Oz Moses

One can't keep that man, or his fabulously horrific family, out of the news... A piece here on the matter of Italian football and one of his sons. Amongst other sites, at The Roar (Mar 8, 2011), has a piece on the subject:

Libya, Gaddafis and Juventus Football

As Libya descends into civil war, the trail of the Gaddafi family through the highest echelons of international government and sport becomes thicker by the day.

In 2002, Al-Saadi Gaddafi, son of beleaguered ‘mad dog’ Muammar, joined the board of Italian Serie A giants Juventus. Earlier that year, the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company (Lafico), purchased a 7.5 per cent stake in Juventus.

The Italian-Libyan relationship is not merely sporting, let alone cultural – the North African state was, at one point, part of Italy’s colonial project. Italy itself was, along with various Western powers, instrumental in bringing Libya back into the fold after years of isolation.

From bombing planes and assassinating external enemies, the Tripoli government decided to turn its interest to more ‘constructive’ projects. The treaty of friendship duly provided Libya not merely with an apology for colonial misdeeds, but financial compensation.

Over time, Tripoli’s relationship with Rome, in the economic sense, has grown deep. (Consider, for instance, Gaddafi’s stake in Il Corriere della Sera, or the Milan stock exchange.)

But, however deep it was, Silvio Berlusconi would have been perplexed by the Libyan leader’s gifts on the occasion of his visit last year: a Koran, a book of Gaddafi’s sayings, and a 50 euro note.

It is questionable whether the Gaddafi family should ever have been allowed near weapons.

Bullets tend to fly all too readily with a Gaddafi behind the trigger. It is even more questionable whether Saadi should ever have been allowed near a football. In true prima donna fashion, he selected himself the captain of Libya’s football side, not to mention assuming the mantle as head of Libya’s Football Federation.

Delusions of grandeur dominated – Saadi openly professed to modelling himself on striker Michael Owen, though he ultimately only ever became a model of foot balling incompetence.

His prowess lay elsewhere.

The then coach of the Libyan side, Franco Scoglio, was less than impressed by the megalomaniacal designs of the young Gaddafi, either on or off the pitch.

“I would never have let him play, even for a minute. As a footballer he’s worthless” (Scotsman, Oct 29, 2002). Scoglio was duly sacked, an unfortunate state of affairs given his work in lifting the country 16 places in the FIFA rankings.

Confirming Scoglio’s razor sharp judgment Saadi duly signed up for Serie A team Perugia in 2003, only to find himself playing one match and failing a drug test.

He may well go down in history, not merely as one of Gaddafi’s more unstable offspring, but one of Italian football’s worst players.

Certainly, Gaddafi junior was worth his price (a Wikileaks cable disclosed from US diplomatic sources describes him as ‘notoriously ill-behaved’), less on the football market than on the market of quotes and theatrical folly. In putting Libya’s credentials forth for hosting the World Cup, he was less than flattering to his African compatriots.

“We do not have any diseases here, unlike in other African states, and security is of the highest level.”

At one point, Saadi was even thinking of muscling into the British market.

But that mountain was seemingly beyond reach. Purchasing Manchester United, he is reported to have said, would have been like buying the Church of England. Both Man U, and the Church, will be relieved about that impossibility as the conflagration in North Africa gathers pace. Juventus, with its Libyan connections, will be feeling otherwise.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Thinking about art and calamity

2011-03-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

A discussion about Sidney Nolan and the problems of depicting art and natural catastrophe at Scoop, Mar 7, 2011.

The Impossible Project: Sidney Nolan and Australian Drought

The grotesque is always hard to capture, be it in terms of natural disaster or human-made catastrophe. When it comes to the Australian drought, it is nigh impossible. Human and animal figures elude proper examination. The carcasses of dead life stock seem somehow out of reach for those of the artistic bent. The result is an irresistible temptation to caricature what is already awful, to provide a stock trade description about an image so unbelievably distressing it demands another language.

The Australian Galleries in Collingwood has made an attempt to register these ensembles of grotesquery, a record of environmental disaster, through an exhibition featuring photographic works by Sidney Nolan. The exhibition Drought Photographs seems, at first glance, promising. Nolan was nothing if not prolific. But on closer inspection, one finds the strength of the environment Nolan attempts to capture overwhelming.

Nolan can be found in a few instances looking rather calm in the catastrophe. In one photograph, there is a glass of wine on a table, placed in the foreground, as the camera takes his picture. Even as one faces the end of life in sand and vicious sun, one should be entitled to a good tipple. There are instances where he is with life and the living - a child is present in one picture. With a sense of bravado, he is facing this environmental calamity with a calm that is itself grotesque. Whether he intended it as an inappropriate contrast is hard to know. But like his painting, the illusion can itself become overwhelming. The carcasses in the photos look like overdone stage props, exaggerated to the point of the absurd. (This entire environment is, in a sense, absurd - or at least the human presence in it.)

Untitled (Brian the stockman at Wavehill Station mounting a dead horse) from 1952 demonstrates the absurd in action. The prop is being mounted in a bone dry desert by the stockman. The horse is, of course, free of life - in so far as both art and reality are one. The stockman, Australia's symbol of environmental colonisation, need only to be told: 'Fool, the animal is a mere carcass.' He has been bluffed by drought. Untitled (calf carcass in tree) from the same year is barely believable, an animal jammed on the tree for artistic license. Untitled (cow skull balanced on hooves I) seems like a misplaced joke.

This is hardly surprising in Nolan. It has been noted that, when confronted with the Drought paintings of the 1950s, Nolan slid into a form of sentimentality. In fact, the reviewer Merlin James raised the point that he might have well been viewed as neo-Romantic in his treatment of the subject. When confronted by the alien, by the impossible, one is likely to become a romantic.

With his sketches placed at the back of the gallery, there is a sense of Picasso about it - sense, in so far as it alludes to Don Quixote and the rather minimal background figure of Sancho Panza in the 1955 drawing made for the August 18-24 issue of Les Lettres françaises, a magazine edited by the poet Louis Aragon. The elongated figure, in turn, might well have been inspired by a notably spare statuette of the Cervantes figure in Spain. Nolan's own drought ravaged figures feature a distorted presence, necrophilia twisted and tormented by nature. Daumier meets Picasso in the sands - the tragedy of the animal world is to be found before the remorseless sun and the torturous lack of water.

The absurdist mythology is taken to its penultimate in Russell Drysdale's portraits. Man feeding his dogs from 1941, hanging with much force and presence in the Queensland Art Gallery, is an example of emaciated figures in action, brittle and skinny arms moving towards even skinnier animals. Thin, desperate figures project out of the dry earth, trees devoid of leaves and life dominate like crosses coming out of a dead earth. In a sense, Drysdale comes somewhat closer than Nolan in capturing the desolation. The thinning out of his human figures, and the even thinner trees, suggest that this environment strips, reduces, destroys. The dogs are alone, mere savage reminders of life without water. With Nolan's portraits of the drought-ravaged environment, one is getting a dinosaur parade, figures destroyed and yet standing tall, proud as museum pieces. No drought would ever allow that to happen in any accurate way at all.

Alexander Haig and History

2010-02-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

How will Alexander Haig, belligerent Cold War warrior and implacable anti-Communist be remembered? More on this at Scoop:

Tuesday, 23 February 2010, 3:42 pm
Column: Binoy Kampmark

Blunt Instrument of the Dark Side: Alexander Haig

The bluff and bluster of history stills itself from time to time, leaving in its wake the busy activity of revisionism and more sympathetic readings of its figures. A figure who is unlikely to deserve such treatment is the late Alexander Haig, a Cold War warrior who was very happy to push the bloodied envelope for the sake of his masters, at least when he wasn’t undermining them. He served as a commander of the 1st infantry division in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and President Ronald Reagan’s US Secretary of State for a year.

Haig never shied away from the opinion that the projection of US power was paramount, so much so that it trumped such ethical matters as human rights. This was something he shared with his contemporaries, among them President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who himself noted in his memoirs how ‘power had to come first.’ That power, notably during Haig’s time as an advisor, was an exercise over less global turf. The battle was becoming more circumscribed. Allies were rising in estimation. Détente with Moscow was being practised; the Chinese were being brought in from the cold. The Soviet Union remained the enemy, but one in a different strategic environment. It was within this environment that the Iago-like Henry Kissinger thrived. The cruder Haig had no such patience, seeing rogues everywhere and diplomacy as dissimulating pantomime.

Haig never left his unrefined views in doubt, blunted by an anti-Communism that verged on mania, and an unhealthy respect for militarist solutions. In Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy (1984) he made it clear that, ‘The United States must somehow shock its European allies into an acceptance of the Soviet threat.’ And shocking was what Haig had a strong liking for, whether it was endorsing a more savage response to Vietnam, or feeding the surveillance genie that was running rampant during the days of the Nixon administration.

Haig was very much a spoiler, tampering and tinkering when his own simple world view on American power was threatened. Kissinger’s view of his contribution was somewhat different, at least in the late 1960s. As assisting advisor to Kissinger on military matters within the NSC, Haig calmed ‘anarchic tendencies and established coherence and procedure in National Security Council staff or talented prima donnas.’

However, as Tom Shachtman documents (Huffington Post, Feb 21), Haig operated his own military spy ring, at stages pilfering documents from Kissinger and the NSC. At times, he was effectively trying to cut Nixon out of the loop. He stonewalled and stifled the process of détente to the best of his challenged abilities. When called on to mediate, he showed that it was not necessarily his strong suit, despite a favourable reputation etched for himself during negotiations to end the Vietnam War. A more accurate example was the shuttle diplomacy he employed between Britain and Argentina prior to the Falklands War, bumbling efforts that caused mistrust on all sides.

This was fully realised when he became Chief of Staff in May 1973. With his obsession with power within White House circles came a disturbing tendency, evident more than once, of assuming quasi-Presidential powers. Were his bombastic words uttered in 1981 after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, ‘As of now, I am in control here in the White House,’ a mere ‘poor choice’, as he subsequently claimed? He would have no doubt simply issued another ‘caveat’ on them, making observers pause to realise his sly leanings towards purposely cultivated ‘ambiguities’.

In truth, his life had few caveats, and he came, in time, to realise his limitations. This was certainly made clear to him during his attempt to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. His service to various administrations belied a deep and often unstable belief in the nature of power and its attainment. He may well have simply seen his entirely life as littered by what he himself liked terming, after Winston Churchill, ‘terminological inexactitudes.’

Binning Reports: The UN and the Emergency Response

2009-09-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

The reaction by members of the Rudd Government in Australia to the statement of Professor James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Human Rights, and his critique of the Northern Territory Emergency Response resemble those of their predecessors. The outside world, it would seem, has little to offer the Ruddites on indigenous affairs, who otherwise style themselves as 'internationalists.'

More on this in my piece in Eureka Street, September 3, 2009.

How to take the UN Indigenous Report Card

By Binoy Kampmark

When the statement of the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Human Rights on the situation in the Northern Territory was released last week, there was a howl of protest. Professor James Anaya's 11-day tour of Aboriginal communities did not leave him with a positive impression. He found a compelling 'need to develop new initiatives and reform existing ones — to conform with international standards requiring genuine respect for cultural integrity and self-determination'.

The dyke of discontent duly opened. Warren Mundine, former Labor Party President and prominent Aboriginal activist has suggested binning the report, much like 'other' reports from that same office.

Jenny Macklin, in her role as Indigenous Affairs Minister, was more than a bit put out by the statement. She told ABC News: 'For me, when it comes to human rights, the most important human right that I feel as a Minister I have to confront, is the need to protect the rights of the most vulnerable particularly children and for them to have a safe and happy life and a safe and happy family to grow up in.'

Shredding or, in this case, binning a report from an international organisation is irresistible for hardnosed policy makers in the frontline of combating Aboriginal misery in the Northern Territory. Anaya is not himself being dogmatic. His statement is a sober, obvious reflection that programs are not duplicated, and that such matters as the Closing the Gap campaign, the Emergency Response and other government initiatives be achieved in partnership with local indigenous institutions.

He pays, as he should, respect to international human rights norms that place the Indigenous community in a prominent decision making role. Words like 'autonomy' and 'self-determination' should not be a species of rhetorical flotsam. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, he argues, should directly participate in the 'design of programs and polices at the national level, within a forum that is genuinely representative of the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples'.
He urges a 'holistic' approach in dealing with the problems of Australia's Indigenous peoples. None of these suggestions should upset the Rudd Government.

Anaya also encourages the deed more than the word. Reconciliation is not merely gnosis but praxis — action must be taken to pursue its objective. He is mindful of this in the context of the intervention. He cannot quite understand how the Emergency Response could be 'proportionate' in infringing rights. Rights may be violated in certain policy contexts that can be justified in the name of the 'public good', but one should always be wary of such assertions.

He recommends reinstating the protections offered by the Racial Discrimination Act. Ignoring Anaya's well-reasoned statement will not be disastrous for Australia. The judgments of international organisations are often blithely ignored. But refusing to at least pay respectful lip service to Anaya's statement continues a long tendency, instituted by the Howard Government, of ignoring international advice, convention and protocol.

That position comes close to that of such anti-treaty figures as John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN and staunch anti-internationalist. Such a rigid strategy of reducing treaties and recommendations to scraps of paper can trash pronouncements that might have some merit.

Wisdom does not always begin at home. There are times when it helps to have an international body condemn an obnoxious law or practice. Objective distance, and one attained from sources outside the problem, can also shed light on local conundrums. Too often, the Indigenous communities of Australia have had no other forum than an international one to air their grievances and express their grief.

The Intervention is discriminatory, insofar as it targets a specific social and historical problem associated with a particular people. It is a distasteful response to a distasteful problem. That would seem to be stating the obvious.

The onus is, as it always has been, on the government authorities to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Intervention and how it will benefit the Indigenous population. Some within the Indigenous community have agreed with it. Some haven't. The jury is out and circling. We still await the verdict.

The Hypothetical Terrorist

2009-08-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

Anti-terror measures are always tinged, some might argue tainted, by hypothetical scenarios ('What would happen if that bomb had gone off?'). Exaggerations are often made by authorities keen to show a frightened public that their tax dollars are not going into a policy vacuum. I discuss some of these issues in a recent piece in Counterpunch, August 12, 2009.

Terror Australis: The Triumph of Hypothetical Attacks

Australia, the earth's largest island continent has had those customary fears associated with the nation still believing in notions of virgo intacta. Immigrations regulations are strict; intruders by leaky boats and unreliable rafts are treated with suspicion. Terrorist attacks are few and far between in a country that urbanized so rapidly it stifled the urge to revolt. Apart from the Hilton bombings in 1978, Australia has proven fairly immune from the phenomenon of political terrorism.

In the previous years, that sense of security has been disturbed. A plot to blow up spectators at sporting events in Australia was foiled and seven men imprisoned after final hearings were held last year. The case was, however, marred by inconsistencies and a questionable performance by the prosecution. The desperation at getting a conviction was palpable.

A few weeks ago, Australians were treated to boasts of Terror Foiled. It was claimed that suicide bombers associated with the Somali group Al-Shabaab had not succeeded in consummating their plans to storm the Holsworthy Army Barracks, a base in Sydney’s southwest, with the intent of killing numerous soldiers with assault weapons. With a certain condescending note, Time wrote about how, on August 4, Australians ‘quickly began to learn the pronunciation of the Somali terrorist group’s name.’ Four hundred police in a joint federal and state operation had moved across Melbourne, raiding nineteen properties. Four men were arrested that day, followed by another four the next. The men are of Lebanese and Somali background.

An unhealthy, psychic state has been unearthed in these revelations: a desire, almost a wish, that Australian sites would prove worthy as genuine terrorist targets. There is a hierarchy in the west on the worthy and unworthy in the terrorist game. A condition of terror envy has taken root. ‘There is,’ a grave Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd argued, ‘an enduring threat of terrorism at home here in Australia as well as overseas.’ For the ill-directed and confused figures beavering away at Canberra’s Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Australia remained, to quote one of its supposed experts Carl Ungerer, ‘a gold medal target for Al Qaeda’ begging the question as to when it attained that prestigious award.

In short, the terror ‘threat’ is everywhere, the unseen creature that strikes the unsuspecting. While it would demand a minimal economy of effort to strike at Holsworthy base, exaggeration is very much the norm in the lingua franca of anti-terrorism. A Somali-based terrorist organization intent on imposing Shari’a rule in Somalia proper does not look like a particularly strong, yet alone credible enemy for a country on the other side of the earth. Throw in an Al Qaeda link though, and you seem to rise in the ladder of terror envy.

Even Somali voices have weighed into the debate. A Somali leader, the Islamic scholar Dr. Herse Hilole, claims he made murmurings about the likelihood of an attack a few years ago. ‘My suspicion was that young Somali Muslims could be or may be used in the future to carry [out] some terrorist activities in Australia’ (ABC News, Aug 4). The Eritrean chairman of the Melbourne-based African Think Tank, Berhan Ahmed, has been toying with the idea Australia’s failed assimilation program would pose threats to its local security. 16,000 Somalis have found refuge in Australia, fleeing the ravages of civil war. But teething problems with integration remain. Housing complexes and tenements have become breeding grounds for disaffection. Un-employment is chronic. The options are stark: the embrace of charismatic religious figures or ruinous drugs.

We are left with the recurring hypothetical event, an occurrence unrealised, all the more potent for that fact. In the ‘age of terror’, the hypothetical terrorist event has become the premier showcase, the determining issue on policy. ‘Potentially this would have been, if it had been able to be carried out, the most serious terrorist attack on Australian soil,’ claims Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Tony Negus. An entire anti-terror system is based on invoking terror, measured by ‘states’ of emergency, alarm and concern. An entire apparatus in coping with terrorists employs methods of fear and surveillancewhile offering the disclaimer: we are doing it to protect you while watching you.

Links and evidence remain sketchy in these revelations. What was in the news as carnival fanfare has now died down, leaving the shadowy business to interrogators and trial lawyers. In a society that is currently functioning on the idea of a permanent war in times of permanent peace, we are left less clear than ever what role the Somali organization truly has in Australia. It is not a situation the authorities are necessarily keen to dispel. Public confusion, not to mention ignorance, persists in remaining the handiest of state assets.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

BlackRock - Money-Management King

2009-06-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

More consolidation is taking place in the global economy. A hungry BlackRock is acquiring Barclays Global Investors, making it the largest money manager in the world. Its assets will be staggering, surpassing that of the US Federal Reserve. Such a heavy concentration of assets should be worrying, though few are registering concerns as yet.

A piece by Karen Weise, from ProPublica (Jun 12, 2009) documents the move:

BlackRock is forking out $13.5 billion to buy Barclays Global Investors, forming the largest money manager in the world, reports Bloomberg News. The acquisition means BlackRock will manage $2.7 trillion in assets—more than the Federal Reserve.

BlackRock has drawn scrutiny for the scope of its reach throughout federal bailout programs; it helps manage many of the Treasury Department’s big investments, like AIG, the New York Times reported last month. In addition, Blackrock announced in March that it would participate in the government’s toxic-asset program as a private investor. (A BlackRock managing director told the Times that the company is very sensitive to potential conflicts of interest.)

Iran goes to the polls

2009-06-11T12:15:00.000-07:00

Presidential elections in Iran beckon this Friday. A few discussions abound. Foreign Policy (Jun 10, 2009) looks at the American reaction (or non-reaction):

A Mousavi win would not mean smooth sailing for Washington's efforts to engage Iran, analysts caution. It could deepen fissures in the Iranian leadership or even prompt a hard-line backlash or crackdown that could further paralyze U.S. efforts to engage Iran, they say. But the voting out of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would undoubtedly be seen in Washington and the West as a welcome sign that the Iranian public supports greater liberalization and a less hostile attitude toward the West.

Radio Free Europe (Jun 11, 2009) is adamant that the vote will be far from free or fair, noting the exclusion of up to 475 potential candidates:

Their choice is limited to present or former members of the Iranian establishment. Women are excluded, as are secular candidates and those considered unfaithful to Islamic and revolutionary values.

KFC Un-thought

2009-05-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Problems with free meals and the logistics of passing them over to a hungry public surfaced last week. Some of this can be found in my discussion in the May 12, 2009 issue of Scoop:

The Deal Un-Thought: KFC and Free Meals

By Binoy Kampmark

The idea of a free meal, whatever the quality, always has force. In a society where jobs are being lost more quickly than they are being replaced; in a world where food prices are volatile and often rising, an advertisement for a free feed is worth its weight of gold. Even if it emanates from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It should be little surprise that a corporate giant like KFC decided to opt for the notion of bread, with perhaps more than its fair share of a circus. Panem et circenses, as the saying goes from the Roman satirist Juvenal, with its sense of forfeiting responsibility and sound policy. The corporate sector has lost a huge fan club, with complicit government officials happy to abdicate social responsibility in favour of market gains. Nothing like gratis chicken meals (‘healthy’ ones at that) to stay the rot and resurrect corporate goodwill for the public.

Enter the KFC coupon, available from a website aptly named ‘UnthinkKFC.com’. ‘Free 2 pc Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal.’ The recipient is promised two pieces of grilled chicken, at the discretion of the manager, two individual sides and a biscuit. The offer’s validity, according to the coupon available for printing, is from May 5 to May 19, but exclusive of Mother’s Day. (Mothers, it seems, don’t need free KFC meals.) It also had to be printed by a certain time: 10 the evening of Wednesday.

The company in time was wishing that it had ‘un-thought’ its offer. The high priestess of promotions, Oprah Winfrey, who creates social phenomena in the United States my merely uttering a few words, endorsed the offer on her program. The offer was also featured prominently on her website. The masses, with bellies eager for a free meal on download, rushed and queued, overwhelming various outlets in the country. Within 24 hours of the announcement, almost 11 million coupons had been printed.

By Thursday, the generosity of the food giant had well and truly evaporated. Having advertised the offer with fanfare, officials were now turning customers back, refusing to accept the coupon. Chicken supplies were apparently running thin. The next day, KFC President Roger Eaton was eating his words before Oprah, betraying a certain dottiness in what he termed the ‘chicken caper’. The company had ‘had a very big projection of numbers on this, but not in our wildest imagination could we believe the response we’ve gotten.’

Eaton is evidently not brimming with much imagination on this score. In this climate, people will eat food resembling worn leather and cardboard in numbers as long as they believe it is ‘free’. ‘Health’ has very little to do with it, even if an assortment of experts have suggested Oprah’s personal battle against an expanding waistline and her endorsement of a ‘healthier’ product made a difference. This is hardly a time for gourmandizing and nutritional squeamishness.

Having found itself in an uncomfortable position, the company has instructed all those at locations to pass out forms promising a free meal at some later date, accompanied by gratis soft drink. That’s put pay to the healthy aspect of it, in any case.

In the end, KFC found that it could barely provide the bread, but certainly the thronging circus. As one disappointed customer, Shannon Edwards, put it to a CNN affiliate station, ‘I have to go to McDonald’s now.’

Swine Flu Politics

2009-05-04T11:29:00.001-07:00

Much in the world about swine flu at the moment, and while we should take it seriously, past mistakes ought to be noted. Remember 1976 and the swine flu that was said to be lethal enough as to potentially take the lives of one million Americans? The cure can at times be worse than the disease, and the immunization program the Ford Administration encouraged backfired dramatically.

Patrick Di Justo has a good piece in Salon.com, April 28, 2009. Hamilton Nolan at Gawker is less charitable to those keen on keeping us on our toes (and behind masks): Quickly, don your paper masks! Stay indoors! The dirty Mexican pig influenza is here, to sicken you! Wocka wocka.

My own contribution is available in 'Swine at the Trough: The Business of Pandemics,' at Counterpunch, April 30, 2009.

