Loving the Free Market: Bush continues to Believe

With economic disaster engulfing global markets, the true believers in the free market continue to promote their faith. U.S. President George W. Bush is one such character, even as he approves huge funding injections by government institutions to prevent the free market from exacting its bounty. Facts and Arts, 28 October 2008, has more:

Free Market Blues: The President Still Believes

By Binoy Kampmark

The free market apostates continue to battle the market. The corporate sector has beaten a hasty retreat. Credit, frozen globally, is being edged out by capital injections into various financial institutions. The realisation that freedom and the free market are not the same thing is slowly setting in, though many Republicans are getting desperate, seeking to equate cautious financial regulation with the evils of socialism (pandered by that "Arab" of curious ethnic heritage). And President George W. Bush continues to live with a curious historical unreality only he can comprehend.

While most G-8 countries, and many besides, argue that a supervisory, regulatory framework is necessary for any new economic order, the sirens of the free market continue to make neoconservatives dizzy. Bush believes that all states "must also recommit to the fundamentals of long-term economic growth - free markets, free enterprise, and free trade." (Radio address, October 25).

Bush commits the usual solecisms one has come to expect from the man in the White House: freedom is linked to open markets; prosperity to robber-baron initiatives and steals in an unregulated environment. "Open market policies have lifted standards of living and helped millions of people around the world escape the grip of poverty." Nothing could be further from the truth. The very basis of a successful economic order is not one that presses home the dogma of the open market but the restraint of a regulated one. One need not control everything, but a keen sense of oversight never goes astray.

No one worth his or her salt in the current economic crisis has advocated the hand of socialism to restrain the invisible hand of the free market. But some sort of global restraint has been urged. A revitalised British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a summit of global leaders to re-script the workings of international capitalism. "We need a global way of supervising our financial system" (October 18).

Following in his footsteps is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has called for a new type of capitalism to invigorate the moribund system as it stands. Regulation and transparency must be encouraged. "Let us build a capitalism," he told the UN in September, "where ratings agencies will be subject to controls and punished where necessary, where transparency of transactions will replace opaqueness."

Wall Street luminaries and the puppeteers of the world market had a sharp intake of breath at the sound of these words. Conservatives in other countries were also terrified that such measures had a certain whiff of socialism. Czech President Vaclav Klaus, another convert to monetarist voodooism who should have been put out to pasture years ago, has a keen, if corrupted nose for these things. Sarkozy had to know "that his proposals and measures contribute strongly to the end of capitalism" (21 October). Such a financial crisis was merely the pretext for "irresponsible politicians" to impose an asphyxiating bureaucracy on the economy.

One wonders what planet of responsibility Klaus has been inhabiting for the last few years (a benchwarmer for the American Enterprise Institute, perhaps?). It is a place no doubt familiar to Bush. Should the President insist on his free market dogma come November at the international summit to be convened in Washington, he will find himself alone. Very alone.

Killing The Religion Report

Axing radio and television programs, notably good ones, is a bad habit networks get into from time to time. ABC's Radio National in Australia is no exception. The end of the flagship radio program on religion on Radio National, 'The Religion Report', suggests that the economic toe-cutters are on the march. More at the 30 October issue of Online Opinion:

Death of a Friend: the end of 'The Religion Report'

By Binoy Kampmark - posted Thursday, 30 October 2008

Radio National, and a considerable number of listeners, is farewelling an old friend. On October 15, it was revealed that The Religion Report, hosted by the enthusiastic Stephen Crittenden, would be axed. Others will join it: the Sports Factor and the Media Report are also set for the radio morgue.

Some have argued, Crittenden foremost among them, that this is not so much a farewell as a brutal assassination inflicted by ignorant managers. He may have a point. The report balanced the political, economic and the religious in a manner few programs in Australia do. Its loss will be felt by its not inconsiderable following.

The programmers won’t go quietly into the night. Crittenden has been reprimanded for an outburst on The Religion Report that took place on October 15: “The decision to axe one of this network’s most distinctive and important programs has been approved by the Director of ABC Radio Sue Howard, and it will condemn Radio National to even greater irrelevance.” He is currently being investigated for having used the Radio National platform in an “inappropriate” and “misleading” way.

