shit [sorry Mum!!] in the woods with the other bears after several pints of that fizzy industrial paint stripper). After all a lot of bitters the big brewers offer us are hardly worth drinking- ie John Smiths. I had a pint of that in Chester on my birthday in December and I think it's the last time I didn't finish a pint as it was so bad. Anyway, the FT article (thinking now it was last year) said that CAMRA had relented and Meantime beers would be up for competition at the Great British Beer Festival for 2005- under the Foreign Lagers section!! With friends of decent beers like CAMRA, who needs enemies?

Back from Brugge

2006-06-01T15:10:00.000+01:00

I had a good time in the end, despite the weather being mediocre at best, terrible at worst and the centre of Brugge being full of hordes of tourists. I ate plenty of good Flemish food, drank plenty of decent Belgian beers and generally chilled out. Now I'm back in Blighty to get on with my life. I suppose, to quote G.K. Chesterton, "The whole concept of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one own's country as a foreign land."

First of all, I'm going to take a fair few pieces I've seen scattered around over the past few months and post them up here. Hopefully they are still of relevance and interest. Also I must apologise about the space at the top of my blog. I have my most recent articles listed on the left but there is a big blank space where my most recent post used to go. Presumably I've touched the wrong button at some point and that's that.

Away for a while

2006-05-18T21:15:00.000+01:00

I'm off to Bruges/Brugge tomorrow for 11 nights (back in London May 30th). It is good to get away sometimes from the hurly burly of modern life. Once I'm back I've a few days off work, so I hope to add shedloads of posts to my blog. Getting to the 200th post would be a milestone (millstone?!)...

It's coming some time maybe...

2006-05-06T20:32:00.000+01:00

I think mainstream British politics has hit the same point as mainstream British popular music hit around the mid-1970s. Surely we need the political equivalent of these chaps to appear?

"There ain't no future in England's dreaming..."

God Squadding Nutters With Nukes

2006-05-01T20:05:00.000+01:00

God does indeed move in mysterious ways....

President Bush: "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free." (http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/)

"Yeah, these are my babe pulling threads..."

In November, the country was startled by a video showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a cleric that he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.

When an aircraft crashed in Teheran last month [December 2005], killing 108 people, Mr Ahmadinejad promised an investigation. But he also thanked the dead, saying: "What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow."
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/main.jhtml?xml=1news/2006/01/14/wirran14.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/01/14/ixworld.htm/)

Mayday Greetings and all that

2006-05-01T09:40:00.001+01:00

I didn't get anywhere with my essay to the Fabians/Guardian. So here it is. My mum liked it, so you'd better do too!

Confessions of an English Radical

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce.

It is not often that you hear someone on the “progressive” wing of politics say that they are pro-English. I think I have been, however much I might persuade myself otherwise, since about the age of eight. I remember at school in history learning about the Romans and Vikings and their occupations of England. However, in time they both left the country, at least in military terms. Then came the Normans. I asked myself, “When did they leave England?” The more I came back to answering the question as I got older the simple answer was “never”. That is, the Normans introduced a class system, a centralised state and a foreign policy based upon interfering in other countries that, to me, still defines “Britishness”. When I was about nineteen I came across the political thought of the Levellers during the English Civil Wars and their idea of “the Norman Yoke”, when the Anglo-Saxons lost their “freeborn” liberties. Although I have been through phases of other forms of politics, I have come back to the idea that England is still under a much-modified Norman Yoke as a good an explanation of our problems as any other. (Margaret Thatcher has “bloody Norman” written all over her; a modern “Harrying of the North” took place under her rule.)

However, despite seeing an independent England as a quite respectable goal for any political radical to support it is hard to find progressives ready to support such a goal. Partly this is because those “pro-English” organisations and publications that exist tend to be on “the right”, and some have some extremely dodgy, if not outright racist, attitudes. Some sound like people still getting over the results of the last three general elections; and some come across as “little Normans”, with England unchanged except for those pesky “Celtic fringe” parts chopped off (few “pro-English” groups ever talk about making an anti-UK alliance with the likes of the SNP or Plaid Cymru.)

However, most opposition from progressives to “pro-Englishness” seems to stem from a fear of something worse than the United Kingdom emerging. This not particularly optimistic view of the world, which seems to inspire much of the “New Britishness” talk now emerging is, I believe, based on two questionable assumptions. One, “Britishness” is a “progressive” issue. Two, “Englishness” is an inherently “reactionary” one. I will argue briefly here that neither is the case.