Law and John Demjanjuk

2009-04-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

The legal rounds and the issue of war crimes committed during World War II continue in the Demjanjuk affair. It's a long one, stretching from Demjanjuk's battles in the Israeli justice system, to the legal limbo he finds himself in the US. German prosecutors are the latest to seek his extradition and trial.

The logistics of this are discussed in my piece 'Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk: A Drawn-Out Affair' in Counterpunch on April 21, 2009.

Killing the news

2009-03-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

The end of the newspaper, which is simply another way of forecasting the end of the intrepid field journalist, may well be nigh. But should this endear us more to the polemical blogger? An assortment of commentary on the subject is available.

An interesting suggestion to arrest the collapse of the news print industry is converting newpapers into non-profit, endowed organisations. That view is put forth in the New York Times by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt.

This is what Eric Alterman has to say in the The Nation about the seemingly terminal affair:

Perhaps it is a mistake to try to save "the newspaper" per se. Given the unavoidable splintering of what once was a "mass" audience for just about all forms of culture and entertainment, the old-fashioned notion of a mass "newspaper" with a sports page, a comics page, a crossword puzzle and a heartwarming story about the winner of a local high school science fair is a predigital phenomenon, however great the devotion to its daily appearance on our doorstep by old farts like yours truly. Ironically, it is the sections of the paper most crucial to informed democratic discourse that are in danger of disappearing. Sports news, entertainment news, health news, fashion, celebrity and style reporting will always be with us in one form or another, because they are such delightful places to advertise.

My own survey, 'A Government without Newspapers', is available at Scoop, March 25, 2009.

Sausage Van Drama: Mary Stuart in Copenhagen

2009-03-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

How do you botch Friedrich Schiller, and mangle the historical importance of Queen Elizabeth I and her historic struggle with Mary Stuart of the Scots? The answer: a Katrine Weidemann production at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen. More in a review at Scoop , March 13, 2009:

Schiller at the Sausage Van: Mary Stuart in Copenhagen

By Binoy Kampmark

The laughs grate, the performances seem grotesque. But the warning signs were there: Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, the adaptation of the demise and end of Mary Stuart at the hands of her nemesis, Queen Elizabeth of England, was doomed to scarring mutilation. Under the direction of Katrine Weidemann, Ditte Gråbøl in the role of Elizabeth and Sidse Babett Knudsen as that of Mary Stuart, succeeded in lowering a tragedy to that of a somewhat crude comedy. We should all laugh, it should seem, lest we lose our sense of perspective on grand historical actors.

Perspective was the last thing to bother the production team. Why bother with luxurious and grave language, the idea of pathos, when one can reduce it to the level of a sand pit dispute with the empathy of quarrelling children? Essentially, the two challengers were throwing sand at each other, with Elizabeth holding the upper hand, if only just. Elizabeth seemed almost moronic in her childishness, while Mary Stuart was, as ever, the harlot on heat, seducing and charming herself across the stage in what looked strikingly like a nightdress. Stereotypes triumphed, though the common assumption of the Queen of England being composed and sacrificial in her role was underscored by a juvenile uncertainty. The cardboard advisors did nothing to change it.

In the original Schiller version, word play is essential. Both characters compete on a plane of power, one for the Scottish throne, the other for England; and the fate of Mary Stuart is given a defence that does make Elizabeth less certain of her actions. The advisors are also essential, crafting defences for and against Stuart’s position. But in this case, best let the girls sort it out in the sand pit, without so much as a referee to adjudicate. Even better, make Mary Stuart crawl on the stage, a spectacle most edifying for one who seeks to reclaim her Scottish throne. Even the premier Danish paper, the Politiken, was left ‘surprised’ by the product, and somewhat disbelieving of the various relationships, including that of the secret love between Lord Leicester and Elizabeth.

Aspects of it were impressive, but for reasons entirely remote from the play. The dramatic suicide of Mortimer, dagger protruding from chest; the spontaneous lesbian scene between the both queens (Symbolic of what? Dangerous tongues, as was suggested on stage?), the rolling centre of the theatre which moved much like a seamless airport escalator, ferrying bodies and chattering characters back and forth, gave the audience much pause for amusement. One member of the audience, on leaving contented, voiced her opinion: ‘I never knew the story beforehand, but my, was it funny.’ And so we have Schiller as the comedian, or rather, a work that was found tragedy and left as a weak comedy.

Danish, in translation, is sometimes difficult to project on stage, though it need not always be the case. The language of gravitas becomes ever the language of pragmatism, instrumental, workmanlike. It can prove effective, but as to whether it moves in the same way is a matter of debate. Translations of Shakespeare appear clunky; Schiller can look right royal comical. Ostentatious word play in this case was trimmed in favour of language that could, as the Politiken column went, take place at a Danish sausage van (or pølservogn). Perhaps his demise at the hands of these so called master comedians was inevitable. He, with his historical characters, would not have been amused. Nor were many viewers.

Farewell Frindall

2009-01-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

The passing of Bill Frindall, masterful statistician and trivia buff of cricket, has given followers of the sport cause for mourning. In addition to covering the staggering number of 350 Test matches, or thereabouts, he also published a vast array of books on the subject. How often would the reader come across his name associated with the Wisden Book of Cricket Records.

As current commentator and BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew is quoted in the the Independent (30 Jan 2009) as saying, Frindall was ‘immortalised by Brian Johnston, who called him “The Bearded Wonder” because you could throw any question at Bill.”

In a game where statistics remain sacrosanct, Frindall was the sovereign sage, a fixture of the legendary Test Match Special team. He will be missed.

Blago and Corruption in USA Inc.

2009-01-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

Why all this fuss about corruption in Illinois? The outrage, it seems, lies not in its occurrence, but its discussion. So, Governor Blagojevich (“Blago”) of Illinois now finds himself facing an impeachment motion (recently passed) with numerous defenders, knee-deep in charges of corruption. While his behaviour may have pushed the legal envelope (oh the nerve, trying to sell Obama’s vacated senatorial seat for funding perks), it was hardly exceptional.

Those great souls in Congress are always happy to be rented (or bought?) by wealthier personalities, corporate or otherwise. Funding for seats and policies all levels of government in the American republic is nothing new. The political process lends itself to barter and bribery, or as they prefer to call it in USA, Inc., "pay-to-play". Keen moralists with brushes and brooms intent on cleaning up “Blago” and his creed ought to read lobbyist Robert N. Winter-Berger's Washington Pay-Off (1972). The problem goes far deeper than Illinois. For a brief discussion, see my piece in Scoop, January 9, 2009:

We Are All Corrupt Now: Blago and the American Republic

By Binoy Kampmark

What is to be made of the sordid little case of seat selling by Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich? Not much, judging from much reaction in the US. And those who do are treated like members of an outdated inquisition, hypocrites who guard a moral order long dead. The American republic occasionally reminds us that its politics is the perennial scrap of a crude plutocracy rather than the deliberations of truly accountable officials. This should come as little surprise to watchers in politics land who have witnessed that agent of change, Barack Obama, come to power on the back of a presidential election that cost $5.3 billion.

Selling a senatorial seat in such blatant fashion might outrage some because Blago has been rather exhibitionist about it. He decided to tell us, in rather clumsy fashion, that American politics was an emperor without clothes. These were probably lost as the new republic started shedding lustre in the late 19th century with its embrace of corrupt political machines. Such honesty in the trading of seats is, of course, treated as a sign of insanity. The blogosphere is alive with claims that Blago has lost his marbles. A defense of diminished capacity has been suggested.
Blagojevich might be a bad egg. But he is not an exceptional one from the battery hens of America’s political system. Some have even written his “pay-to-play” off as one of those cases of bargaining and positioning that comes with a political system that thrives on fundraising and favours. Consider this Zen-like prescription from the Centre for Responsive Politics: “Fundraising is not just a way that candidates demonstrate their viability: it’s a necessary task given the tremendous costs of running a campaign.” Did Blago, in short, purport to “sell” Obama’s vacated seat, not for self-enrichment, but fundraising? The jury is still out on that one.

In any case, senators, representatives, and their seats, have been up for sale for decades. Votes are infinitely buyable. Remember, wrote Gore Vidal in 1973, the Kennedy relation who left a bag full of money at a barber’s to be divvied amongst “the honest yeomen of West Virginia in exchange for their support of the family’s candidate.” When the briber is Boeing or General Electric, or a private donor from the Forbes rich list, the electorate approves or at the very least remains reticent. A superficial sense of decorum is maintained, and the electors can go about getting even less for their now rather ravaged dollar.

The recent theatrical installment – the appearance of Blagojevich appointee Roland Burris, who has sought to claim Obama’s seat as junior senator from Illinois – takes the saga further. Burris was duly rejected by the secretary of the Senate, though a series of steps have been suggested to bring him into the fold. Under pressure from Obama, Harry Reid has relented. Another seat, incidentally, also remains vacant – that from Minnesota. The issue there is an election dispute. The 111th Congress remains two members short.

There is even a sense of outrage by some commentators that people should care about purported corruption in the topsy-turvy world of Illinois politics. (What is first in the news? The strafing of the Gaza Strip or the auction of vacant Senate seats?) Veteran newsreader Jim Lehrer, and David Gregory of Meet the Press, see little problem in the world of “pay-to-play”. Punish Blago, and you punish the political system.

The quixotic governor is even delighting some commentators with his pluck. Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Tribune was thrilled by the governor’s “chutzpah” and ability to procure chaos. (Showing his viability, perhaps?) He was, after all, innocent till proven otherwise, a golden presumption yet to fall by the way side. “You have to admire someone so committed to his job that he won’t let a little thing like a prosecution interfere with doing it.”

Navarrette is right about one thing: there is little doubt that the Illinois governor is committed to his job. Blagojevich, to boot, has put Burris forth as a paragon of good race relations – the first African-American to be elected statewide in Illinois causing alarm to those trembling white males in the Democratic Party. Such material is grist to the mill of mythmaking.

Illinois’ Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn is upset that the state has become an “international laughing stock”. One can’t help thinking that he feels rather wounded that Blago is still there, resolutely blocking his own pathway to the governorship. American politics has been admired, to a greater or lesser extent, precisely for its satanic genius in treating public affairs as those of a business. Blago’s sin (or test of viability?) remains his candour, the inadvertent whistleblower run wild. His punishment will not, in itself, reform the state, let alone the republic. Publicly funded elections might, though that will result in the death of a creed long respected by the burghers of the United States.

The Bagosora Case

2009-01-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

The case law on the subject of punishing crimes against humanity received an important addition last month. The convictions of Colonels Théoneste Bagosora and Anatole Nsengiyumva along with Major Aloys Ntabakuze by the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda for genocide and crimes against humanity are historic. A discussion about the significance of the trial can be found at Facts and Arts, December 19, 2008:

Punishing Genocide: The Bagosora Case

By Binoy Kampmark

It was considered a huge step towards the attainment of international justice. Perhaps in time, this week's convictions of Bagosora, Ntabakuze and Nsengiyumva of the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda will come to sit alongside an assortment of other historic decisions as essential judicial acts. It may well come to be seen as one of the most important decisions since the Nuremberg verdicts of the late 1940s.

The tribunal noted through the somber tones of the Norwegian presiding judge Erik Møse that Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, as the highest authority in the Rwandan Ministry of Defence, was responsible for the murder of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and a host of fellow officials that warned the globe that a final Tutsi solution was being implemented. For that much, he received a life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Bagosora had been in a position of control as chief official within the ministry, being the powerful Director of Cabinet. The trail of culpability also extended to the murder of ten Belgian peacekeepers, all of whom were disarmed before being massacred. The critical participation of the army at all stages of the genocide was also noted as an important factor.

Life sentences were also meted out to Major Aloys Ntabakuze, commander of the Para Commando Battalion, and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, commander of the Operational Sector of Gisenyi. General Gratien Kabiligi, head of the military operations bureau (G-3) was the only figure to be acquitted, having had a secure alibi as the massacres were taking place. Ntabakuze had rampaged through Kabeza, Nyanza Hill and Kigali at the helm of his elite battalion, while Nsengiyumva set to work in parishes and universities. Both had showed a distaste for the Tutsi academics and the mandarin officials to be found at Mudende University and the L'Institut Africain et Mauricien de Statistiques et d'Economie.

The decision has been a long time in coming, which may have raised a few questions for various advocates (justice delayed is often justice denied). Proceedings commenced in April 2002 and were disrupted by the retirement of a judge and the non-reelection of another. The trial had to be renewed in another chamber in June 2003 with a revised bench. When it was finished, much paper had been expended (30,000 pages of transcripts plus 4,500 pages of final submissions). The decision itself is daunting, running into hundreds of pages.

When one has finished digesting the enormity of it, a few key points will be taken away. The cornerstone of the decisions was the feature of control. Bagosora and Kabiligi cited the familiar defense that neither had actual authority over a rampant military. Spontaneity, they argued, was order of the day. The desire for Hutu revenge was innate and impossible to stifle.

The defense worked in part for Kabiligi, but it was hardly the case for the enterprising directeur de cabinet. Bagosora had himself spoken as early as 1992 of preparations for an impending "apocalypse" against the Tutsis. But the jurists were even more convinced that the murders leading to the genocide "formed part of an organized military operation pursuant to orders from superior military authorities."

Given the often insurmountable difficulties that present themselves to jurists and lawyers seeking the convictions of high officials for massive crimes, the decision will come as a relief. It did not set new law - it merely reaffirmed the premise that those in authority can never plead a blanket immunity before the international community.

Bin Laden's Media Secretary

2008-11-26T15:15:00.000-08:00

Things can't be going well for the US military commissions set up to punish America's enemies, ostensibly 'illegal combatants', if all they have to convict are chauffeurs and media men. The case of Ali Hamza al Bahlul, who specialised in recruitment videos (and poor ones, at that), was recently decided.

The piece reproduced below is from Facts and Arts, 11 November 2008:

First the Chauffeur, now the Media Man: Bahlul at Gitmo

By Binoy Kampmark

First the driver, now the media man. The trial system established by the Bush administration to strike fear into America's enemies, can barely tweak their noses. Not only has the infamous system of miliary commissions at Guantanámo Bay failed to convict any notable personality in the crudely termed GWOT ('Global War on Terror'), it has failed to shake off the appearance of being a half-baked enterprise. US authorities keep resorting to piecemeal tactics against an organization that shows no signs of disappearing just yet. Who do we have amongst the convicted terrorist luminaries behind bars? Bin Laden's chauffeur, Salim Hamdan, and now, the equivalent of Al Qaeda's Dan Perino (though less well coiffed), Ali Hamza al Bahlul.

The allegations against Bahlul centred around his conspiring with Al Qaeda, soliciting murder and providing material support for terrorism. The trial already had that air of the surreal - the defendant and his lawyer refused to participate in a whole-hearted defence of the case. Bahlul himself had little affection for Air Force Major David Frakt, the officer designated his defense counsel.

If Bahlul was perturbed, he rarely showed signs of it. At this conviction by the nine-member jury, he had made a makeshift paper plane (perhaps the next item to be confiscated before boarding flights), and read out a bit of his less than impressive poetry praising the attacks of September 11.

Jailing the media man (or secretary, as some reports put it) can hardly be a worthwhile incentive against professional terrorists or practitioners of atrocity. Making videos and managing the media material of GWOT fiends may not be something to condone, but it is hardly something that should lead to a life sentence. Bahlul is far from an expert propaganda minister (Goebbels, don't eat your heart out), and his amateurish media methods (grainy recruitment videos and commercials) would have made the Third Reich's most prominent filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, cringe.

One video demonstrating an attack on the USS Cole harboured in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000 that led to the deaths of 17 American sailors, is suitably tasteless but hardly worth a life sentence. If that were the case, most of Rupert Murdoch's media minions, not to mention Mr Hegemony himself, would be well behind bars for inciting an illegal war on Iraq. Yet again, the legal services of the Gitmo system demonstrate why they should be immediately disbanded and shifted to standard criminal courts. The deluded continue to promote Camp X-Ray as if it were a tropical, well-equipped holiday camp, with all the shackled trimmings thrown in. An FBI agent who interrogated Bahlul in early 2002 went so far as to call this carceral paradise 'very comfortable' (3 Nov Reuters).

President Barack Obama made murmurings during his candidacy that this detention facility, and with it the legal absurdities that arose out of it, should end. That would be wise, if the US has any genuine intention of winning this abstract and vague conflict on 'terror'.

Farewelling the Yugo

2008-11-26T14:59:00.000-08:00

Shall we shed a tear for the demise of the Yugo (otherwise known as the Zastava Koral)? Star of so many video clips and films, some might well do so for the ill-fated vehicle. Others will simply breathe a sigh of relief. A discussion on this legendary and much maligned is available at Counterpunch, November 21/3, 2008:

The End of the Yugo: The Day that Did Come

By Binoy Kampmark

Let's not mince words. The Zastava Koral, known simply as the Yugo, was an abomination, but an endearing one. The last car, assembled by car workers Radoslav Simovic and Zarko Niciforovic, rolled off the line in the Serbian town of Kragujevac earlier this week. The car company is destined for the mechanical mortuary (if not restructuring), with Zastava now taken over, fittingly, by Fiat.

Created with good, populist intentions (yet another car for the struggling, mobile-hungry Volk), it did achieve a few milestones apart from its otherwise sketchy record. The company, for instance, got into bed with Ford in the 1930s supplying trucks to the Yugoslavian army. It did the same with Fiat in 1953, producing two models under license from the Italian giant.

The car always had a sense of the derivative about it, despite spectacular forays into advertising and publicity. The Fiat 128 was the main model of copy, but when it came to jeeps in the 1950s, it was Willys-Overland who shaped up to help. What did not seem so derivative was the flesh that adorned the packages. Ravishing, scantily-clad Yugo-girls were thrown alongside promoted vehicles, pouting for the products. Vulgar yet irrepressibly functional, the Yugo seemed set to last.

In 1985, the Yugo appeared in the United States Tata-like, cheap and at the instigation of the entrepreneurial Malcolm Bricklin. At $3,990, the GV (‘Great Value’) hatchback seemed like a steal, but the only theft being perpetrated was on gullible buyers. Somewhere in the order of 140,000 were sold in the US till 1991, with numbers falling sharply in the last year of sale. All in all, some 800,000 were built over four decades.

Poor performances lent the Yugo to an increasing collection of jokes, many hovering somewhere between the inane and banal. Notable faults were the doomed gearbox, the shoddy workmanship of loosely assembled doors, and that rather limiting feature of repeated engine failure. ‘Why does a Yugo have a defroster on the rear window? To keep your hands warm while you push it.’ An American survey condemned it as the worst car of the millennium, and given the dross coming out of the US over the years, that’s saying something.

Not all have such a negative impression of the products of Zastava. Fonte Everette of Detroit was happy to admit to owning one when he was interviewed earlier this year. For him, the Yugo and his father’s wisdom went hand in hand. ‘If you’ve got a piece of a horse, you’ve got something to work with.’ Everette describes scenes of salivating onlookers hoping to make off with his mechanical beast, but no one was ever willing to offer the right price.

This piece of horse became a ubiquitous fixture of popular culture, and a host of films ran with it. In the stakes of fame (or infamousness), the car’s brand was guaranteed. Then there was that little matter of Yugoslavian unity. Modern governments, from Kuala Lumpur to Belgrade, have rendered cars totemic symbols. They may cost a fortune, and may not even work, but they at least they have a brand.

The excuses for the demise of this idiosyncratic car are piling up like scrap metal. The Yugo, precisely because it was advertised as a delectable cheapo, was treated as one (no need for oil checks, thanks). Abuse yields its predictable outcomes.

Metallica may well have drummed ‘The Day that Never Comes’ in the deadly desert, featuring the ill-fated Yugo (stationary, helplessly inert) which is eventually revived by American soldiers suspicious of its Afghan passengers, one, a demure, chador-clad woman. But the Marines are hardly likely to be storming to the Yugo’s rescue now.

Loving the Free Market: Bush continues to Believe

2008-10-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-30T18:47:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Damien Hirst goes to Sotheby's

2008-09-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

Damien Hirst touted his art auction held on Monday and Tuesday in London as a revolution. Many did find it impressive: new art could be sold 'directly' to the public, without penny-grabbing art dealing in between.

Others weren't so sure. Art critic Robert Hughes, always there to lob the odd grenade of criticism, called it 'persiflage' to suggest that Hirst had somehow expunged the art dealer from the art selling equation. Christie's and Sotheby's, he argued in the Guardian (13 September), had filled the role of private dealer in any case. What are we to take away from the event that earned this 'pirate' of an artist some 111 million pounds?

Let Hughes sum it up: 'If there is anything special about this event, it lies in the extreme disproportion between Hirst's expected prices and his actual talent. Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he managed to bluff so many art-related people.'

More on this at Crikey, in their 18 September 2008 issue:

Damien Hirst finds a bull market without dealers

18 September 2008

Binoy Kampmark, Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge and lecturer in modern history at the University of Queensland, writes:

Damien Hirst specializes in gnomic incantations about his work. He produces what art critic Robert Hughes has termed "absurd" and "tacky commodities." Take his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living -- for Hughes, a tacky, even wacky marine organism, "the world’s most over-rated" shark.

Perhaps one of the most recognisable figures of the art world, Hirst has now taken his war against those commissioning wizards, the art dealers. On Monday, his broadsides were fired at Sotheby’s (the auction was titled "Beautiful Inside my Head Forever") in London, where the auction house, for the first time, sold new work. There were 223 Hirst lots to be gotten through over two days, and they sold direct to eager punters. The dealers had to look on from the sidelines.

Hirst’s process of exiling the art dealer was modern in another sense. As Jackie Wullschlager of the Financial Times pointed out, his method of "disintermediation" was much like the "way bands sell music, or companies sell stocks, online rather than through record companies and brokers."

It was always a risk, and the global art dealership were hoping Hirst’s gamble would reap ruinous returns. Some art critics were probably wishing the same. This was far from the case -- the art market, if nothing else, gave us Hirst and this collusion with commercial bling. The Sotheby’s auction fetched a handsome £111 million. The Golden Calf, a dead bull suspended in trademark formaldehyde, equipped with golden horns and hooves in gold placed frame, alone sold for £10.3 million.

This was Hirst’s secret: he may be world renowned, but he is not as renowned as Sotheby’s. Most passers-by wouldn’t be able to name a single work by the man, but they would be able to tell you the name of a known auction house. It’s all in the branding. Attributes, or the self-defining spiritual nature of the work in question, are secondary.

Hirst did two things: he struck a blow at the conventional relationship between artist (at least known ones) and dealers of their work; and reaffirmed the commercial force of his name. We might get into more trouble if we assess the artistic merit of what he sold, though the auctioneers had to do their own share of branding. Despite having little clue, one auctioneer on Monday intoned knowingly that, "The quality of the work has really shone through." The usual meaningless terms followed: "exquisite", "powerful". The list goes on. Hirst couldn’t care less. He likes formaldehyde. And cows and sharks.

Art works such as Hirst’s are not merely grand spectacles popularized by dumbfounded critics -- they are also assets. The global art market is a huge investment -- more so than a collector’s aesthetic pursuit. When the oil assets deplete, Hirst’s formaldehyde-drenched creatures will take the tab and cover the running expenses of the rich, should they ever need them. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs know this and are rapidly accumulating works of ‘art’ like blue chip stocks.

Hirst has been labeled a clown, a joker rather than a deep-thinking tormented type who is likely to disintegrate in self-doubt and drive off a cliff. But he is the one calling everyone else’s bluff. Andy Warhol, prophet of artistic shallowness, may well have been right: "art is what you can get way with".

Dreaming of an Asian EU

2008-09-18T09:37:00.001-07:00

An Asian version of the European Union? A strange proposition? When Kevin Rudd became Australian Prime Minister, he enthusiastically bandied about the idea with colleagues and members of state. He hasn't been alone in this, and there is much to suggest that his ideas have been gleaned from various other commentators on the subject.