The question, raised on ABC’s Media Watch (October 27) is whether the demise of The Religion Report may have been in part due to the strong nature of the opinions expressed on the program at various stages. There may well be another subtext at work here: individuals such as Sydney Bishop Robert Forsyth are not shedding too many tears on the subject of the Report’s demise. He expressed satisfaction that the religion had been moved from its ghetto specialisation to a more “mainstream” focus.

Not all the Anglicans agree. The Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Archbishop Philip Aspinall expressed disappointment at the move. “The number of specialist religion reporters in Australia appears to be declining, and that is of concern to me as spiritual leader of Australia’s four million Anglicans. I hope the ABC will not add to that decline.”

In denying any ulterior motive in cancelling the show, the ABC has argued that the revolution in programming, set to commence on January 26 next year, will “allow ABC Radio National to convert a small number of positions into roles with a stronger online and digital editorial focus and to enable general enhancements to the networks website”.

But the “downsizing” of supposedly esoteric (some would say inconsequential and unpopular) programming is something that quality broadcasters are succumbing to globally. The blight instigated by the Murdoch Empire, a debilitating condition that stresses readership, or viewers, before quality, is something that traverses all carriers from Deutsche Welle to Radio National.

In the United Kingdom, BBC’s Radio 4, the British equivalent of Radio National, has had periodic attacks on its relevance and the like. While Radio National may not be, like Radio 4, “a barometer of cultural decline” to use Stefan Collini’s words, the parallels are similar.

Last year, the BBC revealed plans to cut back its fabled radio newsroom in Radio 4, arguing that BBC 5 (the sporting, somewhat lower-brow arm) could do much the same thing at lesser cost. An outraged petition followed. Had the comedy genius of Monty Python still been in business, a venomous sketch directed at the Beeb would surely have been in the offing.

Instances of protest can be found on the Religion Report website along with the mounting complaints that are arriving in ABC offices. The Radio National listener may not be as committed as an avid Radio 4 devotee of The Archers or the Shipping Forecast, but they are trying very hard to put up a fight to save the show.

The point in all this cutting lies, as always, in the obsession with the “digital age” and what the viewer can do outside standard viewing or listening times.

If a podcast or a vodcast attains considerable mileage, then it’s bound to be treasured. Those that don’t are liquidated by managers who can’t see beyond the book balance and rate of downloads. While economics is an undeniable reality, so is colossal ignorance.

An editorial in the Scotsman (November 4, 2004) on the subject of funding cuts to an institution such as the BBC is worth noting: ministers and CEOs are temporary figures. Institutions such as the BBC, and in this case, the specific programming of Radio National, endure well beyond the damaging acts of an official. Or at least we can hope they do.

Given the current economic crisis, a symptom as much occasioned by inventive, ethics-free credit crunching as relentless profligacy, we could do more with inquisitive programming of the value of Crittenden’s. We can only hope that more will follow in the footsteps of the 2,000 respondents who have made complaints to the ABC.

Starving the Archive

The cheeky, malicious Vice-President of the United States is doing a bit of administrative housecleaning. Given that the Bush administration gifted US history with one of its most secretive administrations, it's little surprising to hear of Dick's exploits in attempting to cover his tracks. More on these Machiavellian schemes in the September 16, 2008 issue of Counterpunch:

Starving the Archive: Cheney and His Records

By Binoy Kampmark

What are we going to do about old Dick's subterfuge and an office he did much to undermine during his time in power? All sorts of conjecturing has been taking place about how best to deprive the archival records of the US Vice President’s papers under the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The man is scurrying behind a wall of legal protections and gathering a group of friends to achieve that devilish enterprise.

According to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an argument being made by the Office of the Vice President, archivists and the National Archives and Records Administration, is rather cunning, if severely flawed. Dick is, in fact, a member of Congress.

Startled? Let’s go back a bit. Since an executive order in 2001, President Bush declared that the PRA applied to ‘executive records’. What executive order 13233 did should have been a warning to devotees of the paper trail: the public record was effectively being closed. As the American Library Association put it (Press Release, March 1, 2002), the order of November 1, 2001 ‘effectively invalidates the Presidential Records Act.’ Now the PRA was a creature of necessity, passed in 1978 to combat the attempts of an ever-paranoid, larcenous President Nixon to conceal his records.

The records of Presidents and Vice Presidents, the public was told, would be their property – ‘we the people’ would be able to assert that abstract yet powerful ownership over the deliberations of the White House. At the waving of his pen, Bush put pay to that, a legislative emasculation librarians and archivists have yet to recover from.