Simply, it appears to me that there is too much historical baggage associated with the British state at home and abroad for a progressive “New Britishness” to thrive. Instead I would argue that political progressives throughout the existing United Kingdom need to embrace new national identities, in England’s case English Radicalism, as alternatives to Britishness; alternatives able to draw upon our progressive pasts to deal effectively with the challenges of the Twenty First Century.

Britishness and Democracy

Being able to write such a piece and being able to vote for a political party of my choice suggests that there is a lot to be said for living in Britain and any attempt to restrict such freedoms, whether from home or abroad, should be resisted. However, how democratic is the British state? The historical record suggests that the democratic features of the British state came gradually, to say the least. Furthermore, the British state still suffers from a “democratic deficit.” These defects of the British state, and of a “Britishness” based upon unashamedly promoting Britain’s democratic traditions, can be traced back to the real origins of the modern British state. That is, although the Treaty of Union of England and Scotland created the modern British state in 1707, the template for the modern British state was imported to England in 1066. The Normans were an elite that gained their sense of self through monopolising political power over those below them and by the projection of state power abroad. Although over the centuries the Norman elite has been joined by others seeking to take the reins of state power – “the Norman Yoke”- our society is still imbued by a strong sense of “us” and “them”, a class society divided between those who give orders to others and those who are expected to obey those orders. The Normans have given us a legacy where “bottom-up” initiative and the decentralisation of political power are distrusted.

Ever since 1066 England, and in time the rest of the United Kingdom, has been dominated by a “top-down” state project. Although we are supposed to believe that the carve-up between King John and the Barons in 1215 and the bankers’ coup of 1688 are great moments in our march towards a democratic society, they are pretty feeble events to celebrate compared to what the French or Americans have to celebrate. Where is our July 4th or July 14th? Where is our Declaration of Independence or the Rights of Man, celebrating the Rights of the People? When is our Independence Day?

Frankly, “Britishness” is not built on very democratic grounds. We have an unelected, hereditary head of state; a totally unelected upper house; a lower house where seats are distributed in a totally arbitrary manner, with no relation to the distribution of votes whatsoever; there is no constitutional mechanism for referenda from below; no constitutional role for petitioning Parliament; no provision for recall of MPs by their constituents; and there are no constitutional safeguards to protect the existence of sub-national levels of government.

Consequently attempting to define or redefine “Britishness” as a popular project will fail because the whole concept of a British national identity is historically a “top-down” political project. Westminster is not an institution that encourages populist democratic impulses. “Write to your MP” is not a slogan to inspire; in fact, it is one of the most demobilising phrases in politics today. We are not encouraged to march or demonstrate as The People, and hence it is not surprising that so few people can be mobilised to either defend or reform Westminster.

Political progressives are almost a much to blame for this political demobilisation as conservatives. Prior to universal suffrage, political radicals denounced the “Old Corruption” of the British state. However, this changed in the Twentieth Century. Since at least 1918, British progressives have identified overwhelmingly with the British state. Piecemeal reforms by the state to improve the lives of those whom progressives claimed to help and represent had the effect of encouraging progressives that they only needed to take hold of the reins of the “Norman Yoke” in order to build a society in their own image. Consequently it was not surprising that this adoption of a “top-down” view of political change saw the hegemony of Labourist and Leninist political theory and practice over progressive politics from 1918 onwards. Both tendencies saw socialism being imposed by “top-down” methods (“the gentleman in Whitehall really does know best”- Douglas Jay) with their supporters having a mere walk-on role to legitimise the new elites’ rule through either a General Election or a revolution. [Really, when using the phrase "Labourist" I wanted to use the phrase "Fabian" but that would have shot my chances of winning the competition right out the water. For all the bloody good it did me!]

With Labourism and Leninism seeing a strong central state as the means to an end, attempts to reform the British state whether through more democracy or decentralisation throughout much of the Twentieth Century were seen as reactionary diversions from the creation of a British “New Jerusalem”.

Consequently, the current Government’s claim to be devolving power in the UK since 1997 can be seen as part of a long line of essentially top-down initiatives to mollify grumbling from below, similar to the extensions of the election franchise in 1832 and 1867. The referenda on devolution, and the indefinitely postponed referenda on the euro, EU Constitution and PR have all being top-down initiatives; there is simply no constitutional mechanism that anybody from, for example, the anti-war or pro-hunting lobbies can force Westminster or the Executive to heed their demands one iota. Petitions to Number 10 or Buckingham Palace may give their signatories a vehicle for letting out their frustrations, but they have no practical democratic effect. The Royal Prerogative still exists to give the Executive the power to declare war and sign treaties without having to answer to anyone.