A discussion about the prospects of this idea and more takes place in an article in the respected Diplomat, a special Web Feature for Aug 08 :

Dreaming of an Asian EU

Binoy Kampmark 01-Aug-2008

It is hard to envisage: a seamless political and economic area in the Asia-Pacific region, where mobility is assured and military and trade interests are bound by genuine agreement. In short, something akin to the European Union, an order established by the Maastricht Treaty. The features: a common market, shared principles and modified sovereignty; where freedom of movement in people, capital, goods and services is guaranteed.

Australia’s new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is happy to consider a rough model along such lines. His target year for establishing it is 2020. On June 4, a keen Rudd sketched a few ideas for the Asia Society Australasia Centre in Sydney.

First, the necessary doffing of the hat to an old ally. “Our alliance with the United States is the first pillar of our foreign policy and the strategic bedrock of our foreign and security policy.”
Second, a need to bolster the United Nations, a body mauled and scorned by the governments of the Coalition of the Willing in their invasion of Iraq. Third, the importance of providing some directions on “the regional architecture of the wider region.”

So, what do we have on the cards? An Asia-Pacific union of sorts. Rudd’s speech on June 4 to the Asia Society Australasia Centre provides a few clues. “The European Union does not represent an identikit model of what we should seek to develop in the Asia-Pacific, but what we can learn from Europe is this – it is necessary to take the first step.” Rudd envisages a body that facilitates trade, responding rapidly to crises such as threats of terrorism, and natural disasters, a multilateral body designed to maintain regional security.

Whether this remains fluff, a massaging of moral imperatives in the face of climate change and economic obstacles, is an open question. The political visionaries are churning out material at speed from the planning rooms in Canberra, but the detail is threadbare. Nonetheless, Rudd and his advisors may be facing a reality pointed out by international relations theorist Barry Buzan in an issue of the Pacific Review in 2003. According to Buzan, there is “a distinct and longstanding regional structure in East Asia that is of at least equal importance to the global level shaping of the region’s security dynamics.”

There is little doubt that Rudd has identified a movement at work. A new regional architecture has been discussed for some time. The US considered various initiatives in the early post-Cold War period such as an Asian version of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe or an Asian NATO.

Dramatic shifts in regional relationships in the East Asian and Southeast Asian region have recently taken place. The economic leg is kicking with vigour: an East Asian Economic Community, an East Asian FTA and an Asia Pacific FTA are all on the cards. It is obvious that many Asian countries are seeking a community of sorts – the creation of the East Asian Summit in 2005 was an affirmation of this spirit.

There are other trends as well. The China-India relationship, as articulated in the Joint Declaration between the countries in November 2006, suggested exploring “a new architecture for closer regional cooperation in Asia”. And most recently, again with Washington’s keen interest in keeping itself in the picture of Asian security, a strategy called the “Big Four” initiative, involving the US, India, Australia and Japan was implemented. This arrangement, as pointed out in a sharp analysis by Siddharth Varadarajan (Hindu, 1 December 2006), was a “post-tsunami” naval agreement. The second is the “Five plus Five” formula, where existing military alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and the Philippines are supplemented by hedging powers – India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and New Zealand.

What of membership issues? Rudd, for instance, is keen to keep Washington in the picture, but this is something that may not sit comfortably with other countries in the region. Planners would do well to appreciate the tensions behind the foundation of APEC, which initially excluded the United States.

Only at Seattle, the site of the first leaders’ meeting in 1992, did Washington get a look-in, an outcome which led to a spat between then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad and Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. Mahathir, having sought to keep it an all-Asian club, was labelled “recalcitrant” by a Keating bristling with frustration.

The problem within any new economic and security model is whether the US plays a balancing role (moderating the growing power of China) or exists as one on equal footing with its partners. In terms of dialogue and cooperation, APEC already enables member states to air problems on an equal footing without a deeper commitment. A community is quite a different proposition.

Rudd’s ideas have received a lukewarm, if not openly negative, reception. The Asia Times (11 June) called his plan a “hastily cobbled one” by a star-struck Sinophile, and unlikely to go far. “His proposal is at best premature and at worst presumptuous.” Nor was it entirely original – there was indeed very little to distinguish it from current processes.

Rudd had also managed to sour relations with a host of regional partners in pushing his schemes of union. The Japanese, initially perplexed by Australian preference to visit Beijing over Tokyo, retaliated by outlining a vision of the Asia-Pacific titled ‘Five Pledges to a Future Asia that “Acts Together”’. Australia none too mysteriously vanished from the consideration of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. Regional commentators were also wondering why he hadn’t tended to the important relationship between Jakarta and Canberra.

Rudd has additional critics within his party. Two have been vocal – former Australian leaders Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. What was good for the Europeans, argued Hawke, was not necessarily good for the Asian region. Goals, both economic and political, could still be achieved in the region without the “full degree of integration that has occurred within the European Union” (SBS, 7 June).

Keating was even more concise, quick to pounce on the fetters of sovereignty implied in an Asian EU model. It took the Chinese “350 years of the modern age to truly recover their sovereignty; I do not see them sharing much of it with anybody else.”

Keating reminds those who might believe in the stirrings of an Asianist identity, or even a Nehru-like Pan-Asianism, that they are barking up the wrong tree. “Problem sharing and dialogue is one thing, the surrender or partial surrender of sovereignty is an altogether different thing.” APEC serves its purposes for the region, remarkable, claims Keating (The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June), as having both a US president, the president of China and the Japanese prime minister, sit “in common cause”.

A mountain of work is needed on Rudd’s ideas before they have much meaning, but the Asia-Pacific community proposal, however unclear and amorphous, is unlikely to go away.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He lectures at the University of Queensland.

Levitt, Diamond and Kashyap on Economic Crisis

2008-09-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

A useful overview about the financial crisis engulfing the globe this week is provided by Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap in Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics column in the New York Times. Like scientists who have stumbled over an ailing specimen, they dissect the problems with refreshing clarity. A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are all covered.

Lessons to be gained from the recent government intervention to halt the rot? 'A reasonable reading of the recent bailouts suggests a simple rule: if a firm is on the verge of collapse and its ties to the financial system will lead to a cascade of chaos, the firm will be saved. A bankruptcy will be permitted only if the failure can be contained. '

The full extract is available below. The original is from the 18 September 2008 issue of the New York Times:

September 18, 2008

Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals
By Steven D. Levitt

As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this all means. So I did what I always do when something related to banking arises: I knocked on the doors of my colleagues Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap, and asked them for the answers. What they told me was so interesting and insightful that I begged them to write their explanations down for a broader audience. They were kind enough to take the time to do so. In what follows, they discuss what has happened in the financial sector in the last few days, why it happened, and what it means for everyday people.

The F.A.Q.’s of Lehman and A.I.G.

By Douglas W. Diamond and Anil K. Kashyap: A Guest Post

For most of the last 20 years we have been studying banks, monetary policy, and financial crises. So for us the events of the last year have been especially fascinating.

The last 10 days have been the most remarkable period of government intervention into the financial system since the Great Depression. In talking with reporters and our noneconomist friends, we have been besieged with questions about several aspects of these events. Here are a few of the most frequently asked questions with our best answers.

1) What has happened that is so remarkable?

This episode started when the Treasury nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 8. Their combined assets are over $5 trillion. These firms help guarantee most of the mortgages in the United States. The Treasury only got authority from Congress to take this action in July, and in seeking the authority had insisted that no intervention would be needed.
The Treasury has replaced the management of both companies and will presumably oversee their operation. This decision marked an acknowledgment by the government that the mortgage market and the institutions to make it operate in the U.S. are broken.

On Monday, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history was made by Lehman Brothers. Lehman had over $600 billion in assets and 25,000 employees. (The largest previous filing was WorldCom, whose assets just prior to bankruptcy were just over $100 billion.)

On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve made a bridge loan to A.I.G., the largest insurance company in the world; perhaps best known to most of the world as the shirt sponsor of Manchester United soccer club, A.I.G. has assets of over $1 trillion and over 100,000 employees worldwide. The Fed has the option to purchase up to 80 percent of the shares of A.I.G., is replacing A.I.G.’s management, and is nearly wiping out A.I.G.’s existing shareholders. A.I.G. is to be wound down by selling its assets over the next two years. (Don’t worry, Man U will be fine.) The Fed has never asserted its authority to intervene on this scale, in this form, or in a firm so far removed from its own supervisory authority.

2) Why did these things happen?

The common denominator in all three cases was the ability of the firms to secure financing. The reasons, though, differed in each case.

The Fannie and Freddie situation was a result of their unique roles in the economy. They had been set up to support the housing market. They helped guarantee mortgages (provided they met certain standards), and were able to fund these guarantees by issuing their own debt, which was in turn tacitly backed by the government. The government guarantees allowed Fannie and Freddie to take on far more debt than a normal company. In principle, they were also supposed to use the government guarantee to reduce the mortgage cost to the homeowners, but the Fed and others have argued that this hardly occurred. Instead, they appear to have used the funding advantage to rack up huge profits and squeeze the private sector out of the “conforming” mortgage market. Regardless, many firms and foreign governments considered the debt of Fannie and Freddie as a substitute for U.S. Treasury securities and snapped it up eagerly.

Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages. The massive amount of diffusely held debt would have caused collapses everywhere if it was defaulted upon; so the Treasury announced that it would explicitly guarantee the debt.

But once the debt was guaranteed to be secure (and the government would wipe out shareholders if it carried through with the guarantee), no self-interested investor was willing to supply more equity to help buffer the losses. Hence, the Treasury ended up taking them over.
Lehman’s demise came when it could not even keep borrowing. Lehman was rolling over at least $100 billion a month to finance its investments in real estate, bonds, stocks, and financial assets.

When it is hard for lenders to monitor their investments and borrowers can rapidly change the risk on their balance sheets, lenders opt for short-term lending. Compared to legal or other channels, their threat to refuse to roll over funding is the most effective option to keep the borrower in line.

This was especially relevant for Lehman, because as an investment bank, it could transform its risk characteristics very easily by using derivatives and by churning its trading portfolio. So for Lehman (and all investment banks), the short-term financing is not an accident; it is inevitable.
Why did the financing dry up? For months, short-sellers were convinced that Lehman’s real-estate losses were bigger than it had acknowledged. As more bad news about the real estate market emerged, including the losses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, this view spread.

Lehman’s costs of borrowing rose and its share price fell. With an impending downgrade to its credit rating looming, legal restrictions were going to prevent certain firms from continuing to lend to Lehman. Other counterparties that might have been able to lend, even if Lehman’s credit rating was impaired, simply decided that the chance of default in the near future was too high, partly because they feared that future credit conditions would get even tighter and force Lehman and others to default at that time.

A.I.G. had to raise money because it had written $57 billion of insurance contracts whose payouts depended on the losses incurred on subprime real-estate related investments. While its core insurance businesses and other subsidiaries (such as its large aircraft-leasing operation) were doing fine, these contracts, called credit default swaps (C.D.S.’s), were hemorrhaging.
Furthermore, the possibility of further losses loomed if the housing market continued to deteriorate. The credit-rating agencies looking at the potential losses downgraded A.I.G.’s debt on Monday. With its lower credit ratings, A.I.G.’s insurance contracts required A.I.G. to demonstrate that it had collateral to service the contracts; estimates suggested that it needed roughly $15 billion in immediate collateral.

A second problem A.I.G. faced is that if it failed to post the collateral, it would be considered to have defaulted on the C.D.S.’s. Were A.I.G. to default on C.D.S.’s, some other A.I.G. contracts (tied to losses on other financial securities) contain clauses saying that its other contractual partners could insist on prepayment of their claims. These cross-default clauses are present so that resources from one part of the business do not get diverted to plug a hole in another part. A.I.G. had another $380 billion of these other insurance contracts outstanding. No private investors were willing to step into this situation and loan A.I.G. the money it needed to post the collateral.

In the scramble to make good on the C.D.S.’s, A.I.G.’s ability to service its own debt would come into question. A.I.G. had $160 billion in bonds that were held all over the world: nowhere near as widely as the Fannie and Freddie bonds, but still dispersed widely.
In addition, other large financial firms — including Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco), the largest bond-investment fund in the world — had guaranteed A.I.G.’s bonds by writing C.D.S. contracts.

Given the huge size of the contracts and the number of parties intertwined, the Federal Reserve decided that a default by A.I.G. would wreak havoc on the financial system and cause contagious failures. There was an immediate need to get A.I.G. the collateral to honor its contracts, so the Fed loaned A.I.G. $85 billion.

3) Why did the Treasury and Fed let Lehman fail but rescue Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and A.I.G.?

We have already explained why Fannie, Freddie, and A.I.G. were supported. In March, Bear Stearns lost its access to credit in almost the same fashion as Lehman; yet Bear was rescued and Lehman was not.

Bear Stearns was bailed out for two reasons. One was that the Fed had very imperfect information about what was going on at Bear. The Fed was not Bear’s regulator, the amount of publicly available information was limited, and its staff was not versed in all of the ways in which Bear might have been connected to other parts of the financial system.

The second problem was that Bear’s counterparties in many transactions were not prepared for the sudden demise of Bear. A Bear bankruptcy might have triggered a wave of forced selling of collateral that Bear would have given its counterparties. Given the potential chaos that would have resulted from Bear Stearns filing for bankruptcy, the Fed had little choice but to engineer a rescue. In doing so, the Fed argued that the rescue was a rare, perhaps once-in-a-generation, event.

When Bear was rescued, the Fed created a new lending facility to help provide bridge financing to other investment banks. The new lending arrangement was proposed precisely because there were concerns that Lehman and other banks were at risk for a Bear-like run. Since March, the Fed had also studied what to do if this were to happen again; it concluded that if it modified its lending facility slightly, it could withstand a bankruptcy; it made these changes to the lending facility on Sunday night.

Once the Fed had made these changes and determined that it and the others in the market had an understanding of the indirect or “collateral damage” effects of a bankruptcy, it could rely on the protections of the bankruptcy code to stop the run on Lehman, and to sell its operating assets separately from its toxic mortgage-backed assets.

Against this backdrop, if the government had rescued Lehman, it would have repudiated the claim that the Bear rescue was extraordinary; it would have also conceded that in the six months since Bear failed, neither the new facility that it set up nor the other steps to make markets more robust were reliable. Essentially, the Fed and the Treasury would have been admitting that they had lied or were incompetent in stabilizing the financial system — or both.
It was not surprising that they drew the line at helping Lehman. Based on all the publicly available information, this was clearly the right thing to do.

4) I do not work at Lehman or A.I.G. and do not own much stock; why should I care?

The concern for the man on Main Street is not the bankruptcy of Lehman, per se. Rather, it is the collective inability of major financial institutions to find funding.

As their own funding dries up, the remaining financial firms will be much more cautious in extending credit to normal firms and individuals. So even for people whose own circumstances have not much changed, the cost of the credit is going to rise. For an individual or business that falls behind on payments or needs an increase in short-term credit because of the slowing economy, credit will be much harder to obtain than in recent years.

This is going to slow growth. We have not seen this much stress in the financial system since the Great Depression, so we do not have any recent history to rely upon in quantifying the magnitude of the slowdown. A recent educated guess by Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs suggests that G.D.P. growth will be just about 2 percentage points lower in 2008 and 2009. But as he explains, extrapolations of this sort are highly uncertain.

5) What does it mean for the Fed and Treasury going ahead?

A reasonable reading of the recent bailouts suggests a simple rule: if a firm is on the verge of collapse and its ties to the financial system will lead to a cascade of chaos, the firm will be saved. A bankruptcy will be permitted only if the failure can be contained.

Assuming the level of chaos is sufficiently high, this dichotomy is probably consistent with the mandate of the Federal Reserve. The rescue of A.I.G., however, raises some major challenges.
One is where to draw the line. A.I.G. was an insurance company, not a bank or a broker dealer, so the Fed had no special relationship with A.I.G. Presumably, if a very large airline or automaker had been involved in the C.D.S. market, the same reasoning that led to the rescue would apply.

A second challenge comes with defining the acceptable level of chaos. We will never be able to find out what would have happened if A.I.G. had been allowed to fail. Furthermore, there are some reasons to believe that even if A.I.G. continues to operate, the fundamental stress in the financial system will remain. If the rescue does not mark a turning point, the bailout may not be viewed quite differently down the road.

Should the government intervene if it merely postpones an inevitable adjustment? Creditor runs can make adjustment too fast; blanket bailouts can make adjustment too slow. Has the Fed found the speed that is just right?

Third, now that A.I.G. has been lent to, how will regulation have to be adjusted? Surely the Fed cannot be called upon to provide backstop financing whenever a large member of the financial system runs into trouble. How does it prevent a replay of this scenario, and can it be done without stifling innovation?

6) What does this mean for the markets going ahead?

Letting Lehman go means that the remaining large financial services firms now must understand that they need to manage their own risks more carefully. This includes both securing adequate funding and being prudent about which counterparties to rely upon. Both of these developments are welcome.

If the remaining investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, do not get more secure funding in place, they may be acquired or subject to a run too. In the current environment, relying almost exclusively on short-term debt is hazardous, even if a firm or bank has nothing wrong with it.

7) When will the turmoil end?

The inability to secure short-term funding fundamentally comes from having insufficient capital. There are many indicators that the largest financial institutions are collectively short of capital.
One signal is that there were apparently only two bidders for Lehman, when the ongoing value from operating most of the bank was surely far above the $3.60 share price from Friday.

Another is the elevated cost of borrowing that banks are charging each other. A third indicator is the reluctance to take on certain types of risk, such as jumbo mortgages, so that the cost of this type of borrowing is unusually high.

The fear of being the next Lehman ought to convince many of the large institutions that, despite however much they already raised, more is needed. It may be expensive to attract more equity financing, but the choice may be bankruptcy or sale. The decision by the Federal Reserve to not cut interest rates suggests the Fed also recognizes that the short-term interest rate is a very inefficient way to address this problem.

A note on Anti-Americanism

2008-09-12T10:13:00.001-07:00

Where to with anti-American sentiments? What defines them? What motivates them? Such questions have become academic bricks and mortar, the subject, for instance, of a four-volume collection of essays edited by Brendon O'Connor from Greenwood Press (Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, and Themes). In Britain, a group has been formed to protect America's good name. But its guidelines of America in the World are far from clear. Online Opinion gives a sense about where they went wrong:

How not to understand anti-Americanism

By Binoy Kampmark

On the popular networking system Facebook, a particular group exists calling itself the “Petition to Revoke the Independence of the United States”. It is a playful thing, though some of its participants tend to become too serious. It’s such sentiments that have prompted the web antics of one unabashedly pro-American Englishman and conservative pundit Tim Montgomerie.

Montgomerie is on edge. He dislikes what he considers to be a vicious tide of anti-Americanism in Britain, indeed, the world. Nor does he believe an Obama administration will necessarily put to rest that unruly beast. Hence his newly established group "America in the World" (AIW). The organisation opposes two things: anti-Americanism and American isolationism. It is also quick to point out to critics that they are not in the pocket of American finance.

Montgomerie has taken the bright colored end of the American dream and run with it - America is good, and questioning its handling of power, bad. As he says in a statement that was actually culled by the Guardian editor, “World opinion, rightly called the second superpower, should not stop America from taking the toughest decisions.” Even, evidently, when they involve the hokum of unstable regimes intent on annihilating the West with weapons they do not have.

A collection of publicity videos are available on the site. One, A World Without The American Soldier, is particularly liberal with history and, to borrow a term from Donald Rumsfeld, unknown unknowns. The absent American soldier becomes the metaphor of global instability - without him, the world will devour itself in sanguinary fury. What would have happened if the US had not sent its soldiers to fight Hitler, for instance? None of us know, but AIW is happy to throw out various scenarios.

Montgomerie reflects that sentiment described by Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute as that of the inviter: the US did not create an empire on its own accord - it was invited to do so by its European auxiliaries.

Some states create them in fits of "absentmindedness" (that’s the British variety); others are asked to create imperiums like well-moneyed guests at a fundraising event. The assertion is of cause naïve: Europeans were happy to take the money, but not always happy with what came with it: American personnel and bases were less welcome.

A few points of the AIW are worth challenging, and they apply broadly to those concerned that an Obama administration will somehow retreat, mollusk-like, into an isolationist shell. If the new administration winds back the global imperium by closing some of its 737 bases (according to Chalmers Johnson), then a bit more of that might be better than a bit less.

In more than one sense, the AIW and those who believe in rampant anti-Americanism in Britain, have missed the point. It falls down to poor definitions - what is anti-Americanism in the first place? Its taxonomy risks being unnecessarily complicated and cluttered by academic jargon. But no pointers are given by Montgomerie or his group as to what that might be: is anti-Americanism a prejudice, a structured hatred, perhaps an ideology? Some thought might have been given to consulting the recent four-volume compilation of essays Anti-Americanism: History, Causes and Themes edited by Brendon O’Connor.

There is, for instance, a poor understanding about how countries and their citizens can feel compelled to embrace parts of Americana (the jeans for instance) and still take up arms against the Great Satan. Again, that’s the dilemma that AIW does little to resolve, when it would be best served doing so.

Most of all, the AIW is aggrieved at the failure of Britain and fellow Europeans to love. They must feel a fondness for America. The truth is that many do, and had Washington allowed its cultural representatives to do the colonising rather than its military personnel, it might not have been quite in this mess. Few should forget the famous headline in the French paper, Le Monde immediately following the attacks of September 2001, which stated, in no uncertain terms, the bonds of transatlantic friendship: “We are all Americans Now.” Such invaluable currency was rapidly devalued with Middle East adventurism. Many European citizens, and that goes for many around the globe, just don’t like the vicissitudes of American power.

Besides, the British, or to be more exact, the English, are renown in a historical sense not so much for being just anti-American, but hostile to everyone, including themselves. A brief consultation of any reference book on insults will find an assortment of English nasties for every race and nation on this planet. Don’t privilege one dislike - acknowledge them all. To paraphrase a comment once made by director Billy Wilder, one can’t have any prejudices if one hates everyone equally.

The death of the Murray-Darling

2008-09-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Murray-Darling river system in Australia, disproportionately responsible for much of that country's agriculture, is doomed. We have known that for some time, yet state and federal governments continue to dither. Despite trumpeting the merits of cooperation between the states and Canberra on the subject, no immediate action is being taken. The politics of water may well kill the river.

More on this at Facts & Arts, 11 September 2008:

How to kill a river: the Murray-Darling System

By Binoy Kampmark

It's looking more than just grim. A vast river system in Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin, seems terminally affected by drought and decades of environmental abuse. Cosmetic measures have been suggested by the Australian authorities dealing with water conservation and extraction. The Federal government has trumpeted the rescue of the system with the cooperation of state governments. But it may well be too late.

The politics of water has helped exacerbate an ecological disaster. State governments bicker about water allocations. Canberra has attempted a take-over of the entire basin, a measure that was vehemently opposed by Victoria in 2007. That opposition only ceased in March this year, when Victoria's Premier John Brumby was happy to accept a federal bribe of a billion dollars to upgrade irrigation facilities.

There is an inordinate amount of chatter as to what to do, but the only thing most of the officials can agree on is the fate of the river: it seems doomed. In 2007, water expert Peter Cullen issued an assessment. 'This crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin has been brought on by the climate change shift and the serious drought we are now seeing, but the fact that we allowed the system to run to empty is another symptom of our failure to manage the waters of the basin in a sustainable way'.

The Murray Darling Basin Commission reported in 2007 that inflows of water to date had been '68 percent of the pervious recorded minimum… observed in 1902'. The federal government, then under Prime Minister John Howard, offered a solution: prayer. In the face of lower water levels, an appeal to the Lord or an assortment of busy rain deities might help some, though it is unlikely to reverse the toxicity that results from the exposure of acid sulfate soils at low water levels.