Cheney’s response to has been one of self-exclusion: he is not, one is suddenly surprised to find out, part of the executive. We are told, curiously, that the Vice President is somehow part of a different arm of government. That may well be Congress, which will come as a surprise to many representatives on the Hill. Cheney has offered, to add to his other philosophical meditations, a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of the separation of powers doctrine. One can only wonder what the old Baron de Montesquieu might have thought about that.

According to CREW, the archivist has added to this legal conundrum. Not only is Dick apparently an appendage of Congress, the congressional records amassed during his time in office are his personal effects. He may do with them as he wishes. The result is predictable. Paper trails will vanish. There will be no obligation to keep them as a public record. True to form, the Bush administration, even in its post-administrative phase, will intrigue and obscure, deceive and deny.

Privileges in high office can be such a dangerous thing. When it comes to records, the case of Nixon v Administrator of General Services 433 US 425 (1977) comes to mind. While the argument there covered the Presidential office, rather than that of the Vice President (non-executive, according to Cheney), the issues covered there bear repeating. While a degree of constitutional privilege protecting various records is important (that much was acknowledged by the Court), the presumption can be overcome by demonstrating some ‘specific need’ for those particular records to be accessible. In Cheney’s case, Iago of the administration, that need should be obvious. The danger in Cheney’s case is that such records will become as rare as an Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

CREW has attempted to circumvent Cheney’s measures of concealment by seeking an order that will preserve these records pending a lawsuit assessing the legal merits of the Vice President’s actions. The shredding machine is being readied, and the lawyers of CREW are busy preventing it from being used. Cheney, in the meantime, might well want to consider running for Congress after the expiration of his term. That is, after all, where he claims he belongs.

The Waki Commission

The Waki Commission in Kenya handed down its findings on last December's post-election violence earlier this month. For a discussion about some of the findings, see the posting on 17 October 2008 in Facts and Arts:

A Tribunal for Kenya: the Waki Commission Report

By Binoy Kampmark

The Waki commission, charged with the task of investigating post-election violence in the aftermath of the Kenyan elections last December, has called for a special tribunal to try various perpetrators. The Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, headed by Justice Philip Waki, released its findings on October 15 after a three month investigation. It recommended that a special tribunal be created to "seek accountability against personas bearing the greatest responsibility for crimes, particularly crimes against humanity, relating to the 2007 General Elections in Kenya."

At first glance, one is struck by a gaping omission by the Waki inquiry. Political violence, as pointed out by Human Rights Watch, has plagued the Mt. Elgon district in Kenya's Western Province for two years. Mt. Elgon remains a flashpoint of political angst and acrimony. Avoid that, it would seem, at your peril. This is something the authors of the Waki report do.

Notwithstanding that, the findings of the report make essential, if dire reading. In the first place, the violence that took place last year was the result of a pattern dating back to the last decade. The tribal explosion in the Tinderet division of Nandi District on October 29, 1991 is the first that comes to mind. 1997 was another bad year for tribal clashes, notably in the Rift Valley.

All sides, the report found, had fanned the dispute, funding and indulging in attacks on supporters of their opponents with impunity. This is a pattern the authors of the report are keen to halt through a legal process. A police force criticised by various human rights organizations was also condemned for its use of excessive force against protesters.

In the absence of a special tribunal, the Waki commission has recommended that a sealed list of suspects be turned over to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. While that is a measure of last resort, it would also be a measure of minimal relevance to the complex political landscape of Kenya. The remedial measures of justice should start at home - local and national tribunals are often more desirable than international ones, though an international body may be needed in extreme cases.

Reaction varied, but Nairobi's The Nation breathed a sigh of relief, claiming that Kenya had been offered "a last chance to liberate itself from the slavery of politically-instigated barbarity". Kenya's Daily Nation noted the necessity of a "police shake-up," and overall of the entire system of law enforcement.

The debate may well be had, and the recipient of this report, President Mwai Kibaki, will do well to heed its recommendations. Grievances must be sorted; crimes punished. Georgette Gagno, Africa's director at Human Rights Watch has warned against ignoring the Waki recommendations. "It is Kenyans who will pay the price of future violence if politicians allow this important report to become just another unheeded warning." The unheeded warning may be the epitaph of an entire political process.