In short, any attempt to build a “New Britishness” on the grounds that the British state is impeccably democratic will fail as the deficit between rhetoric and reality is too difficult to bridge; a deficit that increasing numbers turning away from the political process in Britain recognise.

Britishness and the imperial legacy

When “New Britishness” is applied to the rest of the world, it seems to promote the idea that Britain is a force to do good in the world. However, has the British state ever done good in the world except as a by-product of its own narrow interests? Except for World War Two there seems to be little historical evidence that this is so. Britain’s empire was the legacy of colonial wars and expansion, which have never historically been the results of purely altruistic “do-gooding” by any power.

Indeed, ever since the Normans invaded, the state elites in first England, and then the rest of Britain, got much of their sense of worth from the idea that they were presiding over a great power, able to project its power abroad. Before Britain acquired a formal Empire the Normans and their direct descendants, the Plantagenets, were involved in almost four centuries of wars in France, in the ultimately futile goal of making France a colony of theirs.

The British Empire itself was created in the face of hostility from various European powers, most notably France, the Netherlands and Spain. As Linda Colley argues in her seminal work on Britain’s imperial identity Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Anglo-Scottish unity following the Treaty of Union was based on shared anti-Catholic and anti-French attitudes and the benefits of Empire to the whole of Britain. Colley argues that these were historically contingent circumstances and without them the basis for a United Kingdom would be undermined.

Outside of Northern Ireland there is little strident anti-Catholicism left in Britain; there is little sign of anyone wanting to start a war with France (except possibly to secure more holiday homes in Provence); and apart from a few spots painted red across the globe, there is no Empire. Consequently, by Colley’s criteria surely there is a need for a “New Britishness”, one that does not hark to our imperial past?

However, how can “Britishness” be anything but something that is totally imbued with the reflexes of an imperial past? This is still the case with foreign policy. Our elites who deal with foreign relations still seem to think that we are a great power, which is quite simply the legacy of nine hundred and forty years of history. Possession of nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council help to give Britain’s elites the illusion that they still preside over a great power. Even though the United States was instrumental in helping to dissolve the Empire and in ending Britain’s ability to operate as an independent global power at the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis, successive British governments seem to think having a common language helps constitute a “Special Relationship” with the USA, which gives us a unique place on the international “top table”. British troops getting attacked on the streets of Basra is a direct consequence of where our elites’ great power delusions can lead.

Furthermore, the European Union has often being presented by both sides of the “European debate” as a litmus test of whether or not Britain is still a great power. Those who are opposed to membership, or further integration, see the EU as a harbinger of, to use Hugh Gaitskell’s phrase, “the end of a thousand years of history”. On the other hand, “pro-Europeans” talk about the EU as a vehicle for Britain to “lead Europe” and become a great power once again. Why Britain should be a great power is never discussed seriously by Britain’s elites.

In short, “New Britishness” and associated professions of faith about “doing good” in the world are merely expressions of the imperial legacy with a grin, a comfort blanket for elites who can only overcome the psychological blows from the retreat from Empire by subsuming themselves in the global pretensions of two new imperial powers- the US and EU- and illustrate neatly Trotsky’s comment that “All through history, mind limps after reality.”

Then there is the domestic legacy of the imperial project. Trying to claim that the British Empire as one aspect of a “New Britishness” we can all be proud of will fail.
This is far from just being the result of the Empire’s legacy upon Britain’s so-called ethnic minorities, although I find it difficult to understand why groups labelled “ethnic-British” should identify with a national identity built around an Empire that oppressed them. In fact, “Britishness” will fail on this score principally because it fails to address questions of identity relating to the so-called indigenous population.

To be unfashionable and to use the c-word, “class”, it seems that much of the guilt and angst about the Empire comes from those of middle class backgrounds, who when it existed would have been those who benefited directly from its existence. That particularly goes for those who would have been members of the overseas civil service bureaucracy. “New Britishness” and its credo of Britain doing good in the world seems in many ways a form of national identity for those whose ancestors benefited directly from Empire can feel comfortable with; a form of mass therapy to assuage their feelings of collective guilt.