Other governments have been less pious. Amidst the tangle of state and Federal governments, each is taking action on its own accord. The South Australian government has attempted to preserve river flows by closing off 33 wetlands. The environmental impact of this move has been minimized by winter rains, though relief to such areas as the renown Banrock Station wetlands will be in short supply. The time has come, argue some of the water mandarins, to abandon various 'icon' sites.

Such abandonment is probably inevitable, spurred on by government incompetence. The current Rudd government did not see fit to ask the main scientific agency in Australia, CSIRO, as how best to ease the crisis of South Australia's lower lakes. Water experts Bill Young and Tom Hatton, both well versed with the dynamics of the Basin, were not contacted. An Australian Senate inquiry instead heard that the water data used by Canberra's apparatchiks on the Basin was inaccurate, relying on long-term average conditions rather than current figures.

Solutions are gathering on the shelves in reports and committee minutes. Another water expert has suggested (earlier this month) shrinking the ailing river system, a sort of shock treatment that looks much like bleeding a patient. Mike Young of Adelaide University has suggested sealing off areas of pooled water to preserve main river channels. Evaporative losses, he cites, have become too great. 'We are running the Murray-Darling with half the amount of water we used to have.' But there is nothing in sight about an immediate rescue.

A sustainable Murray-Darling system would need, for instance, a moratorium on extractions of water to assess sustainability levels. The truth is that water, like any scarce yet vital resource, is political. And the politics of water has doomed a river system. Cullen calls this the work of 'interest groups'.

The Murray-Darling's demise will be that of rural Australia. That lifestyle's days are, like the National Party that represents it, already numbered. The failure of this system will put pay to upwards of 50,000 farmers who account for 41 percent of the country's agriculture. Drinking water supplies will be reduced. Electricity shortages are inevitable. The states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia all stand to be affected. In the meantime, Canberra will happily form another Senate commission to deliberate over the impending disaster.

Making your own Black Hole

2008-09-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

Humans may be able to create their own in-lab black holes. These black holes might even consume the earth in a cosmic fit of destruction and human vanity. Or the exercise might simply be inordinately expensive. Much speculation exists over whether the Large Hadron Collider, a design of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), achieve all of this. The first to find out, apart from the scientists, will be those near Geneva.

The issues are discussed in an article in the New Matilda, 11 September 2008:

Black Holes Really Suck

By Binoy Kampmark

The world's largest particle collider, now going through its first tests, may not trigger the end of the world, but it's got people worried, shown how much scientists don't know, and sucked in an awful lot of cash.

"I am very angry that so much emphasis has been made on the possible 'end of the world scenario'. I had an extremely upset 10-year-old son to comfort last night." So writes "Kim", of Hayes in the United Kingdom, to the BBC World Service. With characteristic nonchalance, the Beeb had been suggesting that humanity might annihilate itself in pursuing the origins of the universe — a case of lethal curiosity.

But what exactly happened in Switzerland yesterday? Much in the way of cryptic, abstract science, most of it indulgently speculative and all of it highly expensive. A 27-kilometre-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a colossal ring buried 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border and the handiwork of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), "went live" on Wednesday morning 0730 GMT (yesterday evening, Australian time). The test was the first of a series of exercises scheduled before the facility becomes fully operational on 21 October, when high energy proton collisions can begin.

With these proton collisions, CERN hopes to find some of the missing matter in the universe, and maybe also see if it can find any observable basis for "string theory". The side-effects of such high-energy collisions are at the centre of "the end of the world" scenarios doing the rounds at the moment.

The LHC was designed to fire two beams of specific particles, known as hadrons, in opposing directions. Collisions between them would result, thereby releasing astonishing amounts of energy replicating the universe at the time of its birth. What sort of conditions are these? Possibly a mini blackhole, according to some, and temperatures approaching a trillion degrees centigrade. Preferably a sighting of the Higgs-Boson, or "God particle", the only standard model particle yet to be observed and responsible for giving other particles their mass and weight.

At a time of such excitement in the scientific world, it may seem mean spirited to count the cost of this facility. But the cost is so very high that it can't really be avoided. While no one's really sure quite what the collider will end up costing, it's probably somewhere between $5.6-11.2 billion.

After so much money and 30 years of planning have gone into this extravaganza, scientists might, just might, get a bit closer to accurately theorising how the universe was created.

Much more was at stake here than the collision of hadrons and the manufacture of Earth's very own, domesticated black hole. Those behind the "atom smasher", as the British paper, the Daily Telegraph, named it, had to face something far more earthly and human: legal challenges. The European Court of Human Rights has been in receipt of a lawsuit claiming that the replication of such conditions was suicidal. In more legal terms, it purportedly violated the right to life and right to private family life under the European Convention of Human Rights. An injunction was sought thereby depriving CERN from turning on the machine. Obviously that strategy didn't work.

The concerns of the litigating parties are not those of pious fanatics who fear the onset of an apocalypse wrought upon us by an angry god. Otto Rössler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, was one of the key complainants. "CERN itself has admitted that mini black holes could be created when the particles collide, but they don't consider this a risk."

Having made a few calculations of his own, Rössler argues that such holes will prove predatory and insatiable, growing exponentially like bacteria and "[eating] the planet from the inside". And how long does the chemist give us in his worst-case scenario? The earth could be literally sucked inside-out within four years of the mini black hole's creation.

Not content with keeping this an all-European affair, environmentalists in Hawaii have decided to initiate their own suit (filed 21 March) in a US federal district court to compel their government to intervene. Walter L Wagner and Luis Sancho claim that the risks have been downplayed by CERN, who have failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The experiments might result in a ravenous black hole or a "strangelet" that might reduce the planet to a dense lump called "strange matter".

Why US laws should even interest a scientific body operating in Europe suggest a misguided sense of American legal reach. But the activists argue that that the focus must be necessarily universal. "[CERN] have got a lot of propaganda saying it's safe," says Wagner, "but basically it's propaganda".

It's hard to see this action coming to anything. Getting CERN to appear in a dock in Hawaii would be quite another matter.

It will be several weeks before the first particles collide. Perhaps Earth will get its own resident, all-consuming black hole, or merely disintegrate into "strange matter". In that case, the first to know will include not only the enthusiastic scientists of CERN but the residents of Geneva.
Or perhaps the LHC will have just been an astonishingly expensive exercise in history gazing.

At this moment, before any results have started to emerge, we can even imagine another possibility — a "best case scenario", in which the research being carried out deep beneath Switzerland yields information that will somehow greatly improve the lives of people in the world, in this era. We can hope that in some way these experiments have a positive effect, equal to or greater than that which would have been achieved by otherwise redirecting the billions of dollars spent on this project.

That would really be something to celebrate.

God and Politics in the USA

2008-08-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

God has a habit of popping up in many public aspects of American politics. The modern American political landscape is dominated by the prayer breakfast. The evangelical voting bloc may not be as unified as it once was, but it remains all-powerful. Why else would the two presidential candidates subject themselves to questioning by the pastor of an Orange County 'megachurch'?

More on this in New Zealand's magazine Scoop:

God and Politics at Saddleback

by Binoy Kampmark

How are the two putative candidates in the US Presidential race treating the evangelical vote thus far? In one answer: seriously. If the evidence is anything to go by, the evangelical vote will still prove thumping come November. Figures vary, but something in the order of 25 percent of American voters see themselves as evangelicals. Hence the presence of both Senators John McCain and Barack Obama at pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch in Orange County, California on August 16.

On paper, both have their problems with that niche constituency. The conservatives doubt McCain’s credentials and have done so from the start. Threats about boycotts and staying home in November have died down. There are even murmurings from such personalities of the Christian right as James C. Dobson that ‘the possibility’ of endorsement was there. But the embers of suspicion, stoked by such conservative heavyweights as Rush Limbaugh, still pulsate on the electoral landscape.

Some evangelical voters wonder whether lurking beneath Obama’s eloquent confidence is a Muslim, closeted and waiting to spring. Grant Swank, a pastor from Windham Maine wrote to the organization Renew America praising McCain for being ‘into a reality kick to expose B. Hussein Obama’ (August 2) as a follower of the Prophet Mohammed. An Obama White House was a ‘spiritual danger’, and would signal doom for evangelicals.

On the other hand, there are some in the evangelical community who like Obama on many other things – his progressivism on climate change and social welfare speak about the changing nature of that constituency in the United States. Warren, a Southern Baptist, reflects that shift in part. Bar the abortion issue, a critical one that the Illinois senator is having troubles combating, he gather votes from that direction.

As strange as it might have been for those outside the US to observe, the meeting at Saddleback caused disagreement and discomfort amongst some American commentators. Kathleen Parker of the Chicago Tribune (20 August) was particularly critical about this tele-evangelical probing, two presidential candidates submitting to a ‘religious interrogation by an evangelical minister – no matter how beloved’. Again, that slippery term ‘un-American’ was raised. The only true victor, she suggested, was Warren, who effectively jettisoned the core principle of separating church and state. Thomas Jefferson, she concludes, would not have been impressed, let alone impressive at Saddleback.

Ditto David Waters, a commentator on religious affairs. That two candidates for the highest office in the country were appearing together in the same church was less troubling than a self-appointed campaign moderator in the form of pastor Warren. He was reminded about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted in his collection of sermons Strength to Love: ‘The Church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.’ Warren’s church had been effectively endorsed by both sides of politics. Campaign advertisements will be issuing from the Saddleback forum shortly.

Warren’s position on the meeting was not left in any doubt, explaining in a message to religious commentators Sally Quinn and John Meachum that topics like ‘the war, the border, the price of oil and reaction to campaign statements’ were but ‘short-term issues.’ What mattered to him was the ‘core convictions’ of the candidates would shape ‘America’s role, direction and future.’

The Press-Enterprise (20 August) of Riverside, California took a somewhat different tack on this alleged violation of the church-state divide. Being at Saddleback was simply another mechanism for vote grabbing. Politicians adjust their pitches depending on what audience they address at the time. There was, in effect, ‘nothing wrong with quizzing candidates on range of questions linked to values and faith.’ Any event that enlightened the electorate should be endorsed. William Kristol of the New York Times (17 August) was even warmer. Warren, he extolled, should well be the moderator of one of the presidential debates in the fall.

Policy researcher Alvaro Vargas Llosa then added a historical slant to the entire episode. In a piece in the New Republic (20 August), he chose to see the debate as a template of American battles between theocratic urges (the Pilgrims) and secular pursuits (Jamestown). The battle between secularism and piety that commenced in American life in the seventeenth century constantly recurs. Little, it seems, had changed.

Perhaps the only true victor in this display was Warren, whose taste for the public show remains powerful. The extent of his influence in American public life, and that of the evangelical voting bloc, has been reaffirmed. Both candidates, by merely being there, acknowledged that without equivocation.

*************
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge and history lecturer at the University of Queensland

Inviting Ugly Ducklings to Town

2008-08-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

Councillors in provincial towns tend to have problems getting into the news. So, when the Mayor of the Queensland mining town of Mount Isa John Molony decided to vent his views on beauty and women, he made a splash. He was proud - he had even displaced the Olympics as 'front page' news.

The full piece is available in 'Ugly Ducklings in Queensland - Molony on Women,' Crikey, 18 August, 2008.

The Conviction of Salim Hamdan

2008-08-08T15:35:00.001-07:00

The global war on terror, clumsily titled GWOT, was never a good idea in the first place. If all the United States can obtain after its blustery rhetoric on winning this 'war' is the conviction of a driver and bodyguard of the still absent Osama bin Laden, there is perhaps little reason to keep it going. Be gone, insidious, fascist-like realisations such as the Office of Homeland Security, a beast that has more in common with National Socialist idealogues than the Founding Fathers.

A commentary is available at Counterpunch, 7 August 2008, on the recent conviction of the Yemeni national by military commission:

Driving Bin Laden: Will Cheney's Chauffeur Be Next in the Dock?

By BINOY KAMPMARK

Driving bin Laden in the 1990s has proven hazardous for Yemeni citizen Salim Hamdan, who has been convicted by a jury of American military officers after a two-week trial by military commission at Guantánamo Bay. The accusations leveled at Hamdan centred on the transport of missiles for Al Qaeda and the aiding and abetting bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. Eight counts of supporting terrorism and two counts of conspiracy were filed by the prosecution.

The verdict then. Hamdan was found guilty on five counts of aiding terrorism by serving as bin Laden’s armed bodyguard and driver in Afghanistan whilst knowing that he was intent on attacking the United States. Hamdan was cleared of the important charge of conspiracy after some eight hours of jury deliberations.

The trial has done little to restore confidence in many legal circles, and done much to confirm what many already knew: the Gitmo commissions are in desperate need of abolition. Hamdan’s story provides the template of the Bush Administration’s law-averse politics and the ‘war on terror’. Captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in his car, he found himself in shackled detention in Guantánamo Bay in May 2002. In July 2004, the ill-fated Hamdan was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

During the proceedings, the US Department of Justice prosecutor John Murphy addressed the officers by describing Salim Hamdan, the equivalent of a celebrity obsessed delivery boy on mission, as one of a band of ‘enthusiastic, uncontrollably enthusiastic warriors’. Finding this barely believable, the defense lawyer Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer called the charge a case of ‘guilt by association’, a case of a low-level employee who worked for low wages between 1997 and 2001. Not a single witness contradicted Hamdan’s claims that he had never been a member of Al Qaeda or responsible in any way for the terrorist attacks.

Mizer’s legal nose detected pure political expediency here – drumming up the cases, for instance, was one way of boosting electoral prospects for 2008. In late March this year, he alleged in a military commission brief that Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England put to lawyers how they needed to ‘think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election.’ Mizer also argued that ‘unlawful command influence’ was at play here, making it impossible for Hamdan to have something remotely resembling a fair trial.

Somewhat damningly, there was no rebuttal from the Pentagon, let alone investigation into the motives suggested by England’s statement. The case was allowed to go trial.

Notwithstanding his detention at the base, Hamdan’s life as an appellant has been colourful. His lawyers filed a habeas petition arguing that his status as prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention had to be legally determined in a court of law before he could be tried by a military convention. In 2006, the Supreme Court (Hamdan v Rumsfeld) unnerved by an attempt by the White House to exile them from the process of hearing the case, concluded that the inherent powers of the executive or an act of Congress could not be said to expressly authorize the Guantánamo Bay military commissions.

In what was a healthy slap in the face of policy makers, it was held that the Geneva Convention, as part of the ordinary laws of war, had to be enforced by the Supreme Court. The commissions had to comply with the ordinary laws of the United States and the laws of war, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Defense lawyer who spearheaded the appeal, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift suffered a career death in thanks, overlooked for promotion in discharging his brief for Hamdan.

Despite the fantastic insistence by the White House that the commissions abide by a framework of international law, mandated by the Supreme Court, the system continues to possess defects that render it incurable. The case still reeks of that fetid air of torture (what Bush has called ‘an alternative set of procedures’) and the entire process behind extracting confessions within the Gitmo system.

Evidence was admitted by the commission that would never had seen the light of day in a civilian or standard US military court, another elastic addition to the undermining of law by the Bush Administration. Allegations that the CIA had engaged in brutal conduct against Hamdan on route to detention were not heard. Crucial parts of the trial were also held in secret.

A mixed verdict doesn’t necessarily make it a just one. Nor does being a driver make one a member of a terrorist network, let alone complicit in terrorist attacks, but wobbly reasoning continues to remain the province of the illegal and specious.

The passing of Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn produced a series of muddled commentaries. Some felt that he had indeed been a fan of democracy, and that he was somehow completely opposed to Vladimir Putin. In truth, he was nothing of the sort. Natonalism and religious fervour are two ingredients that often detract from any practical notion of democracy.

Longing for the passing of a Russia run by serf-loving Czars was far more in keeping with his style. He detested Bolshevik totalitarianism because it was unduly reductionist and atheist. This does not detract from his monumental work on the Soviet penal system which will stand as the fearless critique of a brutal regime.

More on this at the New Zealand magazine Scoop (5 August 2008):

Occupant of the First Circle – the Death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Tuesday, 5 August 2008, 1:35 pm

By Binoy Kampmark

In A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a microstudy of Russia’s penal system is delivered to the reader with unrelenting power. The subject is accused of espionage and sentenced to rot in the Soviet gulag. The author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died of heart failure in his home near Moscow on Sunday, is the most known exponent of Russian gulag literature. But for all his clarity on the subject, something enhanced by his time as a prisoner, Solzhenitsyn mirrored the tormented eccentricities of his country, one that Winston Churchill described in 1939 as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.

In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn focuses on the intricate trappings of the prison system. Not all zeks (or prisoners) lived the tawdry, grotesque lives of Ivan Denisovich. Others were modestly privileged in serving the state and could even be rewarded. The workers of the Mavrino Institute were still in Dante’s First Circle of Inferno, but it was a privileged one, with ample bread and butter. The story is sketched within the framework of how a voice is identified and developed for state purposes.

No one is immune from the leviathan that may intervene and crush a subject at any given moment, whether through an innocent remark made in public, or even a telephone call. Innokenty Volododin, State Counselor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thinks he has taken precautions in warning a scientist of an impending trap implicating him as a traitor. But his call of warning is noted by a devilishly ingenious machine which examines the particles of human speech to build a picture of the voice, a sort of speech biometric. He is arrested and sent to Lubyanka prison.

In 1970, the Nobel Prize committee merited Solzhenitsyn with their award. He refused to leave for Stockholm, fearing expulsion from the Soviet Union. This did not prevent it from eventually happening in 1974. He was exiled first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he finalized the last two volumes of his monumental study of the penal system Gulag Archipelago. The three-volume study, crafted with clinical precision between 1973 and 1978 committed to print what his novels had already shown: how diverse, scientific and perversely modern the Soviet Union’s brutal prison program between 1918 to 1956 had been.

While brilliant in his literary oeuvre, Solzhenitsyn proved erratic in his philosophical appraisals. He embraced a volatile blend of nationalism and religion that resembled the viewpoints of the authors behind Vekhi (Landmarks), a 1909 collection of essays calling for a religious-nationalist revival in Russia. While he agreed with much about what fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov said, he could not agree with the latter’s impression in the 1970s that nationalism was ‘a sort of peripheral nuisance’. ‘Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of the jewel?’ he wrote in a collection edited essays From Under the Rubble. His writings on this subject were dismissed, as writer John Bayley put it, as those of a ‘fuddy duddy’ lamenting the ‘disappearance of Holy Russia’.

Democrats found him particularly indigestible. While bemoaning robber baron capitalism, his views remained fundamentally illiberal, hostile to both scientific socialism and liberal democracy. In a 2003 interview with biographer Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn branded humanism as ‘irreligious anthropocentrism’, a breeder of ‘intellectual chaos.’

On his return to Russia in 1994, he was happy to pronounce judgment against Russia’s fledging democracy to members of the Duma. His fondness for Czarist Russia, on the other hand, never abated, being reaffirmed in one of his last works, Two Hundred Years Together. Being a whitewash of the dynastic regime (it was, we are surprised to read, not anti-Semitic), it was also a honed strike on Russia’s Jewry. They, he argued, had to be accorded their fair share of blame for the country’s misfortunes.

Being in the West did not necessarily endear him to it. In 2006, he speculated in that long vein of Russian fears and suspicions that a plot of encirclement had been hatched in Washington and Europe’s capitals. Russia, despite posing ‘no threat’, was being threatened by an ever expansive NATO, thereby ‘encircling Russia from the South’ (29 April).

His embrace by President Vladimir Putin signaled the ultimate demise of democratic impulses in Russia – neither personality had much time for a political philosophy both found distasteful, preferring a nationalistic medium to convey the greatness of Russia’s revival. With cruel irony, the ex-KGB man and the chief interrogator of the Stalinist gulags had more in common than they realized. Both were cogs at different ends of the totalitarian machine, occupants of the First Circle. As for Stalin’s crimes, they have, under Putin, assumed an air of benign necessity. History, it seems, has stolen its ironical march on Solzhenitsyn.

Whaling Politics

2008-06-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

The politics of whaling has never ceased being contentious. Quotas are often disputed, as is scientific evidence and supposed necessity for the slaughter of various species. The International Whaling Commission concluded its 60th meeting at Chile recently. A sense of what happened is covered in Counterpunch, 27 June 2008:

Beached in Chile: The Dilemma of Whaling

The International Whaling Commission has had its 60th meeting, this time in Santiago, Chile. Proceedings have followed their traditional pattern; hostilities have been reasserted between pro-whaling parties and those reluctant to give any ground on the matter. A delegate from Iceland has gone so far as to dismiss any humane interest in whales as conservational gibberish: this, he says is not a matter of the ‘survival of the cutest’.

It all started optimistically. Some 24 nations agreed to broker a resolution between pro- and anti-whaling nations. The Australian environment minister Peter Garrett, more known for his reptilian gyrations as the front man for rock band Midnight Oil than sound policy, was urging a change of emphasis. The IWC had to move from mere regulation to solid, enlightened conservation of cetacean species.

In truth, that direction has been taken by the body for some time now, even if some members have been less than enthusiastic to admit it. The five-year moratorium of 1986 has been extended, and still applies. Some countries on the commission, headed by Brazil, have raised the issue of a Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an arrangement that did not get sufficient numbers last year.

The scientific provisions of the IWC, considered by some to be ludicrous if not meaningless, have at least seen a reduction of whaling by Japan. About half as many whales are slaughtered each year than was the case before the moratorium of 1986 on commercial whaling. This was threatened in 2005, when the Japanese made it clear that they were commencing a new phase of the whale for science program, otherwise known as the Japanese Whale Research Program in Antarctica (JARPA). JARPA-2 would lead to the slaughter of 935 minkes, 50 fin whales and 50 humpbacks from the seas around Antarctica.

This spike in numbers then caused concern at the IWC meeting in Ulsan, South Korea that year. The first JARPA programme had an annual catch of 440 minke whales. The revised number came unnervingly close to the annual commercial quotas in place for Antarctic minke whales prior to the moratorium. Scientific advisors were angered – the Japanese had failed to await the results of a close examination of the first JARPA program before proceeding with the second. A resolution, proposed by Australia, suggested that Japan either withdraw its policy or adopt non-lethal methods in attaining scientific data from whales. It just passed – 30 votes to 27. An indignant Japan had no desire heeding the vote.

The Japanese continued to insist at Santiago that their science is not the stuff of fantasy, a contrivance designed to back commerce over preservation. The Institute of Cetacean Research, established in 1987 to counter the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling, has done more than anything else to bolster an obsolete, or at the very least, questionable science.

Figures are produced from time to time suggesting sustainable, if not growing numbers in whale stocks. In the politics of whaling, numbers are relative: the IWC Scientific Committee felt that minke whale numbers in the Antarctic had probably decreased to 300,000 by 2000 or 2001. Contra, the Japanese: the number was closer to 760,000. We are left more baffled than ever.

The Japanese have not been entirely inflexible, though they will not yield to a complete abolition of all forms of whaling. Indeed, their opposition to the anti-whaling groups is couched in the language of a beleaguered state. Japanese negotiators are ever wary of ‘cultural imperialism’ jammed through the backdoor of environmental politics – after all, said one advisor to the Japan Whaling Association, Shigeko Misaki in March 2003, the issue was not whether whaling should take place at all, but how it should take place. For Misaki, organizations in the US happily conceded to the slaughter of the bowhead while furiously defending the hapless minke.

The Japanese breathed a sigh of relief when Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA) became Chairman of the U.S. House Resources Committee. Now that was someone who would understand the ‘sustainable use of marine resources’.

The Japanese have, through skill and money, manufactured a consensus among various developing nations, who make the argument that human rights is at stake. It is certainly as much to do with a battle of lifestyles, a matter, say of whether aboriginal subsistence hunts should be allowed to prosper. Others are less charitable. ‘This has more to do with sushi than science,’ suggested Darren Kindleysides, campaign manager of the International Fund for Animal Welfare in January this year. Money, not knowledge, talks in the forum of the IWC. The science on that score is secondary, even if much of a case can be made.

The position of such anti-whaling countries as Australia is not particularly glorious either. What can’t be attained through diplomacy can be done through the courts – the International Court of Justice could have been the scene of an Australian application against Japan, notably on whaling beyond its allowed totals. But the new Rudd government in Canberra shuddered at the prospect of taking on an otherwise close ally in the courts. Prior to that, the Labor opposition had been more than content to blow the bugle for a legal redress.

In March this year, there were murmurings that Tokyo might be happy to concede to whaling within their own waters. Otherwise the Japanese may find themselves leaving the IWC with the puff and indignation of their League of Nation predecessors in 1932. And the IWC, they promise, will be undermined in much the same way, becoming a toothless league without effective sanction.

The Art of Self-Examination

2008-06-26T03:37:00.000-07:00

When will the purveyors of self-directed learning concede defeat and beat a hasty retreat? When will they realise that teaching is not a matter of mind numbing podcasts (less interactive teaching), supplemented by student group discussions? More then, on the issue of students and setting their own exams at The Australian:

UQ Medical Students to help set exams

Guy Healy | June 25, 2008

SOME of the brightest medical students in the country will write a quarter of the questions for their end-of-year exams in a project aimed to increase their learning and reduce their anxiety.

The head of the University of Queensland's medical school, David Wilkinson, has defended what fellow UQ historian Binoy Kampmark has attacked as "a voodoo exam-setting method".

"This delusional nonsense is patterned on the self-directed programs that have gradually moved into medical school syllabi over the years," Dr Kampmark said. "Students are no longer taught; they will do the teaching and conduct the instruction. Modern medical students are there to be pampered and promoted. Let's just get them to mark their own questions in future as well, shall we?"

However, Professor Wilkinson told the HES that his job was to ensure UQ graduated the best junior doctors who as interns would go on to play a formal role in educating undergraduates.

"That's a very significant responsibility," he said.

The origin of the project, which is being funded by a $30,000 grant from the university, lay in the observation that "medical students get very anxious about their exams as opposed to focusing on learning what they need to learn." Professor Wilkinson said there was a saying that assessment drove learning, so the students' study groups would research topics such as heart attacks and strokes and put them up as questions that would be screened for inclusion in the exam, worth 75 per cent of the total year score.

"We think it will help stimulate their learning and give them a clearer insight into writing exam questions and reduce the anxiety around exams," he said.

Overseas research showed that students did as well on their own questions as the schools' questions and it didn't devalue the rigour of the exam.

But Dr Kampmark asked whether patients would like their prospective doctors to set their own exam questions, with answers available before they were tested.

In a related development, more than half of the 384 students who attended a university health service at a large Queensland urban university last October reported mild to very high levels of psychological distress, including depression and anxiety.

Study author and UQ clinical psychologist Helen Stallman said distressed students suffered serious disruptions to their education and emotions, on average being unable to work or study for eight days in a month.

An Irish Question

2008-06-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

The Irish have proven to be spoilers to another aggrandizing scheme of the European Union, sinking the Lisbon Treaty by referendum last Thursday. In 2005, it was the Dutch and the French who effectively terminated the proposed EU constitution. The issues are covered in an article in the European Courier (16 June 2008), with a version available to subscribers of Crikey.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE IRISH?

By Binoy Kampmark

Otto von Bismarck had one suggestion as to how to deal with the Irish Question, that burning issue of Irish independence that dogged Britain throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If the Dutch were kind enough to come over to Ireland, they would turn it into an immaculate field of greenery and efficiency. If the Irish were good enough to go to the Netherlands, they would let the dykes fall into disrepair and drown.

Before Ireland went to the polls to determine the fate of the Lisbon Treaty last Thursday (12 June), another Irish Question was emerging. Things looked dire for the pro-Lisbon case. Those favoring the Treaty were diminishing by the day; those against it, multiplying like E. coli on an abandoned petri dish. The undecided voters remained a sizeable bloc till the day of the election.

On paper, the line from Brussels on the treaty was this: it would further limit the veto power of states in more policy areas, assist the expansion of the EU into eastern Europe, and enhance institutional efficiency. The Lisbon document had been a desperate attempt to rework the Constitutional Treaty so unceremoniously terminated by French and Dutch voters in 2005. This particular arrangement now awaits another reworking, though EU member states admit to having no ‘Plan B’.

The results were devastating for the treaty backers. 53.4 percent voted to reject it. All but 10 constituencies came out against it. The rural and urban working classes turned out in force for the ‘No’ case. Declan Ganley, founder of the lobby group Libertas, was thrilled with the outcome, calling it ‘a great day for Irish democracy.’ Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was not quite so jubilant, and spent the next few days assuring European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso that the vote had not been against the EU.

The ‘No’ case came in various guises, using a whole umbrella of arguments. One was an admission of voter ignorance, though it was an ignorance Brussels had done little to dispel. Voters simply did not know what they were getting themselves into. The treaty remained inscrutable in its scope and implications.

Other forms were, at least symbolically, more violent and at times irresponsible. The EU leviathan, it was said, would promote abortion in conservative Ireland; Irish neutrality would be scuttled in favor of military obligations. Dublin’s generous corporation tax regime might be altered by meddlesome bureaucrats on the continent.

The problems this negative vote throws up are not insurmountable. But that’s proving hard to tell. Europe may well want its democratic structures tuned and perfected, but what sort of form will that take? The Irish protest is no exception: they have their own ideas, and many on the continent aren’t having a bar of it.

Indeed, the Irish are the problem children of the EU class. When they repudiated the Nice Treaty referendum in June 2001 with a solid 54 percent, the French paper Liberation cursed them: ‘The best pupils in the European class have spat in the soup.’ The only way the Irish state got Nice past an ever wary public was through a campaign of scolding and chiding. The school children relented, passing it with a ‘Yes’ turnout of 62.89 percent.

EU officials and commentators in favor of the treaty have been keen to give the Irish not merely a dressing down, but a re-education. After all, it was the EU who boosted a lethargic, impoverished agricultural country; the EU that improved the country’s income from 60 percent of the original European Economic Community average to 120 percent. Some £40 billion in subsidies has been put into the country over 35 years, but to no avail. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have tried restraining themselves, taking ‘note of the democratic decision of the Irish citizens with all due respect even though we regret it.’

For the Lisbon Treaty to take effect in January 2009, all states must ratify it. Hence this new Irish Question. The result makes the acceptance of the treaty doomed, unless there is a re-run of the Nice referendum. In most instances, countries have avoided an election altogether, their parliaments fearful of an unruly and suspicious voting public. The log of countries to have done so is 15, with 11 taking steps towards ratification.

The signs are ominous, and don’t augur well for democratic sentiment (‘We like democracy, as long as you vote for our platform.’). An assortment of British publications and correspondents, displeased with the bureaucratic octopus that is Brussels, have come out to bat for the Irish. An editorial in the Times gushed, suggesting a toast to the Irish ‘in lager, Sancerre, slivovitz or ouzo’. ‘This whole process,’ argued one letter to the Scotsman, ‘demonstrates a disturbing deficit within the EU, between its citizens and Brussels, with concerns over further European integration’ (16 June). A contributor to the same paper argued that a truly democratic Europe - one ‘for the people, rather than a Europe fro the Euro-elite in their ivory towers in Brussels’ had to be built.

The EU has an image problem amongst its citizens, suspicious of the ‘gravy train’ stacked by self-indulgent, invisible Eurocrats. The process of re-invention will work both ways, and Brussels will do well to heed the truculent Irish. A Bismarckian solution in the twenty first century is hardly on offer, and the Irish are unlikely to be taking flight to the Netherlands anytime soon.

Agent Orange in Oz

2008-06-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

The latest offering in this weekend's edition of Counterpunch (13-15 June 2008) on government testing on its own citizens, this time near the sleepy North Queensland town of Innisfail in Australia. The substance? Agent Orange.

They Gassed Us: Testing Agent Orange in Oz

By BINOY KAMPMARK

Australia’s indigenous peoples were not the only ones to be subjected to the scientific depredations of the United Kingdom and Australian governments between 1956 and 1957. That particularly noxious venture yielded seven atomic tests in the desert sands of Maralinga, South Australia. The British record on the subject, along with Australian complicity, is a fetid one. Officials have taken cover behind a wall of inaccessible documents and unwavering secrecy.

A year before the area around Maralinga was euphemistically ‘rehabilitated’ under the UK Ministry of Defence’s Operation Brumby (1967), chemical tests using Agent Orange were supposedly being conducted on rainforest at Gregory Falls, near the North Queensland town of Innisfail. The area in question was a local water catchment area. Researcher Jean Williams, who has made a name for herself in matters of veterans’ affairs, stumbled across documents while ferreting around in the Australian War Memorial’s archives. Her discovery has precipitated outraged queries from the residents in the area.

The evidence is scattered, but hard to dismiss out of hand. Williams claims to have found a report recommending the use of 2,4-D in the context of those trials in the 1960s. One file notes the following: ‘Considered sensitive because report recommends use of 2,4-D with other agents in spraying trials in Innisfail.’ That same file suggests that chemicals 2,4-D, Diquat, Tordon and dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO) were used in June 1966 in the area. Another file detailing a supposedly more extensive project called Operation Desert went missing containing the ominous words, ‘too disturbing to ever be released’.

Additionally to Williams’ labours are a handful of eyewitness accounts from residents in the region. Former soldier Ted Bosworth, for instance, claims he drove military scientists to a rainforest near Gregory Falls to test an ‘unknown’ herbicide.

Other bits of anecdotal evidence can also be added. 76 people died from cancer in the town of some 12,000 residents in 2005. President of the local Return Servicemen’s League, president Reg Hamann, has commented on the number of young residents in the area who perish to leukemia and other cancers. Officials in Queensland Health have only shrugged, denying that such rates were 10 times above the national average. According to one official, ‘This is the same as the cancer incidence rate for Queensland.’

The Gregory Falls test site has remained barren ever since, effaced of foliage and previously rich vegetation. A local farmer, Alan Wakeham, whose land shares a border with the site, is puzzled. ‘It’s strange how the jungle comes right up to this site and then just stops. It won’t grow any further.’

The Federal government, in a state of stringent denial, has argued that a small-scale trial of readily available herbicides was tried at Gregory Falls. But Agent Orange was not part of the mix. In the words of a recent Defence Department statement on the subject: ‘The herbicide 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, was not tested.’ The local mayor Bill Shannon is livid and wishes to conduct his own investigation.

The use of chemicals and the overall conduct of scientific ‘experiments’ on beguiled citizens, whether purposely or through sheer recklessness, is stacked with precedents. Governments of all political shades and persuasions have found it tempting to apply scientific know-how to their own citizens. It is well known that scientific experiments were conducted on subjects without their consent in the United States. This took the form of radiation testing during the Cold War, to the Tuskegee experiments which denied African-American subjects medical treatment for a study into the pervasive effects of syphilis.

Whether it’s the unsuspecting water drinkers of a North Queensland town, scientific prototypes for a counter-insurgency operation, or the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis study, a secretive government staffed with such morally decrepit characters as Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, founder of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, will always play a nefarious role. Whether Mayor Shannon finds anything in the soil samples of his sleep town remains to be seen. But he is by the no means the first, nor the last, to have suspected his government of habitual deception in the name of ‘science’.

Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

2008-06-10T17:26:00.000-07:00

Cities, like corporations, can go to seed and perish financially. The Californian town of Vallejo is no exception. The town council has filed for bankruptcy under measures introduced during the Great Depression. More at the Counterpunch Weekend edition, May 31-June 1, 2008:

Going Bankrupt in Vallejo: Breaking Union Contracts

By BINOY KAMPMARK

Bankruptcy is a damn nuisance. But it is a boon to the fiscally irresponsible, notably town councilors and municipal officials. The city of Vallejo in the Bay Area has filed for bankruptcy protection(May 23) under Chapter 9 of the Banking Code through its city manager, fearing a queue of hungry creditors. A report on the council's special meeting in February predicted insolvency in late April.

The seven-member City Council authorized the move unanimously on May 6, thereby joining a list of 500 or so municipalities throughout theUS which have invoked the measure since the Great Depression. Such an move reorders debt arrangements while still financing operations.

Vallejo remains to date the largest town in California to have taken the plunge, after Orange County (1994) and Desert Hot Springs (2001).

Reasons for this insolvency crisis in this town of 120,000 vary. Officials and councilors have found a key culprit: the city's supposedly generous pay benefits to police officers and firefighters.
These, it is claimed, have pushed the deficit to $16 million at the start of the new fiscal year in July. Councilwoman Stephanie Gomes might 'value' the police forces and firefighters, but she can't helpturning her nose up at them. They are the ones who 'can afford to live in Marin and Napa'. The 'very hardworking, blue-collar residentsof Vallejo' have paid the penalty.

Some balance is in order here. Salaries may be high, but the working hours are commensurately long and wearing. According to the SanFrancisco Chronicle (February 21), rehiring in the firefighting forces has not kept apace with retirements since 2001. Overtime sessions areunavoidable, with 96-hour shifts, punctuated by a two-day break, common.

Cities, like common mortgage holders, have been struck down by the credit squeeze, entering into labor contracts now deemed unsustainable. Tax revenue has also shrunk by $2 million, with dropsin revenue recorded in development fees, property tax and sales tax. Vallejo is, to use the words of Capt. Jon Riley, vice president of theFire Fighters Union Local 1186, the 'poster child for mismanagement'.

According to Gomes, who was interviewed in February this year, 'We've been spending more than we've been making for 20 years and it's timeto pay the piper.' The vast portion of the city's general fund (some $74 million) goes towards public safety contracts (fire and policeservices), though this is not unusual for cities in California.

Unions and various associations are skeptical about the council's moves. The municipality had filed for bankruptcy protection and called it necessary to avert the catastrophe of insolvency. Union management is making the argument, with some grounds, that the case for insolvency has not been made out. Individuals like Mat Mustard, vicepresident of the Vallejo Police Officers Association, are irate.

The meeting proceedings of February discuss the consequences of such a suit. 'Bankruptcy will not create additional revenue. A bankruptcyfiling may allow the City to take actions contrary to existing contractual obligations that would allow continued General Fund operations.' An argument might well be made that bureaucratic incompetence has been insulated.

Legal teams who specialize in bankruptcy are beside themselves with joy. Other municipalities may well follow Vallejo. Mark Levinson, abankruptcy lawyer retained by Vallejo is smacking his lips. 'Vallejo is not the only city in California or the U.S. that is saddled withemployee contract that are burdensome.'

Australian Forces withdraw from Iraq

2008-06-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

Australian forces are withdrawing from Iraq, as promised by the Rudd Government prior to the election last year. Ready yourself for the various explanations. One is that standard, forever tainted statement of 'mission accomplished'. Another is that these freedom warriors ought to be deployed elsewhere - 'we' (the 'West', the 'Coalition of the Willing') are ascendant over terrorism. More, at Online Opinion (10 June, 2008):

The progress of defeat: the withdrawal of Australian forces

By Binoy Kampmark

Australia’s five-year military commitment to Iraq has, we are officially told, ended. Overwatch Battle Group, along with its training contingent, halted operations at their station base at Tallil in Dhi Qar province on Monday, June 1. The withdrawal of Australian forces is being wrapped in curious packages of rhetoric, many of which require demystifying. A relieved Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston has observed that, “The Iraqis are doing their business”. Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon has called the deployment a success; the opposition has cursed the government’s good luck.

It is hard to find any credible description of what Australia’s role has been in that divided, crumbling state. The Rudd Government promotes the message of withdrawal, yet retains some 800 Australian personnel in the region. The opposition is still getting high on petrol fumes, seeing this military measure as a populist distraction by a wily, if cornered Prime Minister. Rudd, argued Liberal frontbencher Peter Dutton “will use anything at his disposal to distract from the fact that he hasn’t brought petrol prices down”.

During the conflict, the Iraqis have been often seen like helpless children happy to receive the instructive comforts of Australian “liberty”. But they have grown up now - they can, in Houston’s own words, do “their business”. Some disagree - the Iraqis still need nursing, the schooling of good democrats. According to Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen, “you have a war that is essentially being won and we’re seen to move out of there.” Jensen is evidently reading different dispatches from the front.

This nonsense of reading the Australian mission as a triumphant enterprise in giving freedom becomes even more troubling on inspecting it in historical context. The Australian forces, coattail riders and Gurkas of American realpolitik, were committed to an enterprise marred by fraud and trickery. The mysterious weapons of mass destruction remained the great absentees of the entire conflict, while the rhetoric of emancipation only crept in later.

The Howard government remained, along with Fox News outlets in the US, the only pious agents of the Coalition to keep believing that those WMDs might mysteriously crop out from a desert shelter.

Another, almost equally fantastic aspect of Australia’s involvement has been the way its soldiers have been deployed. It is utter fiction to suggest that the Australian forces, apart from the SAS frontline personnel, were being engaged in the thick of operations during their stint.

The Defence Department under the Howard government was petrified by potential losses, and bureaucrats were terrified about the impact body bags would have on the home front. The then Defence Minister Brendan Nelson made sure losses would simply not happen. The show, at least from the perspective of the infantry, had to be bloodless, a pantomime of freedom giving. The insurgents obliged - they had bigger targets.

What is forgotten in this withdrawal is that John Howard, the man who, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush, participated in this invasion, is now the object of a war crimes brief drafted by an International Criminal Court Action group in Melbourne. The 52-page brief hones in on Article 8 of the Rome Statute covering war crimes.

Minimal publicity has been given to the activities of Glen Floyd, a chief organiser behind the push. This is little surprise, given the fact that the circumstances surrounding the Iraq war have become assimilated into a culture of denial and deceit. The semantic tortures of former US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld heralded that culture. He will go down in history as having concocted the most obtuse, convoluted rationale for dealing with Saddam’s lethal assortment of purported WMDs:

Reports say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Cutting through this contorted verbiage is heavy going, and it supplemented the rationale for war in Iraq for years. It was not a case of granting “freedom” or undertaking the task of nation-building. Both this challenges have proven virtually insurmountable.

The Melbourne group itself, made up of a collection of political figures, legal personalities and academics, have made their intentions clear for some time. Senator Lyn Allison of the Australian Democrats, a firm supporter of the move “has been taken to hold those accountable for their action”, namely, the ex-Prime Minister.

An uncomfortable reminder then, as Australia’s soldiers leave, of what the “supreme international crime” as articulated at Nuremberg in 1946 is: the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances”.

Writing your own exam paper

2008-06-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

Students in the medical school at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia are suffering so much they have become the subject of an anxiety study. What is rather odd about this exercise is the witchdoctor philosophy that accompanies it: to ease anxiety, the students are being asked to write a portion of their own exam questions. It does not take insight to realise that anxiety levels are bound to dramatically drop under such an examinations regime. A discussion, extracted below, is available at New Matilda, 6 June 2008:

Owning the Questions

By Binoy Kampmark

How medical students at the University of Queensland are writing their own exams

According to documents made available to medical students within the School of Medicine at the University of Queensland this semester, students will be allowed to set a certain portion of their own questions during the examinations for the second half of the year.

A study is being done into the stress levels of medical students and how they perform when confronted with various forms of assessment. The news is curiously available for public consumption at the School of Medicine website, an indication of that department's sheer naiveté or ignorance. This voodoo exam-setting method is described in the project titled Enhancing Ownership of Assessment: Medical Students Generating Questions for their own Final Examination.

The aims of this grant (a UQ Teaching and Learning Strategic Grant) are to "improve students' problem-solving and comprehension-monitoring abilities as well as reduce their anxiety about assessment". To further this aim, students will contribute to "a bank of potential examination questions which will be available for revision and formative assessment in the weeks leading up to the final examination". This "bank" will contribute some 25 per cent of the final examination questions for students in both first and second year.

This, in a system where knowledge is ownership and the proletarian owners of it are the students. Some sense of this rationale is gathered in a lecture given to the students were by Tracey Papinczak, Senior Evaluation Officer within the School of Medicine in late April. She is one of those named on this particular grant. Self-regulation in education is discussed, along with various learning taxonomies. Self-direction or self-regulation (are students neo-liberal agents?) allows "students to identify how well they are covering the most important aspects of the subject material". To aid this, "exemplar" answers will be provided.

Would patients like their prospective doctors to set their own questions, with answers fully available prior to examination? Examinations, notably rigorous ones, are supposedly set by the wise, the learned, the educated. Ownership of knowledge is impossible to assume if you don't have it. Pupils and teachers should ideally engage in a dialectic of learning and disputation. But the medical school at the University of Queensland, demonstrating long strides of innovation befitting a Universitas 21 member, prefers a different approach.

The School of Medicine might argue this: there is a "quality control" mechanism in place; students are not being given an arbitrary hand in setting questions. The questions are screened. To refer back to Papinczak's lecture, "Poor quality ones will be returned to the group for a second try (weeks 28-29)". Appropriate questions will be uploaded to a central examination database available to all students. Patients are bound to feel reassured.

Students will finally be given a questionnaire prior to the examination to test their anxiety levels. The language resembles the most dire form of couch therapy: "Often I lie awake worrying about work that I think I won't be able to do". Answer options on the form range from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree". Other questions: "I seem to panic if I get behind my work"; "I often feel anxious about whether I'll ever be able to cope with the workload". Anxiety is then "rated" on a 1 to 10 scale.

A few guesses can be made about the prospective findings. The figures may well show that students who set 25 per cent of their questions, with answers in advance, readily available on the net, will suffer less stress than those who don't. How wonderful it is to conduct research on a project when the answers are already certain.

This delusional nonsense is patterned on the self-directed programs that have gradually moved into medical school syllabi over the years. Students are no longer the taught - they will do the teaching and conduct the instruction. Modern medical students are there to be pampered and promoted. Let's just get them to mark their own questions in future as well, shall we?

Art, censorship and obscenity in Oz

2008-05-29T23:33:00.000-07:00

Australian cultural debates are marred by a persistent undercurrent of puritanism. This is evident with the recent confiscation of art works in a Sydney gallery by photographic artist Bill Henson depicting child subjects. While few could disregard the need to protect children, the arguments about their 'sexualisation' and the purported harm against them in these photos is questionable. The argument is extracted below and available at Index on Censorship, 28 May 2008:

Art and Obscenity in Oz

By Binoy Kampmark

The censorship of an exhibition in Sydney says more about the infantilising impulse of the authorities than it does about art, says Binoy Kampmark

‘A barrier of illiterate policemen and officers stands between the tender Australian mind and what they imagine to be subversive literature’
HG Wells

Art exhibitions can be a hazardous business, especially in Australia. Australia was, at one time, banning more art and literature coming in than going out. The only thing the authorities did not do was burn books and slice canvasses. In terms of ‘western’ democracies, only Ireland pipped Australia to the post of conservative, censoring hysteria.

The work of photographic artist Bill Henson has been added to this registry of ‘indecencies’ that have troubled the Australian conscience. Twenty Henson photographs featuring ‘naked children aged 12 and 13′ were confiscated on 22 May from the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney.
The police are proving rather enthusiastic in prosecuting the case. Victoria’s Assistant Commissioner Gary Jamieson, fancying himself as budding art critic, promises to ‘go through the process of evaluating those works’.

Galleries are being hounded into removing pictures by the new moralists. Some are digging in for the moral onslaught. The Monash Gallery of Art is backing Henson, who, in the words of its director, Jason Smith, ‘has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood’.

Everyone is a judge in a democratised art world. But the power to judge is not always proportionate with the power to act on it. At most, disgusted citizens can either stay away, switch off the screen or walk out. Thankfully, they don’t have the power to deprive a gallery of its liberty.