In contrast, a “New Britishness” which stresses the need to atone for the guilt of all Britons will alienate many who have no such feelings. That is, people from working class backgrounds that did not benefit directly from the Empire. When I ask myself about the benefits of Empire (“Would you have been able to visit Vancouver without it?”; “Would England be able to play India at cricket?”) the simple answer arises “IT WAS NOT MY EMPIRE!” It had nothing to do with me, and my ancestors did not gain much, if anything, from being a part of it. My father’s side of the family were hit by the Irish potato famine and saw the Black and Tans shooting civilians on the streets of Sligo (which did not stop my grandfather serving in the British army in World War Two); my mother’s ancestors were forced off the land and forced to work in appalling conditions in factories during the Industrial Revolution. How can the British Empire be said to be “theirs”? The same goes for those whose forebears were driven off the land by the Highland clearances and the Enclosure Acts or were cannon fodder for the endless and mostly futile wars (World War Two being the one obvious exception) that our rulers have presided over generation after generation. Thinking like this, it makes one realise that by discussing the Empire, and trying to make the vast majority of people in Britain feel guilty about the excesses and crimes associated with it, is a totally hopeless task.

Just looking for a New England?

There is no “New Britishness” that political progressives can subscribe to. It is a concept too weighed down by the gap between its democratic, enlightened pretensions and the sordid reality that the British state has presided over for centuries.

Is there an alternative that progressives, at least in England, can subscribe to? Is there a historical tradition that is democratic, decentralist, encourages “bottom-up” initiatives and when it comes to the rest of the world, is consistent with George Orwell’s declaration that “I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anyone else”?

The simple answer is a national identity built upon “English Radicalism”. English Radicalism draws upon the folk-myth of the “Norman Yoke”, when freeborn Anglo-Saxons were deprived of their freedoms by the Normans, to inspire the English, whatever their origins or background, to create a better society for all. English Radicalism, which inspired thinkers and movements such as the Levellers, Tom Paine, William Cobbett, the Chartists, the mutualist and co-operative movements, William Morris, the pre-1914 syndicalists and Guild Socialists such as GDH Cole, was driven underground politically by the triumph of “top-down” socialism after 1918. Now that global “top-down” models of organising society, whether by states or corporations, are under attack from decentralising, democratic tendencies, it is time for English progressives, and their counterparts throughout this not so United Kingdom, to embrace a national identity which accords with the spirit of the age.

It also means a national identity that draws upon one of the most abused phrases in modern politics: “Little Englander”. The original “Little Englanders” were patriotic radicals who were opposed to the Empire building that underlay Britain’s participation in the 1899-1902 Boer War. As our nation can only be at ease with itself when we abandon imperial adventures, whether our own or on behalf of the USA or EU, and realise that our real gifts to the world are our language, our culture and our sense of humour, none of which the Normans gave us!

In conclusion, I think political progressives are wasting their time hoping that the “New Britishness” will lead to a country they can be proud of. I think English Radicalism, and its counterparts in the other nations of the British Isles, will deliver the independent, democratic, decentralist and “bottom-up” country most of us desire to live in. I believe that if we want to, the “Norman Yoke” will disappear quicker than we can imagine, and like the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it.”

I hope you thought was a worthy read. I have been thinking a lot over the past few weeks wondering where to go in life and all that. Like Hamlet I spend too much time thinking and not doing. Tolkien in one of his letters said that the true English vice is sloth and I suffer from it a lot. I also realise that procrastination is the id to the ego of perfectionism and I have during my life suffered genuine fears about what do next with myself too much. Well, I am to stop worrying. I want to be a writer of non-fiction (much, much more interesting than non-fiction on the whole) and if possible do something worthwhile politically. I didn't become a Green candidate for West Hampstead. In fact I didn't even sign any nomination papers and have decided that my attempts at political "substitutionism" (to use a good phrase of Lenin's) are futile. (although I will vote Green on Thursday!) I am to stop joining political organisations that I don't honestly believe in hoping that I can change them. If I am to be part of a political party it needs to be one that I can wholeheartedly support. I hope that my writing can bring such a party into existence. That is, an English Mutualist Party. I will go on (ad nauseum!) about it in further blogs.

I am away in Brugge/Bruges in Flanders from May 19th to the 30th. I won't have much time to take things forward before then. However, I will make the following plea.