Not so the police, whose judgments often resemble the mediations of a belligerent philistine. This police drive is all tied up with the mentality of the censor. The censor is not only dismissive of reality, but genuinely repelled by it. Poet Max Harris provided the ideal summation: ‘The law is framed, and prosecutions are carried out, to prevent us from knowing the facts of life, the state of the world, the realities.’

Child protection in the Henson case provides an apt metaphor: Australia is itself an innocent, a child in fear of growing up. Dream and for heaven’s sake don’t get carried away with thoughts of what really happens. ‘Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,’ argued Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He also found the images ‘revolting’. Australians should, of course, be deprived of seeing films and other media that might sunder their tender minds. Seeing Henson’s works is bound to turn us all into drooling deviants.

The moral tick that underlies such reactions is tediously consistent with Antipodean history, from religious activist Rona Joyner to the Office of Film and Literature Classification. The OFLC made hay under the Howard government, targeting such films as Ken Park and Baise Moi as inconvenient unforgivable intrusions of reality upon the Australian public. Ken Park was fatally flawed for depicting gratuitous child self-abuse and fetishism in what were ‘high impact scenes’ — the Australian public had to be shielded from the cruel depictions — after all, children don’t really behave like that. Surely not.

Different standards apparently apply, because of a child’s innocence and fragility. How such innocence is defined is, of course, highly arbitrary. A society apoplectic at the very mention of sexualised children is incapable of finding a balanced approach, and the reaction to Henson is a case in point.

Children are the noble savages of modern consciousness, deified, put on pedestals, and, as a result, beyond understanding. Adults are presumptively evil; children, the untarnished good. There is a little irony in this, as Henson has himself described his child shots as exploring ‘something which is absolutely inviolate and unknowable’.

Others are more subtle about their condemnation, adding a gleam of polished ignorance to their assessments. Children should not be prematurely sexualised, argues Victoria’s Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary. (Since when haven’t children been prematurely sexualized?) No more nymphets on canvas, thanks. Farewell to the Bronzinos and the Egon Schieles, which depict the advances of child figures on older women, all dismissed as the vulgar, suggestive extravaganzas of sexualised minors.

Presumably, all art, notably art that portrays children in ‘suggestive’ ways, must suffer the same fate — after all, art has itself become a commercialised marketplace phenomenon, a capitalist binge.

The police involvement, and Rudd’s moral venting, brings to mind the debate between the British legal scholar HLA Hart and his sparring counterpart, Lord Patrick Devlin, on morality’s role in the law. For Hart, citing the opposing view of the Wolfenden Report (1957), the law should resist enforcing moral precepts unless they involve acts which cause genuine harm to individuals. This is vintage John Stuart Mill.

Devlin demurred, citing the familiar argument that an assault on ‘constitutive morality’ would degrade society in due course. It seems very unlikely that the public, let alone children, need to be protected from Henson and his pictures. The police and Rudd think otherwise.

If the police are so keen on protecting a vulnerable public from itself, they might start with cleansing Australian galleries of Norman Lindsay’s work, with its saccharine depictions of flesh that don’t so much sigh as sag. When the British art critic Sir Kenneth Clark cast his eye over Lindsay’s canvasses on a journey to Australia, he exclaimed that he had never seen such a vast collection of Victorian pornography in his life. Criticism of Henson should only be that of the man as artist. If vulgar, then so be it. It is certainly harmless, and hardly indecent.

UFO Gazing

2008-05-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

Ufology and its advocates have reason to be excited. Government authorities are gradually releasing records of 'sightings', and it is the French and the British who the frontrunners in the business. Sadly, the sightings are not only repetitive but unimaginative. Are we witnessing the death of the creative abduction? More at Ovi Magazine.

Commentary by Emanuel Paparella re Carl Jung (Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth) following the article is instructive.

UFOs, Ufology and the British Public

By Binoy Kampmark

Few people realize the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

Current discussions in the archive world are awash with talk about extra-terrestrials. Releases announced by national archives trigger a choking exodus to vulnerable websites - conspiracy theorists, agnostics, and the generally curious head for the cyber show, often crashing the website in question with salivating, mouse-clicking eagerness. The French were first in the queue of ET-releases, divulging an impressive record of files spanning 50 years last year. Interest was intense. The website of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales crashed last year after more than 220,000 users deluged it with traffic.

That in itself was not surprising. Keen UFO gazers would be aware of the French interest in ‘Un-identified Aerospace Phenomena’ (PAN). The Rare Aerospace Phenomena Study Department (SEPRA), based in Toulouse, was charged with developing a methodology for examining such sightings. It was closed in 2004.

Britain’s National Archives site has also gone public this month on its collection of UFO sightings, releasing a series of documents from the Ministry of Defence (MoD - an acronym that is curiously extra-terrestrial in its import). MoD had little choice in revealing these ‘X Files’, drowning in requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Some 160 or so files will be kept at the archives for perusal.

A quick peek then, at what these files have to offer, eight of which have been made available on the archive site. The dates: 1978 to 1987. To justify its interest in reporting such incidents, the MoD made it tediously obvious: it was only keen, as a note made in January 1983 says, to catalogue such curiosities to ‘establish whether they reveal anything of defence interest (e.g. aircraft)’ (DEFE-31/172).

Besides, surely they could be nothing peculiar about these space oddities, despite the occasional ‘strange’ object moving through the sky. For the cold realists within the MoD, ‘there are adequate material explanations for these – satellite debris re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, ball lightning, unusual cloud formations; meteorological balloons, aircraft lights, aircraft at unusual angles etc’.

Any initial excitement in perusing such reports is dampened quickly, and the dull dismissive language of the humourless MoD pen pusher proves infectious. The prosaic bureaucratic language does little to raise expectations. The sightings assume a monotonous sameness. Both the witness and the recorder are engaged in an exercise of banal recall. If only such sightings could be that more inventive.

Sightings are nothing short of predictable. Airports are unsurprising venues for alien intruders. Rather naughtily, they like ‘flashing’ (that’s the lit variety). They also persist in using saucers more like pet bowls as their preferred mode of transport. As the French records show, the Trans-en-Provence man who, in January 1981, saw such an object 2.5 meters in diameter is little different from his English or American cousins.

Records do little to endear one to the lack of inventiveness of the observers. On 26 January 1985, the observer in question, while walking the dog, observed a ‘Bright light’. Another description from an observer in a car, in December 1984, for a duration of 10 minutes at 8.45 in the evening: ‘Witness observed the object when driving along, he stopped and flashed his light, object turned, approached and dropped an orange ball of light, car radio went dead.’ Nothing to make you fall off your chair.

Little has changed from those first ‘flying saucer’ sightings in June 1947 made by pilot Kenneth Arnold from the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. After 1950, such objects came to be called UFOs (unidentified flying objects) in the familiar jargon of Captain Edward Ruppelt’s Project Blue Book of 1950.

A civil servant who worked at the UFO desk of the MoD, Nick Pope, sounded exasperated. ‘There simply is no saucer-in-a-hangar smoking gun’ (Guardian 15 May, 2008). Pope was, however, happy to throw ufologists a bone in December last year, claiming that some sightings were ‘highly credible’ (Daily Telegraph, 12 Dec 2007).

Officials were at times compelled to make some statement or take some action. One source detailing observations in October 1984 was treated as ‘quite genuine and has other witnesses’. In all likelihood there was ‘probably some sort of phenomena to be seen possibly connected with the radio masts or the royal radar’. A comment could be made as 'a public relations exercise’ - some ‘official acknowledgment’.

For all these findings, the record on human and extra-terrestrial actual contact is depressingly thin. There has been a very visible death of the British alien abduction. Hornchurch, Essex, in October 1974 (the Aveley Case), seems to have been the last major instance of it. More cache is gotten out of reporting and pondering agricultural phenomena. Crop circles are what enchant the UFO boffin in Blighty.

Such un-identified phenomena sightings are often barometers of social behaviour. Whether it is the communist fifth columnist of the Cold War, intrusive enemy aircraft or fears of millennial apocalypse, the alien phenomenon is often a case of overheated angst.

Lord Wynne-Jones even had time to be flippant in a question in the House of Lords (4 March 1982), addressed to the government’s Viscount Long: ‘My Lord’s, does the Answer [from Viscount Long] mean that since there has been a Conservative Government the UFOs have done a U-turn and departed?’ Life, as a consequence, is continuously imitating art and digesting political sentiment – the conical alien head, whirling in a curious saucer, or a bright cigar-shaped object.

But there is another feature to the release of these files. Determined, campaign-hardened ufologists, using very terrestrial creatures (the FOI Act and public pressure), become self-appointed freedom fighters combating government secrecy. And that is hardly alien.

The Case of Binayak Sen

2008-05-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Things are not getting any easier for Indian civil rights activists. Public health specialist Dr. Binayak Sen is one of a growing list of detainees imprisoned for alleged complicity in the activities of various terrorist and anti-government organizations. He has been imprisoned for over 12 months in Chhattisgarh. More in Counterpunch, 15 May 2008:

Indian Jailbirds: The Case of Binayak Sen

By Binoy Kampmark

Chhattisgarh prison. Sen is a public health specialist and national Vice President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. In April this year, he was conferred the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. He is due to receive it at the end of this month. The Global Health Council was polite in its letter to the President of India and the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh. ‘Please consider finding the means to allow him to receive his award in person.’

The Chhattisgarh authorities barely stirred. For them, the good doctor is knee deep in the Naxalist campaign waged by the Communist Party of India (CPI). In providing medical treatment to Naxalite leader Narayan Sanyal in the Raipur jail, Sen purportedly aided and abetted Sanyal’s ‘anti-national’ activities. The charges were more than suspect: the meeting had taken place with the full knowledge and permission of the Deputy Superintendent of Police.

With his detention on charges of sedition, Sen joined an assortment of human rights activists who are filling India’s jails. Journalist and civil rights activist Lachit Bordoloi was arrested in February for his links with the United Liberation Front of Asom. Praful Jha, a journalist from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in January for alleged links to the CPI. Ditto Govindan Kutty, editor of the monthly journal People’s March based in Kerala and fellow journalist Prashant Rahi. Allegations of torture abound. While India seduces the West with its economic prowess, it is gradually strangling its political dissenters.

The government in New Delhi gives the impression of being under siege. In some ways, it is. A spate of bombings over the last few years, the deadliest being the attacks in Jaipur in March, have rattled officials. In his National Day speech in August 2006, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saw Naxalism and terrorism in general as the two biggest threats to India’s internal stability. Such threats are being countered with a vigor that is alarming the human rights fraternity.

Anti-insurgency campaigns tend to be fraught with crude euphemisms. Law makers and law enforcers often resemble a cadre of creative writers: they seek to draft statutes that inculpate rather than clarify; they charge suspects with inventive crimes. In such a climate, the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code have been relegated as inconvenient hurdles.

Such campaigns are also characterized by a conspicuous use of ‘irregular’ activity. If insurgents wage war with cloak and dagger (or in the case of the Naxalites, axes), the authorities will respond in kind. Enter the civilian militia organization, Salwa Judum, part of Sen’s prison dilemma.

When it first appeared on the Indian political scene in 2005, the group was described as a spontaneous uprising against the Communist Party of India, a manifestation of indigenous (or adivasi) dissatisfaction with Maoist repression. A closer inspection by the PUCL in April 2006 revealed a ‘state-organized anti-insurgency campaign’. Sen has been vocal in condemning it.

With government assistance, ostensibly to combat Maoist insurgents, the Salwa Judum milita has proven its mettle against tribal minorities. Its violence in Dantewada District within Chhattisgarh is undisputed, a mixture of threats, retaliation and a scorched earth policy. Tens of thousands of residents have been displaced, relocated to ‘relief camps’. These are potential deathtraps, given the dearth of amenities. Authorities underline Maoist excesses and measures – those of the Salwa Judum are hailed as proportionate counter-measures.

The authorities have various legal weapons at their disposal, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (CSPSA), and the particularly brutal Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967. These have been collectively known as the ‘Black Laws.’ The previous statute covering the subject, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, had been given a pasting by activist groups. Its abolition in 2004 was cold comfort to reformers. The legislative debris of POTA was merely absorbed into the ‘Black Laws’ of 2004.

The CSPSA, a creature of the Bharatiya Janata Party, broadened the criminal emphasis on ‘unlawful’, targeting those with tendencies to disrupt public order. Reportage on supposedly ‘terrorist’ groups and activities is strictly prohibited, so we are none the wiser as to what is actually going on amongst ‘terrorist’ organizations. The UAPA facilitates lengthy detention periods without trial and a requirement for reasonable evidence. Secrecy and concealment of government abuses is thereby assured.

Sen’s detention has sparked outrage. 22 Nobel Prize winners have expressed ‘grave concern’ at a jailing which violates the freedoms of opinion, expression and association protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. But many will follow his footsteps as prison benchwarmers. The catalogue of abuses by the Indian government, at federal and local level, will only grow. And Sen is unlikely to be Washington on May 29 to receive his award.

First the grub, then the ethics

2008-05-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

A global rise in food prices is producing political and social chaos. People are not merely voting with their feet, but with their stomachs. Governments are falling, and deaths are resulting. Pundits are coming out in droves with solutions, though these are patchy at best. More, at the 8 May 2008 issue of Counterpunch.

Food Riots are Coming to the US: The Morality of the Stomach

By Binoy Kampmark

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food. No this is not a drill.

--Brett Arends

There is a time for food, and a time for ethical appraisals. This was the case even before Bertolt Brecht gave life to that expression in Die Driegroschen Oper. The time for a reasoned, coherent understanding for the growing food crisis is not just overdue, but seemingly past. Robert Zoellick of the World Bank, an organization often dedicated to flouting, rather than achieving its claimed goal of poverty reduction, stated the problem in Davos in January this year. ‘Hunger and malnutrition are the forgotten Millennium Development Goal.’

Global food prices have gone through the roof, terrifying the 3 billion or so people who live off less than $2 a day. This should terrify everybody else. In November, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that food prices had suffered a 18 percent inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India. The devil in the detail is even more distressing: a doubling in the price of wheat, a twenty percent increase in the price of rice, an increase by half in maize prices.

Finger pointing is not always instructive. In this case, it may be. The US and various European countries are moving food crops into the bio-fuel business, itself an environmentally unsound business. This, in addition to encouraging developing countries to not merely ‘liberalize’ their agricultural sectors, but specialize in exporting specific cash crops (cotton, cocoa), has done wonders to precipitate the shortages. Consumption in developing economies, added to the vicissitudes of climate change, water availability, and rising fertilizer costs, are others.

Political stability is being undermined. Food shortages are proving endemic. Food riots are becoming common. Riots have been sparked in Cameroon, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan and Yemen. There have been riots over spiraling grain prices in Mauritania and Senegal. In Mexico City, mass protests were sparked by a price hike in tortillas. In Haiti, biscuits are being made from a mud compound. The Somali capital Mogadishu bore witness to the deaths of five people.

Governments, indifferent and incautious to the demands of a hungry public, have already fallen victim to the food crisis. Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was dismissed by a senate vote in Haiti after skirmishes between UN forces and protesters. The UN commander Major General Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz urged calm amidst the carnage. ‘It is important for the people to have a peaceful life in Haiti,’ he claimed in April 2008. The message then: be peaceful on an empty stomach.

The Bush administration, so often in arrears on the relief front, has earmarked some 770 million dollars or so in funds dealing with the problem. There is one glaring hitch: the money would only start flowing in 2009. ‘There is definitely a lag time when it comes to assistance,’ states the senior manager of the Foreign Aid Reform Project at the Brookings Institute, Noam Unger.

More troubling is the critique offered of the crisis by officials within the administration. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the Peace Corps conference held at the end of April, targeted various culprits. The audience barely stirred at some of the explanations: distribution, oil prices, and the ‘alternate fuels effort’. They duly woke up when Rice moved on to targeting the export strategies of various countries – India and China foremost amongst them. ‘We obviously have to look at places where production seems to be declining and declining to the point that people are actually putting export caps on the amount of food.’

The problem, for Rice, is rising food consumption. Improved diets within China and India are bothering free market fundamentalists who insist that export caps stifle trade. According to this rationale, Indians are far better off buying the rice from the global market than eating their own in times of crisis. How silly of them to ensure a domestic supply first before shipping off the rest for the global market. Rice is crying foul at such protectionist deviancy, will ‘have a look at it’ and take the matter to the World Trade Organization.

Members of the American public are not so sure. A narrative of catastrophe is gradually building – stockpile or perish. The Wall Street Journal (April 25) was one of the first to issue the clarion call: ‘Start Hoarding Food Americans!’ The paper had various suggestions. Stock up on some products – dried pasta, rice, cereals, canned products. Buy them all in bulk to save. Sit the children down give them a good talking to – no, not about the birds and the bees, but about ‘how our generation and the two behind it, screwed their world into a death spiral through greed and predatory capitalism.’

Solutions suggested by such economists as Jeffrey Sachs, somewhat patchy yet desperately needed, are forthcoming: allow easier access for sub-Saharan African farmers to fertilizers; reduce the amount of crops going into bio-fuel development; shore-up climate change policies.

Sachs, in his work Common Wealth, also advocates the abolition of states in the face of a crowded planet. But it was state regimes besotted by neoliberal economics that brought us here. They can take us back and remedy the damage. Abolishing them would simply absolve their regimes.

In the meantime, the US and some countries in the West may have to brace themselves for a starving army guided by the morality of the stomach. The food riots are coming.

London, the Mayoral Race and Boris

2008-05-03T18:56:00.001-07:00

This piece was run at Ovi Magazine before the council election results in Britain came to light, and before voters were aware exactly what had happened (yes, BoJo is now in control of London). For the most updated version of this piece, consult Counterpunch, 3/4 May 2008.

I have left this version for readers' indulgence:

London, the Mayoral Race and Boris

By Binoy Kampmark

It is a contest between practised rogues.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent, 21 April 2008

With a degree of desperation, The Guardian (1 May) newspaper rolled out its arsenal to compel voters in London not to vote for the conservative candidate Boris Johnson, the bumbling, error-prone Etonian who once told Swedish UNICEF workers and their black driver in Uganda that he wished to ‘go and look at some more piccaninnies’.

Zoe Williams’s column was a strident warning: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’ What would be the consequences of ‘this bigoted, lying Old Etonian buffoon’ getting his hands on ‘our diverse and liberal capital’? Fellow Guardian contributor Charlie Booker had already made his intentions to vote for a dog before Boris.

Surely elections of the Greater London area have not been this colourful in some time. But things are desperate. Columnist for the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown labelled the two front-runners, Boris and Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone, as ‘so flawed it shames democracy itself.’ (21 April). In a battle of lesser evils, Ken came up tops.

Actor Alan Rickman felt that Boris running London was much like putting an incompetent lunatic in charge of an asylum. Another thespian, Arabella Weir, would consider immolation before the horses of the Ascot races. Writer Bonnie Greer had fled New York to avoid Borisian madness. London, she feared, would be handed over to the ‘Kensington and Chelsea gulag and the Bullingdon Ascendancy.’ Fellow author Will Self also had it in for the Chelsea ‘denizens’, who would not so much lionize Boris as cuddle him as the teddy bear mascot for ‘4x4’ driving. Blake Morrison’s pen may migrate to Australia in the event of a Boris triumph.

Thumbs up then for Livingstone from a gaggle of authors, dramatists and social workers, a group Ken has done much to woo and convince over the years. Ken, no angel himself, is one who has had his fair share of contemptible buffoonery and fleshy distractions (five children from three women, for one). He has also dabbled with race when it has suited him, and has presided over a rise in prices that makes London one of the dearest capitals on earth.

Johnson’s policies have been a smorgasbord of curiosities. He wishes to bring back bus conductors. He wants to run up police numbers. Londoners are not safe, and Johnson is there to secure them. He is against supposedly punitive regimes against the owners of fuel guzzling beasts who should simply aim to drive less. Voluntary submission is the name of the Boris game.

He has also denounced anti-discrimination laws and dismissed racism as a problem of discourteousness. His political past is one of war against political correctness. When Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the Congo in 2002, he considered it a waste of time: ‘No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British tax-payer funded bird.’ This tendency has won him friends and a broad readership for his idiosyncratic columns, something he built up while editor of the conservative Spectator magazine.

A pity then, for the other candidates, not all of whom quite rise (or fall) to the levels of Boris’ self-combusting talents. Some even sound eerily sensible. The Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick is one such individual, and for that, he is unlikely to win office. Others are predictably extreme – the British National Party has fielded its own candidate, while some candidates are simply bewildering – who on earth are the ‘English Democrats’?

Whatever happens in London (results there on a knife-edge as we speak), British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is in trouble across the country. The British Labour Party has not been in such a mire of political unpopularity in over 20 years. The state wide electoral results at the council level show a collapse of the Labour vote by 25 percent. David Cameron’s Tories have nabbed something like 43 percent of the vote. Crucial gains were made in places like Bury. But the pre-election advice from the Guardian still resonated through Greater London: ‘If you passionately want to Keep Boris out, 1st Choice Ken, 2nd Choice Anyone except Boris.’

Allah, Funding and Australian Universities

2008-05-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

Institutions often have to juggle ethical issues when receiving funding. This is particularly acute for those dealing in education. The issue with funding from Islamic sources, notably those of fundamentalist states (Saudi Arabia, for instance), is a difficult one. Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, is the lastest in a line of institutions which have received or have sought funding from Saudi Arabian sources for an Islamic 'Unit'.

Should they hand it back? Probably, but only at the expense of creating Islamic centres which are desperately needed to understand historical currents. Critics of such funding, often ignorant of politics in the Muslim world, do little to further the overall argument.

More is available in the article by Binoy Kampmark, 'Drawing a Line - Islam and money in Australian Universities' at the Australian political magazine Crikey, 2 May 2008.

Terminal Labour and Triumphant Boris

2008-05-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

The British local council elections are done and dusted. As, it seems, is British Labour (no longer 'new' but looking jaded and severely battered). Will there be an exodus from London now that Boris Johnson is in charge of the City Council purse, all £11 billion worth? Unlikely. London will bustle, simply to a different tune. Chaos will continue, only with a distinct, Borisian mark. The only one to be truly afraid will be Gordon Brown.

More at Counterpunch, May 3/4, 2008 issue:

Brown, Boris, and the British Council Elections: Labour on the Rocks

By Binoy Kampmark

British Labour is in trouble. One political reading of the local council results of 1 May seems irrefutable: Gordon Brown’s government is gradually fading into oblivion. The elections delivered gains to David Cameron’s conservatives across Wales and England. 159 councils were contested, with some 4,023 seats.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s message prior to the election was desperate. He assured readers of the Daily Mirror that ‘Labour councillors’ had the ‘concerns and the hopes of hard-working families’ at heart. Far better to stick with Labour, a party against taking ‘risks with the economy’ and tampering with ‘vital services’.

That desperation spilled over in the contest for City Hall in London. The Guardian newspaper rolled out its arsenal on the day of the election to compel voters in London not to vote for the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson. It reminded readers how the bumbling, error-prone Etonian once told Swedish UNICEF workers and their black driver in Uganda that he wished to ‘go and look at some more piccaninnies’. Zoe Williams’s column was a strident warning: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’ What would be the consequences of ‘this bigoted, lying Old Etonian buffoon’ getting his hands on ‘our diverse and liberal capital’?

Less afraid than disgusted was the prolific and often-incendiary columnist for the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who labelled the two front-runners, Johnson and Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone, as ‘so flawed it shames democracy itself’. In a battle where evil had become the metric measure, Ken was preferable.

Then, the verdict from a host of actors, writers and activists. Actor Alan Rickman felt that Boris running London was much like putting an incompetent lunatic in charge of an asylum. Another actor, Arabella Weir, would consider immolation before the horses of the Ascot races. Writer Bonnie Greer had fled New York to avoid Borisian-styled madness. London, she feared, would be handed over to the ‘Kensington and Chelsea gulag and the Bullingdon Ascendancy.’ Fellow author Will Self also had it in for the Chelsea ‘denizens’, who would not so much lionize Boris as cuddle him as the teddy bear mascot of ‘4x4’ driving.

The pre-election advice from the Guardian then: ‘If you passionately want to Keep Boris out, 1st Choice Ken, 2nd Choice Anyone except Boris.’

Electoral advice from the Guardian has a tendency to go astray (remember its disastrous attempt to convince Americans not to vote for George Bush in 2004). Johnson was duly elected, getting a bruising 53.2 percent to Livingstone’s 46.8 percent. Labour’s losses across the boroughs were the worst seen since the 1960s, a 24 percent decline in the overall share of the vote. The Conservatives gained 144 seats, their best performance since 1992; Labour lost 145.

Municipal elections are not necessarily representative of national sentiment. Labour suffered stinging defeats in 2004, its councillors victims of an unpopular war. That did not prevent a Blair victory in 2006. Voters often prove discriminating in their punishment.

What will worry Labour strategists is the revitalised nature of the Tory challenge. Unlike ‘BoJo’, they are looking less like performers in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and more like government contenders. Conservative gains in the North such as the bellwether borough of Bury within Greater Manchester will sting, as will losses in Hartlepool and Pendle in Lancashire. Crushing losses in the Midlands and the South will dismay the party.

Brown has become the victim of minutiae, intrigued by such matters as the size of gaming machines and other White Hall frivolities. Bureaucracy enchants him, and it’s not working. The General Secretary of the Fabian Society Sunder Katwala has accused him of ‘neurotic under-confidence.’

He has bungled over abolition of the 10 pence starting rate of income tax, something he initiated in his final budget as Chancellor. Compensation measures for workers and income earners on the lower scale were woeful. Both had been denied the working tax credit. Nor was the government ‘able to help the 60 to 64-year-olds who don’t get pensioner’s tax allowance.’ He has also presided over a government that did what a few years ago would have been unthinkable: embrace bank nationalisation.

Brown and his party only have two years to remedy the catastrophe that is fast enveloping them. They, more than anybody else, have reason to be afraid. Eric Pickles, local government spokesman for the Conservatives, is eager: ‘The ship is heading towards the rocks.’ The same may be said of London.

Skin Deep: the Indian Premier League

2008-04-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

The Indian Premier League is unlike anything else seen in this old, stuffy, provincial sport. Indian cricket stadia have been improvised to look more like their baseball counterparts in the United States. At the same time, it re-enforces timeless prejudices touching on hierarchy, race and wealth. Where better to promote this than India? More, at Online Opinion, in their 2 May 2008 issue, and Ovi Magazine, which also ran the piece:

Beauty and Whiteness: the Indian Premier League

By Binoy Kampmark

Former English cricketer Robin Jackman is giving his pitch report (April 25) in Chandigarh, and the girls, both blonde and brunette, mainly white, and unmistakably Caucasian, are dancing before him. He seems indifferent. He has a job to do: report the weather conditions and discuss the “toss” between the captains for audiences across the cricket world. Amidst this workmanlike program is a flurry of skirts and pompoms.

This scene is surely unprecedented in the annals of this provincial, rather stuffy sport, long given over to social hierarchies in both Britain and her former colonies. A sport dedicated to the long afternoon, the gin and tonic, and the imperial self-satisfaction, was not meant for this. Suddenly, we might as well be in Yankee stadium.

Indeed, the organisers of world cricket’s newest attraction, the Indian Premier League (IPL) would like to believe that. This brainchild of world cricket’s leviathan, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, arose as a means of coping with Subhash Chandra’s Indian Cricket League. International players, along with a potpourri of promotional gimmicks, were sought to sweeten the mix. Ostensibly catchy names for the teams were also thrown into the bargain: the Mohali Punjab Kings, and the Kolkata Knight Riders. Then came the cheerleaders.

The match begins after an introduction and patchy analysis from commentators whose smiles linger for too long over pearly white teeth. This is the IPL, a league that is aspiring to be a baseball world series. Then come the performers, dressed in gaudy, somewhat jarring colours, who fight out a match of 20 overs a piece. Each over comprises six deliveries, and field restrictions are strictly designed to fetter the bowler and empower the batsman, who then proceeds to pummel to his heart’s content.

Some viewers, at least those who are being targeted by this format (audiences in South and South-East Asia) do not quite know what to make of the modern variants. An open question submitted on the Yahoo Malaysia search engine gathered a host of responses on the 20-20 format of the IPL. Where, posed the questioner, had the vigorous “sledging” gone? The racial taunts were absent, as was the direct questioning about spouse and parentage so typical on the modern cricket field. Even Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh were behaving, their exploits of a few months prior scotched by a mutual hunger for money.

The questioner, calling himself “Laughing Tears”, even went so far as to suggest that the format of the game be altered to bolster the competitive spirit. No girls please, but more rehearsed sessions of testosterone-charged machismo, “like WFF fighters”. This “artificial drama of sledging can be pre-planned to make this game more attractive”.

Organisers of this form of sport see cricket consumers as fast-food addicts. Like the documentary maker Morgan Spurlock, they are overtly keen on consuming the same food for a month, with its inevitable consequences.

The IPL, much like the polystyrene parallels of the fast food world, is also a peculiar cultural package. Take the insistence of its organisers on cheerleaders in the form of short-skirted scantily clad Caucasians. The Indian ideal of the model woman, at least in the commercial sense of the term, is a Caucasian beauty with flawless white skin. Indian audiences are constantly reminded of that fact.

This is far from peculiar to India - other Asian countries adhere to the canon that one white feature covers three aspects of ugliness. Whiteness was aristocratic and sheltered, a glaring contrast to the field hand or sun-burnt labourer. “Flawlessly milky skin is to die for”, promotes one particular website for Asian women.

This fascination with whitening comes with its hazards - in 2002, some 1,262 people flooded a hotline established by the Hong Kong health department fearing a toxic cream outbreak. Mercury levels in Rosedew and La Rose Blanche, both whitener creams, were somewhere between nine to 65,000 times the recommended dosage.

The advertising machine is driven to producing whiteness, and the cricket behemoth that has given the IPL is no different. An Aryan obsession dominates like an imperialist trope - the Dravidian cowering, indeed covering, is still there.

Black, or for that matter brown, is not beautiful in the commercial drive of the subcontinent. Physical fairness is what counts, as the Indian National Party Congress Chairman Sonia Gandhi finds in her supporters. One columnist went so far as to find in this Italian-born figure and widow of Rajiv Gandhi the “highest Vedantic ideals”.

The jiggling dance fest is posing problems for the Indian authorities. Some players have complained - Pakistan’s Shahid Afridi has demanded their removal, citing them as a distraction to his keen sense of hard-hitting. “Cricket itself is an entertainment. It does require such cheerleaders to entertain.”

The authorities are also caught in a bind. R.R. Patil, State Home Minister, threw out the bar dancers of Mumbai in 2005. He now sees a sporting equivalent in open play, and is wondering whether to act. The conservative Bharatiya Janata Party Maharashtra President Nitin Gadkari could barely restrain himself. In the Legislative Council on April 23, he posed the question: “If the state has banned dance bars, then how is it allowing vulgar dances by scantily-clad cheerleaders in IPL matches?” An investigation of work permits may soon commence.

Capitalism, but to be more exact, commercialism, is indifferent to bonds, to ties, to community. It dishevels, it parts. Every major historical revolt against capitalism has a common assumption: rampant, unmonitored commercialism throws up factions which re-order society. So, the girls dance, fleshy, nubile, exquisite, some Indian patrons hurl abuse, and the BJP protests. Are Indians, despite an increasingly insatiable middle class, ready for this?

The donors and the stake holders of this giant enterprise won’t care - unless it affects the purse strings. Like the concept of fast food consumption, the 20-20 format of the IPL is set to be replicated. Allen Sanford, the Texan billionaire is keen to run the model in England. An otherwise conservative English Cricket Board might just relent.

Benedict XVI in America

2008-04-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

The Papal visit to the United States had the purpose of shoring up what was becoming a desperate situation for the Catholic authorities in that country. Catholic schools are closing; the number of priests is falling; and the institution has been accused of turning a blind eye to allegations of sexual abuse. More at Eureka Street, 28 April 2008 (vol 18, no. 9):

Pope visit holds mirror up to 'grappling' US Catholics

By Binoy Kampmark

Did the six day visit to the United States by Pope Benedict XVI usher any significant changes in the direction of Catholicism in that country? For prolific writer on religion Amy Welborn, the visit was not only 'busy' and 'rich', — it was a 'mirror held up to American Catholics, asking us to consider who we are, honestly and with humility'.

The reflections in that mirror were often jarringly unpleasant. The institutional crisis wrought by child abuse allegations hovered menacingly over traditional discussions about faith, war and peace. According to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, some 689 new accusations of sexual abuse were made in 2007 alone, with $615 million paid in settlements.

Since 2002, when allegations of sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese came to light, charges have proliferated. They were not only directed at individuals such as a now defrocked John Geoghan, but the culture of concealment that had crept around those suspected of abuse. Pointed salvos were fired at Cardinal Bernard Law and former deputies Bishop John B. McCormack and Bishop Thomas Daily for their seeming indifference.

To his credit, Benedict made it clear that it was a problem that had to be confronted, a cultural condition sorely in need of eradication. In St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, he urged officials to 'continue to work effectively to resolve this issue'. At the Immaculate Conception Shrine, he argued that the issue of pedophilia or what he termed 'gravely immoral behaviour' within the Church had been 'very badly handled'.

But the Pope would not divorce the matter of child abuse from the broader assault on community values, perpetrated by, among others, members of the media. 'What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?' The 'manipulation' of sexuality had proven corrosive for the young.

Very little in the way of concrete responses were outlined, though he urged a 'determined, collective response'. And, to the disappointment of some victims, Benedict did not visit the Archdiocese of Boston.

Despite the omission, he made it clear early in the tour that the church would 'absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry. It is more important to have good priests than many priests. We will do everything possible to heal this wound.'

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has undertaken its own steps, drafting an annual report detailing progress made in implementing a plan of child protection outlined in a newly drafted charter.

The Pope found himself in a country where Catholicism is seemingly in institutional disarray and retreat. Out of 19,000 parishes in the United States, 3200 are bereft of a resident pastor, while 800 have closed since 1995. The number of priests started declining in the 1970s, and has continued to do so. Church officials found the Pope's visit a tantalising recruitment drive.

America's Catholic schools have been a particular casualty, a fact that has not escaped Benedict's attention. Some 1267 have closed since 2000.

President George Bush, while not singling out the Catholic pedigree, noted in this year's State of the Union Address that 'faith-based schools' were 'disappearing at an alarming rate in many of America's inner cities'. US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has called them 'treasures' in decline.

Nationwide enrolment has fallen by a figure close to 400,000. Schools such as the ailing St Monica School of Miami Gardens in Florida are on life support. A loss in enrolment numbers inevitably drives up tuition costs. Schools contract or close altogether.

Dioceses have had to tempt partnerships between the private and public sector to keep schools afloat. But receiving tax payer dollars comes at a cost: a removal of religious instruction from the curriculum. Catholic America is being impoverished at its roots.

Being fully aware of the Catholic retreat in school instruction, Benedict made a plea to Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America in Washington: 'do not abandon the school apostolate; indeed, renew your commitment to schools especially those in poorer areas'.

Benedict leaves a country seeking to grapple with core issues within the Catholic faith, a mirror of problems from recruitment to administrative indifference to internal abuses. The Pope will find the problems of hierarchical complicity difficult to overcome, but the moves by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops have been positive. The work has at least started. Let it now be finished.

Bowling for Boris

2008-04-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

The London Mayoral races are fast approaching. A previously unassailable 'Red' Ken Livingstone is looking shaky. His contender, that most amusing, affable of clowns, former Spectator editor and conservative member for Henley, is Boris Johnson. A primer is provided at Counterpunch, 24 April 2008:

Bowling for Boris: The Tories, Red Ken and the London Mayoral Race

By Binoy Kampmark

Cleverness in London, according to Jack Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, was pervasive. Such a surfeit of cleverness bored him to tears. What he would have given, he exclaimed, for a fool. In the context of London mayoral politics, we have been privileged to witness several of the latter at play. Of the 10 mayoral candidates, there is one notable challenger to the incumbent: the Tory Member for Henley and former editor of the conservative Spectator, Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives, after a lengthy stint as Britain’s perennial disaster show, now look like they might snatch London on May 1. After the courtships of former BBC head, Greg Dyke and the DJ Mike Read ended quite calamitously (both refused to run), the Tories turned to the blonde beast from Henley.

Watching Johnson in his political career has made other scripts tedious. Never has political seppuku looked more appealing, let alone comedic. If Michael Foot was once described as the walking obituary of the British Labour party, then Boris might be considered the destructive, error-prone Tory jester, the smiling face of suicidal conservatism.

Struggling sitcoms would do well to introduce his bumbling charm onto the set to boost flagging ratings. Politics itself, long given to machine factories that churn out stodgy slogans and clichés from doctrinaire PR pundits, can certainly make use of the blonde beast from Henley. He may not win, but he will entertain.

And he has a fine record of it. His popularity skyrocketed with appearances on the quiz show Have I Got News for You. He has also exhibited an unfailing tendency to be caught with his pants down. The more prominent a position on the front bench of his party, the more likely he is to part with his pants at any given moment. Witness, for instance, his infidelities with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt. While Johnson described the allegations as ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’, Wyatt disagreed.

His writings, much like his conduct, have a tendency to self-detonate. They are laced with amusing observations, many completely off the mark. Arguments often misfire, and Boris often finds himself caught within his own verbal pincer movement. A particularly amusing one is his belief that Europe needs some king of Pax Romana to be re-introduced. Like many Tories, he can’t quite understand how Europe can be united politically, yet be different culturally. But, he assures Londoners, he is one of them, a culturally sentient ‘one-man melting pot’.

BJ’s opponent is ‘Red’ Ken Livingston, who has not lost an election in 25 years. Red Ken has done a spectacular job of making everybody from indignant Muslims in Bengali-run Brick Lane to CEOs in the business district back him. Courting both Allah and reactionary media vultures in an intense two-timing affair is something Johnson will find hard to match.

Having engaged in his fair share of buffoonery, an act that entirely fooled Tony Blair into initially supporting him, Livingstone’s staying power has proven miraculous. Having made the famous London subway extortionate in pricing with a peculiarly named ‘Oyster’ card (What next – a barnacle? A tortoise?), the coffers of the mayor’s office must look like El Dorado.

Livingstone has also imposed a congestion charge which has done little to unblock the streets of a clogged London. The heaving city continues to grow and choke, and the London Tube is groaning under the pressure of more commuters. They, as the shortest visit to the city will show, pay the highest fares in Europe.

In spite of all of this, Livingstone’s colleagues in other metropolitan centres can only admire him. New York’s Michael Bloomberg salivated at the prospect of implementing a ‘Ken’ agenda for that city, and proposed a regressive carbon tax in New York: $8 for cars and $21 for lorries. An unimpressed state assembly in Albany rebuffed the plan this month.

The trophy cabinet is bare for the Tories, and Boris has become their lead striker hoping to propel them to victory. If they can’t have No. 10, they can at least control the capital. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has opposed Ken Livingstone for years, is now spotted by his side at campaigning functions.

Johnson the political jester can’t believe his luck. He has even suggested the odd sound policy: phasing out the use of hideous ‘bendy buses’. But will have to do better than that. More police, or an ‘interactive bus tracking’ system will hardly solve London’s ills. Wilde would have been proud.

Faith Swapping in America

2008-04-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Changing faiths is a growing feature of America's religious landscape. The figures of a study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life make interesting reading. More at Finland's Ovi Magazine, 23 April, 2008:

Faith Swapping: Religion in America

By Binoy Kampmark

Americans are not only changing jobs, changing locations, changing spouses, but they’re also changing religions on a regular basis.Luis E. Figo, Director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 26 February 2008.

An online Library of Congress exhibition makes the observation that ‘a religious people rose in rebellion against Great Britain in 1776’. Religion, a section of that same exhibition continues, offered ‘a moral sanction for opposition to the British – an assurance to the average American that revolution was justified in the sight of God.’

In more recent years, the intensity of the debate on religion in American life has hardly diminished. To an incoming board member of the conservative Heritage Foundation, William E Simon Jr., the United States of 2000 was confused about answering a key question: ‘Does America really need religion?’ (26 September 2000).

Intoning in that familiar doomsday vein of moral atrophy, Simon suggested that America’s religious centre was not holding. The nation was prospering, but it was also in spiritual decline. The concerns of the Heritage Foundation were answered by a barely victorious George W. Bush, Jr., who won (some claim stole) the Presidential elections that year on the back of strong evangelical support.

What are we to make then of the findings in the recent survey of religious orientation in the US conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life? The survey (out 25 February), comprising 35,000 respondents, aged 18 and upwards, has thrown up a few surprises on this assemblage of religious peoples. Some of them will provide scant comfort for commentators.

For one thing, the U.S. finds itself on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country, with current numbers hovering around 51.3 percent. A column from the Boston Globe (26 February 2008) by Michael Paulson does little to hide the shock. ‘The United States, founded by dissident Protestants seeking religious freedom, is on the verge of becoming a nation in which Protestants are only a minority.’

This may bear out an old argument suggested by some religious scholars (Steve Bruce, for one, in A House Divided (1990)): that Protestantism’s democratic pluralism has tended to undermine its influence. Some groups try to resist the trend - the strong-faith base of the evangelical churches continues to hold strong at 26.3 percent. The evangelicals may be losing political influence, but they are not necessarily losing numbers.

Just to add more confusion to the debate and muddle the argument as to why Protestantism might be its own worse enemy is the recent changes in America’s Catholic following. The Catholic base, ostensibly less pluralistic, has also been far from immune. Its losses have been made up in part by immigration – the growth of America’s Hispanic population has seen to that.

Christian followers need have no worry as to rise of rival religions. Amongst non-Christian religions (numbering 4.7 percent of the sample), Jewry accounts for 1.7 percent, Buddhists come in at 0.7 percent, and Muslims register a negligible 0.6 percent.

These figures from the Pew Forum do little to suggest an overall flight from religious persuasion. They rather suggest a flight between religions. 44 percent of adults have switched religious affiliation, moved from having no affiliation with any religion to having some affiliation with a particular faith, ‘or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.’ 28 percent of respondents left the faith in which they were raised in favour a different belief system. Such mobility has prompted Louis E. Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, to call American religion a thriving ‘marketplace’, both ‘dynamic’ and ‘competitive.’ In this movement, institutional religion, rather than religion per se, is the notable casualty.

The loss of interest in institutional religion fits well with the initial Christianizing of North America by English settlers. The Puritan Separatists in New Plymouth called for a de-centering of religious authority. A key reason why religious migrants found a home in the Americas was no less than to flee the idea of institutionalized faith and governance. Institutions had, after all, been responsible for their persecution.

Another change the survey reveals is the increased number of individuals not affiliated with any particular faith (something in the order of 16.1 percent), though such a figure is deceptive. Of these, 1.6 percent of the sample describe themselves as atheist, while the group ‘nothing in particular’ comes in at 12.1 percent. Such a figure is hardly a sign of rampant secularization – America remains sui generis for being both highly industrialized and deeply religious.

The truth borne out in the Pew survey is that religion, notably those of Christian faith, is alive and well in America. It may be a ‘marketplace’, but its hold is no less convincing. The furniture may have changed places, but the house of religion appears immoveable.

An Olympian Abolition

2008-04-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, dear readers, it is time to consider getting rid of that farce we call the Olympics. A boycott is insufficient, doing little to stem the very system that has given us everything from the Olympic (read Aryan) Torch to the modern, steroid-filled athlete. More, as ever, at Online Opinion, 15 April, 2008:

Boycott or Abolition? The Politics Behind the Beijing Olympiad

By Binoy Kampmark

They came out in their droves in San Francisco to disrupt the running of the Olympic Torch last Wednesday, just as they did in Paris and London. Some locals desired a different approach from those disruptive Londoners and Parisians - they would show “respect” to the Chinese organisers of the games and the spirit of the Olympics. The pro-Tibetan marchers begged to differ.

One of America’s most liberal cities, again betraying a dearth of clear thinking among Olympic officials, was hardly the best venue to stage the run. The route had to be re-organised at short notice, and the times and distances of the harassed trotters halved.

The premise of the pro-Tibet protesters is sound enough, even if their gestures may be as futile as those of the pyromaniacal Peregrinus Proteus. According to Lucian, this Roman suspect of parricide immolated himself, in protest, at the AD165 games. Showing how history has, as Mark Twain reminds us, a rhyming effect, Tibetan monks promise to do the same at Beijing.

The most telling crimes, both cultural and political, have taken place in Tibet. With Beijing’s blessings, Han Chinese have deluged the country, throttling it with a modernisation program that is revolutionary in its goals: abolishing feudalism, and the singular role of Buddhism.

Beijing detests political dissent, and the monks resemble, in the eyes of the authorities, rebellious foot soldiers. The Dalai Lama is a political exile seen to be fomenting revolution. “The self-proclaimed spiritual leader has obviously forgotten his identity, abused his religion and played too much politics,” suggested Xinhua (March 31), China’s official news agency.

To deny China a chance at putting on such an event without disruption may be doing them a disservice - after all, numerous other less than noble regimes got there first, often without demur. But the issue here should be less about a boycott, or even protest, than abolition. The case for finally ending this monumental charade can be done by looking at what the Olympics is not.

It is certainly not a democratising, let alone humanitarian venture. The seed of this error can be pointed to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern doctrine of “Olympism”. It makes one ill to read a description of what “Olympism” is by University of Sheffield sociologist Maurice Roche, for him, an effort to “elevate sport into the leading edge of a broader idealistic and universalistic humanitarian mission in the modern world.”

The democratising ballast of Olympian heroics received a boost after the Seoul Games of 1988. This is at least what some authors would like you to think. According to one study in the Third World Quarterly (2004) by David Black and Shona Bezanson, the Olympics forced the regime to “confront basic questions of political development which were not initially on its own near-term agenda”. A curious and scrutinising world press and the fears of a “loss of face” in having the games forfeited, propelled change.

The authors commit a cardinal error in confusing cause and effect. Sport is not in itself a catalyst for change. To suggest that the Olympics somehow turned authoritarians into democrats is disingenuous and historically shallow.

On the contrary, there is much to suggest that global sporting organisations like the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee are clay-footed colossi resistant to change. Consider, for instance, the case of former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was Generalissimo Franco’s government secretary for sports in 1966.

The bargaining between the IOC with Beijing officials which saw some promises of “social change” was barely credible. It bore some resemblance to the discussions between sporting bureaucrats on whether they would participate in the Berlin games of 1936. The American Athletic Union, riled by the exclusion of Jewish athletes from the German team, contemplated a boycott. But the then president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, extracted a meek promise from his German counterparts that all qualified athletes would be allowed to participate.

The Olympiad is certainly not for the host country’s poor. Notoriously, staging the Olympics reverses the fortunes of the impoverished while proclaiming the reverse. Seeing the London campaign for 2012, one might have confused the Olympics for Abraham Lincoln’s Freedmen’s Bureau of Southern reconstruction. In truth, a promise of the next games is a clarion call for the bulldozer and the lock-up cell.

Public housing was, as David Zirin has pointed out in Counterpunch, demolished in Atlanta. Sydney, being no exception, saw the homeless removed from within a certain radius of the city environs. Four years later, Athens bore witness to a similar program of exile and eradication. The toiling poor and the aesthetic of sporting prowess tend to be incompatible.