Living in North West London I thought it would be extremely simple to find fellow writers as the area has such a deep literary tradition. However, visits around libraries and bookshops in recent days have proved fruitless: where are the writers circles and groups in this part of the world (West Hampstead, Swiss Cottage, Primrose Hill, Maida Vale, Little Venice, Kilburn, Queen's Park etc)? If anyone knows, please e-mail me! The same goes for bloggers around here: it would be great to meet fellow bloggers. I know writing/blogging have their solitary tendencies, but it would be nice to know that we are not all totally isolated.

PS The spellcheck for this is superb: it suggested changing "Fabians" to "baboons"...

"A fish rots from the head down..."

2006-04-19T22:05:00.000+01:00

"OK Blair, we know you're in there!"

"Come and get me copper!"

The quote which headlines this post comes from either Oswald Mosley or Nye Bevan, and seems to sum up perfectly the "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" air which pervades the body politic here at the moment.

Of course, Blair and the "donations for peerages" hoo-haa did not appear out of nowhere. Back in the 1980s I remember reading a great book by John Rentoul (now a Blairite cheerleader in the Independent on Sunday) called The Rich Get Richer which was a great informed tirade against Thatcher's sponsorship of greater inequalities of wealth at the time. In it, Rentoul divided British society into 3: the Haves, Have Nots and Have Mores. It is the Have Mores who continue to prosper at the expense of the rest of us. Not that the main political parties will do anything about it. As party mememberships fall, where are the parties going to get the cash to function? wealthy individuals. How to persuade these wealthy types to dig deep? Amongst other things (ie policies that won't frighten the horses) honours, including the odd peerage or ten.

What makes the Have Mores even worse is they don't bring any real benefit to the economic performance of the country; they are freeloaders on the backs of the rest of us, as Stuart Lansley argues.

The tax-free lifestyle of Britain's new mega-wealthy is impoverishing us all: Once there was a sense of shame about gaping inequality. Now the new breed of tycoons are revelling in their wealth
Stewart Lansley, The Guardian,Saturday April 1, 2006

Twenty years ago Britain was one of the most equal countries in the developed world. Today it is one of the most unequal. It is a transformation that has been driven by a remarkable revolution - a great surge in the numbers and wealth of the mega-rich. Not only have they been accumulating fortunes on a scale and at a pace not seen for close to a century, but the flaunting of wealth is back. The parties and the yachts are ever more lavish; Premiership football clubs are being used as toys of the global super-wealthy; champagne-spraying in London clubs is increasingly common among investment bankers. The rich like nothing more than to outscore their rivals in the wealth stakes. When Philip Green paid himself a dividend of Â£1.2bn last year, it conveniently beat the previous record set a few months earlier by the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.

Not so long ago a soaring wealth gap would have proved politically unacceptable. But today's wealth explosion has been broadly welcomed across the political spectrum. Tony Blair has applauded the rise of the super-rich. As Peter Mandelson put it, New Labour is relaxed about people getting "filthy rich".

Today's consensus is that provided we improve the lot of the poorest, the gap is no longer an issue. The wealth boom is defended as a sign of a more entrepreneurial Britain. Few could quibble with modern levels of personal enrichment if they reflected successful business creation and added value at historic levels. But is this really what has been driving runaway executive pay, soaring City fees and record bonuses?

Regrettably, the answer appears mainly to be no. Of course, there are many examples of entrepreneurs, from James Dyson to the internet pioneers, who have created wealth, jobs and opportunities and are widely seen as worth their place at the top. But founding entrepreneurs hardly dominate the rich lists. We are not living through an entrepreneurial and economic renaissance in which the new rich are making society wealthier, dragging up the rest of us. In fact, Britain has internationally low innovation and productivity rates.

Today's escalating personal fortunes are not closely linked to record levels of wealth creation. Rather, the ranks of the rich contain many tycoons, investment bankers and business executives who, far from creating wealth, have taken advantage of our pro-rich culture to grab a larger slice of the cake. Far from what some pro-wealth supporters claim is a "positive-sum game" with no losers, what is happening is a complex transfer of wealth from ordinary taxpayers, shareholders and customers.

The modern entrepreneur tends to play a very different role from that of the moguls of the past. They are more likely to have made their money not through building up firms and products from scratch, or adding value by introducing new processes, but through financial raiding, deal-making and speculative share-dealing, which involve less risk and arguably create less, if any, wealth.

Twenty years ago the typical chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned some 25 times the pay of the average worker; today it is close to 120 times. This surge might be justified if it had been driven by a transformation in Britain's business performance. But this is decidedly not the case. A Manchester University study has shown that top-company heads have enjoyed pay increases that have greatly outstripped a range of measures of business performance. "Value skimming" is how the authors defined it. The business magazine Management Today has condemned the growing gulf in pay as defying "any sense of fairness".

"Rewards for failure" have become the norm. Most chief executives have negotiated contracts that guarantee them, even when pushed out, generous payoffs known as "golden parachutes". The management expert Charles Handy has noted that such payouts have made ineptitude by senior executives the shortest route to millionaire status. In America they are known as "golden condoms" because they "protect the executive and screw the shareholder". It is reminiscent of the phrase used by the former deputy chairman of Lloyd's: "God would not have made them sheep if he did not intend them to be fleeced."

Most City bankers are also engaged in a form of "value skimming". The City in effect operates as a giant, informal cartel, charging excessive fees for activity that, for the most part, involves the transfer (or sometimes destruction) of wealth, rather than its creation. Increasingly, the emphasis is on short-term, "fast-buck" deals that are at odds with the patient organisation-building on which enduring companies and long-term wealth creation are founded and many large and successful companies were originally built. Mergers and acquisitions are often driven by the prospect of fat bonuses and fees for directors and their City advisers rather than the long-term interests of the companies.

Financial speculation, the source of many modern fortunes, is rarely associated with creating value. As one leading figure in the hedge fund industry has admitted: "When I first went into the City, I could not believe that anyone would want to pay me so much for creating nothing."

Modern entrepreneurship and tax avoidance largely go hand in hand. There are few top tycoons who have not exploited tax loopholes to boost their personal fortunes - at the expense of the broad body of taxpayers. Philip Green has saved hundreds of millions in personal tax in the past three years because ownership of his companies - Bhs and Arcadia - is vested in the hands of his wife, Tina, who is a resident of Monaco. (With 5,000 Britons, mostly businessmen, living in Monaco, the tax haven has become known as le rocher anglais.) Sir Richard Branson, Lakshmi Mittal and Hans Rausing all use offshore tax havens, quite legally, to reduce their tax liabilities.

Successive (and welcome) attempts to encourage a new enterprise culture would, we were promised, lead to a process of "trickle-down" and, ultimately, benefit us all. In fact, what has happened is that the richest 1% have been taking an increasingly disproportionate share of the nation's wealth: 23% today compared with 17% at the end of the 1980s. In contrast, the share going to the bottom half of the population has fallen from 10% to 6%. This is more "trickle-up" than "trickle-down".

There is nothing inevitable about the soaring wealth gap. It is a largely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. The "anything goes" culture can be challenged, as it was in the postwar era when a social norm emerged that effectively capped runaway greed at the top. However, recent years have seen the decline of the shame gene that once kept corporate abuse in check. Just as shareholders have been expressing their outrage at some of the worst excesses of company executives, the government has the power and the public's backing to take a lead on what is acceptable. That capitalism has its "unacceptable face" was, after all, openly acknowledged by a Conservative prime minister - Edward Heath - and not that long ago.

Stewart Lansley is the author of Rich Britain, The Rise and Rise of the New Super-Wealthy; a longer version of this article appears in April's Fabian Review

stewartlansley@aol.com

Sorry for all that "politics of envy" guff. As I have said previously on this blog, I'm not jealous of any of these plutocratic parasites, because after all, money can't buy you good looks (dodgy plastic surgery yes, but not good looks). Moreover, as Herr Marx said, every ruling class creates its own grave diggers. If the oil doesn't run out, I think it will be the personal debt mountain that will bring the whole thing crashing down (I'm assuming that Boy George doesn't get around to nuking Iran...).

John Harris is a damn good writer. I have a copy of his The Last Party: Blair, Britpop and the Demise of English Rock, which is one of the best books about pop music in a wider social context that I have read (England's Dreaming, Jon Savage's tome on Sex Pistols and Punk is a valiant effort, but gets caught up in Savage's own pretensions). Harris is also a good writer on politics in its wider sense (type his name into the Guardian website search engine for some examples) and the article below suggests that the cunning plan to get young people (Bloody hell I sound old!!!), especially students, into sky high levels of debt will make them apolitical (if you work all hours to pay off debts what freetime do you have?) might well backfire: unintended consequences and all that...

Generation Debt is changing, but not as Mr Blair imagines: As the financial screws tighten for the under-30s, there are signs they are turning away from the spirit of the free market
John Harris, The Guardian, Wednesday March 29, 2006

'Change is marching on again," the prime minister told us last year, in a Labour conference speech that contained the now-obligatory iPod reference. "Perhaps our children more readily understand this and embrace it than we do." In context, the C-word was shorthand for the usual ideas: education as a functional method of economic advancement, the imperative to make sure everything is personalised and priced, the notion of a career as several decades spent pinballing between increasingly fragile jobs. But who could argue with the razor-like instincts of youth? Their economic combat skills hardened by all those enterprise courses, their eyes eternally scanning the markets, this was the future into which they were speeding.

Unfortunately, things don't seem to be working out like that. Yesterday brought news of a study by the Financial Services Authority and Bristol University suggesting a young generation snarled up in debt, with nonexistent savings and what seems to be chronic financial ineptitude. In the States, meanwhile, there is currently much fuss over Generation Debt, a crisp polemic by 24-year-old Anya Kamenetz, a Louisiana-born Yale graduate who writes with the same elegant indignation that defined Naomi Klein's No Logo. From Ivy League undergrads to the new proletarians who see out their working lives at Subway and K-Mart, her book is built around experiences crystallised in its killer strapline: "Why now is a terrible time to be young".
The plot goes something like this. After two decades of post-Reagan politics and economics, the under-30s find themselves in a predicament loaded with tension. Higher education brings the prospect of astronomical debt, exacerbated by being "marinated in the most aggressive advertising and marketing environment ever known" (the most crafty exemplars of which are America's credit-card companies). Should you manage to graduate, you may well find that a degree holds out no guarantee of fulfilling or dependable employment. If you don't make it to college, meanwhile, you're likely to be earning pin money in a "grinding, impersonal and dead-end job", while being told that ever more rickety welfare provision means you should be saving money you haven't actually got. Home ownership is a distant dream; starting a family seems cripplingly expensive. "Mom, Dad - listen up," Kamanetz implores. "Things have changed. We're not doing as well as you did. And if something doesn't change soon, it's unlikely that we ever will."

Give or take a deluge of very American detail, the outlines of the story neatly fit the British experience. The debate over tuition fees may have gone quiet, but a new reality is upon us: a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that a fifth of British students are now living with their parents. Moreover, the maths that underpinned the scheme looks to have been rather optimistic: back when the changes were first proposed, ministers made repeated references to the idea that, over their lifetimes, graduates would earn £400,000 more than those who didn't make it to university; now researchers at the University of Swansea claim that, in the case of male arts graduates, the figure is more like £22,000.

Should you miss out on higher education, your working life will initially be made all the more unfulfilling by a respectable kind of ageism. The full minimum wage is delayed until 22. If you haven't had kids, the working tax credit won't be available until you've turned 25. Throw in the fact that it's young people who disproportionately staff our call centres and supermarkets, and the upshot is clear enough. According to a recent report by the centre-right thinktank Reform, while those aged 30-39 have seen their average weekly gross pay rise by 79% since 1998, those aged from 22 to 29 have managed only about a third of that figure. The FSA report shows 64% of 18-30s burdened by loans and credit-card debt, and snared by historical bad luck: although their apparent lack of financial clue suggests a devil-may-care outlook, which they might have assumed was their birthright, ignoring the bills is no longer an option. At the last count, around 60% of individual bankrupts were under 30.

The picture does not exactly suggest a generation of enthusiastic free-marketeers - and if Kamanetz's book is to be believed, the prevailing politics of the under-30s may turn out to be a lot more interesting. Certainly, the neo-liberal right could yet rejoice in their possible rebellion against a welfare state that may be able look after their parents' generation only at a punitive cost to themselves. But Generation Debt also contains augurs of surprising moves in a more collectivist direction. In its account, "a new generation of labour organisers and advocates" is addressing the flimsiness of the American service economy by reinventing, of all things, trade unionism. At the same time, more than a few American students are trying to revive the quaint idea that education is a social good and taxation ought to fund more of it. And look at current events in France: university students renewing the spirit of 1968's evenements in response to the fact that the government's loosening of employment regulations will start, naturally enough, with those under 26.

Therein lies a compelling spectacle: a generation tapping into the kind of politics that it had supposedly rendered obsolete. Mr Blair's beloved change, it seems, may yet march in a rather unexpected direction.

john.harris@guardian.co.uk