The games are certainly not for the peaceful. In recent memory, the Olympiads of Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) come to mind, both taking place in the shadow of proxy wars. But the Cold War was but one era of sporting hypocrisies, where ideological titans used athletes as cultural and political muscle. The 1904 games in St Louis were resonant with the imperial tones of Manifest Destiny. A particularly brutal war was being waged in the Philippines while “primitives” were shown in sporting events as markedly inferior to their Caucasian counterparts. Four years later, France crushed Vietnamese protests even as the London Olympics were taking place.

The Olympics is invariably tainted. Holding it is usually a bad omen, much like Miss Marple’s presence in a quiet English village. Viewers and readers of the sleuth’s exploits know that a crime has taken place, or is about to take place. Far from being an occasion for uplift, the games provide an occasion for mourning.

Why Sport is Politics

2008-04-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

Sporting legends tend to assume that skills on the field are transferrable. Prowess in the pool or on the track often leads to endless social commentary and contracts with Channel 9 .

Lisa Forrest's Boycott: The Story Behind Australia's Controversial Involvement in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, has its faults, though it is surprisingly well written. Forrest is excellent when she compiles the materials (interviews surrounding the reasons for Australian participation in 1980), disagreeable when she slides into sporting idolatry. In her worship of fellow athletes, she forgets, even denies, how sports is so often a political venture, tied up with the apparatus of state. The Olympics, a highly distasteful interlude that takes place every four years, is one such event, amongst others.

A survey of Forrest's views, and the prospects of a boycott of the Beijing Games, is provided on the ABC Website, originally from the New Matilda. I hasten to add that the avenue of the 1936 Games - Berlin - has replaced an unfortunate 'Munich', which devilishly wormed its way through a misprint in the original:

Pawn in the Games

By Binoy Kampmark

According to Lisa Forrest's recently published Boycott, the Australian Olympic Federation's refusal to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 was a sound one. Forrest, who was a tender 16 at the time, was Australia's swimming captain.

Her views provide a neat starter for discussions about a potential boycott of the Beijing Olympics - something she, and many in the sporting fraternity, would rather not see. Even Malcolm Fraser, who insisted on an Australian boycott of the Moscow Games, has recanted his position.

Despite Australia's reluctance to even consider a boycott in response to China's brutal repression in Tibet, there is a growing international movement in favour of doing so. French President Nicolas Sarkozy got things going with his suggestion that the boycott option be put on the table. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has suggested targeting the opening ceremony.

Forrest's Boycott is a morality tale, in which, in David Marr's words, the "Cold War meets a kid from Cromer - and she wins." With the Eastern Bloc's steroid-fed superstars, it was hard to avoid the fact that political ambition and sporting prowess were one and the same. But for Forrest, the debate about boycotting the Moscow Olympics over the USSR's actions in Afghanistan was beside the point.

If one can see how ineffectual it was then, she may have a point. Ditto, it follows, the Los Angeles Games of 1984 in the aftermath of US policies against Grenada. The Olympic spirit of peace was duly given its marching orders, but Forrest could still see herself and her fellow athletes as "anti-establishment" heroes who "were on a crusade to save the Olympics".

The underlining premise of Forrest's position is that sport repels, not attracts, political engagement. It should take place in an independent space. But sporting representatives, especially Olympians, are for better or worse pawns in broader political and social conflict. At best, they receive, as Richard Hinds points out, "government hand-outs for training facilities, travel and medal-winning incentive schemes." Far from being rebellious, they are scrupulously conformist; well-groomed show ponies.

Forrest's tunnel-visioned appraisal of sport is a hermetic delusion. With this, she shares common ground with John Howard, who tended to see sport and politics as distinctly independent fields of endeavour. When the Whitlam Government intervened to prevent an Australian cricket tour of South Africa, the young backbencher Howard made an indignant parliamentary speech, saying he was greatly "disappointed" at the cancellation. "Preventing cricket contests" would do little to break down apartheid.

Things got a bit muddled with the Howard government's refusal to allow Australian cricketers to travel to Zimbabwe for a one-day tournament in 2007. "The Mugabe regime," Howard argued, was "behaving like the Gestapo towards its political opponents". To let the tour go ahead would have provided "an enormous boost to this grubby dictator". For Howard, sport in Mugabe's Zimbabwe was of a different moral order to sport in apartheid-era South Africa.

The Berlin games of 1936 - when, it could be argued, the current Olympic format was designed - was a spectacle of totalitarian self-advertising. The parading sporting figures we see every four years follow a modified version of the programmes developed at that Olympics - a rehearsed, fascist political routine, a testament to humanity's love of a good parade.

As Richard Mandell suggests in a work on those games, international athletes, from Americans to Indians, became instruments of a Nazi spectacle of the body beautiful. Initial suggestions of a boycott over the exclusion of Jewish athletes were quashed.

The Beijing Olympics promises to be yet another political bonanza, equipped with one reminder from 1936: a huge 16-mile axial design by Albert Speer Jr linking the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the Olympic Park. The son of the Third Reich's most resourceful architect was resigned: "The comparisons with my father are unfortunately unavoidable."

The Chinese want the Olympics for reasons of image; others, for reasons of reform. Some think that seeing hulking pieces of flesh sweating on a track or lithely gliding through a pool will democratise China, or at the very least "open it up". This view is as absurd as the claim that cricket "civilised" the colonies by adding grace, poise and the wardrobe of a gentleman to the "dark races".

On the other hand, a measured boycott in the same vein as that used against South Africa may have more potency. But Australia's love for the Olympic binge is such that our participation is assured, irrespective of political circumstances.

Australia's taut, determined athletes, clad in their new speed suits, are eager for battle. Besides, breaking the bones of a Tibetan monk is evidently less heinous than confiscating the farmlands of white Zimbabweans.

If the Olympic sporting fraternity are rebellious, as Forrest claims, they will stay home. Beijing, through its actions, has conceded that politics and sport - far from being mutually exclusive - are often joined at the hip. "The recent riots in Lhasa and other parts of the country," said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, "were aimed at undermining the upcoming Beijing Olympics."

We can only hope so.

When the Free Market Failed

2008-04-10T01:16:00.001-07:00

Unprincipled, narrow, and barely forgivable, the neo-liberal agenda is gradually collapsing. But not totally. These new apostates, excited as they are by market interventions they previously eschewed, are following a predictable path: protecting the least vulnerable of them all. So, bad bargains are being bolstered, and speculative deals allowed to stand. The US Federal Reserve has, in effect, become a creditor to a failed enterprise. Ditto, Gordon Brown's government regarding Northern Rock. For more, see Counterpunch, 27 March 2008:

Socialism for the Rich! Free Market Apostates

By Binoy Kampmark

We have heard it for some time now: the market is divine, lending its magical corrective qualities to sort out the good from the bad. A character portrait of George Bush by a former teacher of his, Professor Yoshi Tsurumi (1 March 2004), recalled a pupil's suspicion of such monitoring bodies as the Federal Trade Commission and Securities Exchange Commission. These bodies were 'unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition".' The New Deal receive characteristic opprobrium - it was 'socialism'. As for poverty: it was the simple result of a poor work ethic.

Someone supposedly more qualified to assess the levers of the market, Alan Greenspan, added a few pointers to this bald-faced view of market forces. In the late 1990s, when the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management was registering losses in the billions, Greenspan, as Federal Reserve chairman, attempted to initiate a rescue package that would still keep the free marketeers happy. After all, the economy would, in time, re-order itself.

But not even Greenspan was willing to let things float. As he put it in his testimony to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (1 October, 1998), the Federal Reserve had taken some measures to facilitate 'private-sector refinancing' of LTCM. With characteristic opaqueness, he argued that the Reserve's measures 'were designed solely to enhance the probability of an orderly private-sector readjustment, not to dictate the path that adjustment would take.' Despite some tinkering, free-market orthodoxy would remain.

As Professor of political economy at Harvard, Benjamin M. Friedman notes (New York Review of Books, 20 March) various attempts at regulating heated economic activity in this decade were rebuffed. The US Treasury suggestion in 2001 that subprime lenders subject themselves to monitoring, with a 'best practices' code, and the Department of Housing and Urban Developments attempt to control real estate transactions, all came to nought.

A suspicion of regulating agencies on the part of the Bush administration (by no means the only one) and a system of buccaneering capitalism has led to one sad truth: the private sector is inviolable when it produces; and a needy cripple when it doesn't. When it performs, there is a rush to praise executives and line their wallets they made the right decisions, and did the company good. Company profits are a result of business acumen, the genius of market capitalism.

When the company fails, we must all fail with it. Corporate success is the success of the few; corporate failure, a collective one. This is the underlying message of salvaging measures by governments and their regulatory bodies. The global subprime crisis has triggered bailout strategies across several countries. This suggests a grand admission: the market is not magical in its self-corrective wisdom, and its harmful effects must be neutralised.

The list of free market apostates is growing. Governments, after peddling the wonders of robust competition, are now viewing it with fear, even panic. Previously feted market ideologues are either shedding their skin or going into hiding.

Consider the most recent example of apostasy: the Federal Reserve's actions regarding Bear Stearns. With the demise of the mortgage securities specialist, Ben S. Bernanke and his fellow governors decided to ditch the policy of non-interventionism. Bloomberg correspondent Craig Torres provided a précis of the action: treasury notes would effectively be swapped for 'privately issued mortgage-backed securities held by Wall Street firms' (15 March). Willem Buiter, economics professor at the London School of economics shuddered at the policy shift. This was 'socialism for the rich, which is both inefficient and morally objectionable.'

The Reserve had become creditors of the otherwise doomed enterprise. In the words of Vincent Reinhart, former director of the Division of Monetary Affairs, such actions were 're-drawing the relationship of the Federal reserve with the rest of the financial system' (15 March).

In Britain, Gordon Brown, with Chancellor Alistair Darling at the helm of the Exchequer, took a pseudo-socialist path An ailing Northern Rock, the Newcastle-based lender, has been, for all intents and purposes, nationalised. Offers by such giants as Virgin were dismissed as providing insufficient 'value for money to the taxpayer' (BBC News, 17 February).

Darling attempted to minimise the significance of the move, hoping to hide the British government's new love for market control. 'The bank will be run at arm's length and on a commercial basis.' With inverted logic, the protection of Northern Rock has now become a collective duty tax payers are to foot the bill of failed private speculations because it's in their best interest to do so.

Some banks on the continent have faced similar problems, with now familar government responses. The German banking system suffered the jitters last summer when IKB Deutsche Industriebank fell on the sword of American subprime speculation. A third bailout of the dying beast was assured in February this year by German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück. While private banks were expected to foot some of the bill, the government would provide two-thirds of the $2.2 billion dollars. The list of bank welfare recipients continues to grow.

The consequences of such bailouts are gradually coming to the fore. The Federal Reserve is finding its resources depleted. Numerous governments, despite a previously pathological aversion to regulation, are suddenly nervous by unfettered competition. While the Free Market deity is far from dead, it is expiring.

Greenspan, amidst the economic carnage, is unrepentant. Writing in his memoir The Age of Turbulence, he argues that 'the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.' Given the current crisis, with a shrinking base of homeowners, Greenspan may have been a little too optimistic. For that, we are left with a socialism tailored for the wealthy.

John McCain and the Democrats

2008-03-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

Competition in politics has its merits, even if conducted between those on the same side. The Democrats risk committing political suicide, something they are not averse to doing. But the Republicans are not necessarily out of the woods on this one. A piece from Counterpunch, 7 March 2008, discusses the angles:

When Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats

By Binoy Kampmark

This primary election cycle is a story of phases. John McCain stumbled through them. From a status of certain nominee, he teetered towards a certain cash-strapped defeat. He then stormed back, pushing Mike Huckabee aside, and clinching the necessary delegates. All this, despite the devotees of McCain-hating gathering on the sidelines with purpose.

Hillary Clinton has undergone a similar revival. Victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island verify the only thing that is certain: the more the pundits punt for a candidate, defeat is bound to be around the corner. Obama still has his nose, despite being bloodied, in front. Hillary’s victory in terms of delegate numbers is not merely mathematically improbable, but even impossible.

With such a scenario, Clinton can only hope for an anti-democratic insurrection, something which the Democrats may not be averse to providing. Clinton now shifts the argument to that of the experienced struggler. The Clinton turn is again at play. Bill may have taken a few steps back in promoting his wife, but he continues to hover.

Hillary does not have the emotional switch her husband does. Bill could, and still drops a tear on cue, apologizing when the political stage demands it. Such emotional turns helped Hillary in the initial phases, the tears, the feelings, that sense of being ‘one of them’. But her approach now is one of focused belligerence: battle and mettle.

She has also found weaknesses in Obama’s stratospheric rhetoric. Obama looked somewhat shakier in the latest primaries, even if he did not have much reason to. He recoiled at Clinton’s rhetoric on his position on NAFTA. He also proved less aggressive on Clinton’s weak spots – health care, the notorious welfare ‘reform’ and throwing the effects of free-trade back at the Clinton camp. The exit polls in Ohio, and to a certain extent Texas and Rhode Island suggest that voting patterns may be returning to those of February 5.

All this also points to another thing. The main argument against the Democratic contest between Obama and Hillary is this: that a sparring show is somehow debilitating to unity in the face of a formidable opponent. Maureen Dowd (March 5, NYT), for instance, makes the case that the Democrats are engaged in the ultimate nightmare scenario for the voter: identity politics. ‘All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.’ Misogyny does battle with race – is America, she laments, going to the polls on whether it is less racist or misogynist?

The Democrats will bleed themselves – Denver will come to resemble Chicago in 1968. The Republicans, revived and restored, will take the scraps away from an immolated opponent.

This negative, seemingly self-destructive scenario may well happen, but it occludes two things. In the first instance, the Republicans won’t necessarily know whom to target. Presidential strategies demand presidential opponents, but we don’t have the line-up. The Democrats might be confused and unable to see through the glass darkly, but the Republicans will be even less clear. Unable to train their guns on a suitable candidate, the GOP will have to do something it has struggled to since 2006 – look appealing. McCain faces his own battle on that score.

Then, there is this scenario: Overwhelming, saturating attention will be focused on the Democratic camp. For the first time in years, the Democrats will seem interesting. The debate between Clinton and Obama will rarely straddle Olympian heights, and Clinton will continue to gnaw at her opponents entrails. The truth is, they have a lot to talk about, and Americans will listen.

Publicity is the oxygen that drives the political machine. With the Democrats constantly featuring, McCain may be out on his ear. He will have to work on keeping his puzzled party in strict GOP rank-and-file. He will also have to keep in the limelight, and positively. The Democrats may be having a dragging domestic, but the Republicans under Bush exited the conversation on American politics years ago.

Many voters in November, notwithstanding McCain’s reconciliatory credentials, will not forget which party pushed America into the economic and military purgatory it now finds itself in. And a Mesopotamian purgatory of 100 years is quite a stint, whichever side of politics you come from.

Drinking in Australia: Kevin Rudd and Booze

2008-03-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

The issue of drinking in the Antipodes rears its ugly head yet again. A Labor Government, under the stewardship of a social conservative, is tackling 'binge drinking.' Comments on this article miss the point (all too predictably), and these creatures tend to drive one to drink. We can only thank them for that. For more on what Australians call 'goon', delusional anti-drinking laws, and the otherwise lamentable Hills Hoist, go to New Matilda, 13 March, 2008:

Kevin's Angels

By Binoy Kampmark

Government schemes to discourage excessive drinking are doomed before they start. They consist of a grand misreading of society, a reactionary hoodwinking. A battle on binge drinking comes unsettlingly close to that of a war on "drugs" and "terror' - it gives a tactic a poor conceptual padding, nothing more. Abstractions suddenly assume a concrete form and we have the enemy in our sights.

It is in this vein we find Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's socially conservative campaign against the errant drinkers of Australia. They are many: the Prime Minister cites a figure of 168,000 Australians between the ages of 12 and 17. Heath Minister Nicola Roxon has this to say about heavy drinking: "It's hurting our kids, it's hurting our communities, but it's also hurting our hospitals."

Rudd suggests terrorising binge drinkers into temperate submission. Underline brain damage, he argues. Emphasise the destructive effects of alcohol in the manner of AIDS advertisements that used the motif of the Grim Reaper in the 1980s. Stop grants to sporting organisations responsible for inciting excessive drinking. Through an attack of moral apoplexy, the Rudd Government will turn Australia into angels of temperance.

All this is predicated on one assumption: liquor is bad. Good and healthy beings are imperative in Rudd's Australia. We are to treat our bodies as ecosystems: the right balances of fluids, the right foods, the immaculate diet. We are not merely going to clean the planet, we are going to clean ourselves. News reports featuring Rudd's announcement focused on intoxicated, staggering, well-dressed youngsters.

The binger issues from the drinking process. A corrected process, a revised approach to drinking, is what will neuter the binging. A suggestion then for an anti-binge campaign that is less like an anti-terrorist warning and more like a culture course: put the food back into drinking.

Drinking, accompanied by food, couples liquor with cuisine. Drunkenness is delayed, and might even be discouraged. Drinking ceases to be a ritual whose object is annihilative inebriation. Many an Australian function, notably those with young drinkers, tends to place booze over tucker. Liquor is king; food is the stuff for sissies. Unlined stomachs receive an inevitable pummeling.

This attitude is not helped by Australia's ill-mannered love of segregating food and drink of the stronger kind. Supermarkets have everything bar one thing: alcohol. The place to get it is the ‘bottle shop'. Liquor, like sex, persists in being seen as the forbidden and the unclean. The solution: national culinary de-segregation. Do, as many European nations do so well: place the liquor alongside food. If nothing else, this encourages consumers to accept that drinking takes place alongside food.

Then, there is the nature of the drink itself. The world of liquor is dominated by a sturdy, immutable hierarchy. Brandy, as the good doctor Samuel Johnson argued, was the stuff heroes drank. The humble beer hovers at the bottom. In Australia, the hierarchy is reversed. Heroics are to be found in consuming beers with memorable names but less than memorable tastes: VB, XXXX. Batsman David Boon is the eponymous figure of swilling, famously consuming 52 beers on a flight from Australia to England.

Young drinking Australians are, relative to Johnson's heroic consumers, lumpen-proletariat. They drink what is most readily available. Enter the plonk, or wine which by any other name would taste as foul. This ubiquitous demon exerts its devilish hold on the young drinking mind.

Plonk has its aesthetic properties. The Hills Hoist's ugliness has been alleviated somewhat by decorative bladder packs of plonk, or "goon", that rest on its turning spikes. (In colloquial speech, this is called The Wheel of Goon.) Such behaviour, accompanied by the stresses of peer pressure, can only end in badly. While the teenager and student will gravitate to the lowest drinking denominator, they should at least be told about options.

These options might consist of a dip into John Arlott's old columns on wine, which were, in many ways, even finer than his cricket pieces. They gather dust in old library collections, but should be made readily available for the enterprising drinker. For the modern student, a speedy run through a Jancis Robinson program might suffice. These will no doubt be dismissed by some as snobbish Old World panaceas, but an enlightened drinking public is far from a bad thing. Poison can be taken in a learned way.

Rudd positions himself as a pragmatic micro-manager. But in extending his ideas to such things as drinking, he risks extending controls to the uncontrollable. Australia's drinking culture has never initiated children into moderate drink, which is where the problem stops and starts. Establishments should not be discouraged from serving excessive drink to youngsters - they should merely be encouraged to serve drink in a particular way. Liquor might be a poison, but it is a manageable one.

Punishing Microsoft

2008-03-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has done little to abide by an order made against it by the EU Competition Commission in March 2004. While the punishment for the software giant's anti-competitive behaviour is a pittance, its impact may not be. Counterpunch has more:

Hubris and Nemesis: Microsoft and the EU

'In his day,' wrote Ralph Nader and James Love in Information Policy Notes (1998), 'John D. Rockefeller tried to monopolize oil production, refining and distribution.' Alcoa had a go at cornering aluminum manufacturing. AT&T, with its focus on local and long distance communications, sought to control the telephone handset market and devices compatible with telephone lines.

As the authors go on to point out, the ambitions of this modern Dutch East India Company pale in comparison to those of its predecessors, though the anti-trust format remains the same. Microsoft's strategy is nothing less than global, a control of all software operating systems associated with electronic commerce. But the computer giant was not just concerned with controlling the associated technologies relating to transmission. It wanted to control the content itself.

Its means of doing so have been classic violations of anti-trust practices. Microsoft tends to work outside the barriers of competition law with the dedication of a vicious mercantilist. Rival products are countered with a huge research and development base that inevitably leads to the introduction of alternatives which are often free. The catch is the way an entire system is packaged. New features are bundled together with the Windows or Office systems.

Microsoft's behavior has been partially successful. It faced a legal hurdle in a judgment by US District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in 2000 charging it with 'predatory' actions which had 'trammeled the competitive process'. It was a decision the US Appeals Court upheld in part in June the following year. But a key feature of the trial judge's previous ruling - that Microsoft be broken into two separate entities - was thrown out on appeal as 'tainted'. The Clinton administration found the judge's remedy attractive, but the succeeding Bush administration had little time for corporate punishment.

The rationale of the Department of Justice in 2001 was typical: uncontrollable corporate behavior was a good thing for the American consumer. By shortening court proceedings and refusing to break up the giant, the government was protecting US citizens. It was as if Bill Gates had been appointed Attorney-General: after all, a strong Microsoft, he always claimed, was good for customers. In an environment that ultimately led to the demise of Enron, Microsoft was let off the hook.

Three years after conquering the White House, an emboldened Microsoft found itself in the quagmire of European competition laws. The EU has been rather more diligent than its American counterparts in monitoring the computer giant's indiscretions in the marketplace. No less than five years had gone into an investigation of the company.

The devil, as ever, lay in the operating system. The Commission subsequently ordered Microsoft in March 24 2004 to divulge programming codes to rivals in the server market. The aim of this move was simple enough: to give the products of rivals 'full interoperability' with computers running Windows. Microsoft was also given 90 days to make the European version of its Windows operating system to PC makers without the add-on features of media player. A fine of $600 million was also imposed.

Aghast, Microsoft officials sought a way that would flout the competition verdict while still giving the impression it was law-abiding. It refused to heed the EU's previous judgment in 2004 by keeping the prices of disclosing interoperability information high. The EU response earlier this week was uncompromising: a $1.35 billion fine for a period between 2004 and 2007. Only in October 2007, when Microsoft offered a world wide patent license for 0.4 per cent of a licensee's revenue and interoperability information for a flat fee of $15,000, could it be said to have complied with the 2004 ruling.

Microsoft, assures the Competition commissioner Neelie Kroes (nicknamed 'Steelie') tells us, is the only company in 50 years of European Competition policy to be fined for not complying with an antitrust verdict. The total fines imposed on Microsoft so far amount to something in the order of $2.5 billion.

These may only be pinpricks to the bank balance of Microsoft's ongoing concern (a mere two weeks cash flow), but they demonstrate a necessary resolve by governments against corporate unaccountability. Neo-liberal free marketers have thankfully made themselves scarce on this one. 'Steelie' Kroes may be overly optimistic if she thinks that this will close 'a dark chapter in Microsoft's record of non-compliance.' There is also much to be done as to what constitutes appropriate pricing for patent licenses. But at least the regulators are trying.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

2008-03-06T19:41:00.000-08:00

William F. Buckley, Jr. died on 27 February. A measure of his impact on American conservatism and his angry politics, is discussed in a March issue of the New Matilda:

Death of an Old Guard

By Binoy Kampmark

The "scourge of liberalism", as the American historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr once called him, is dead. According to accounts, William F Buckley Jr died in his study in Stamford, Connecticut on 27 February. As one of America's best known conservative commentators, Buckley was prolific: an editor for almost half a century and a writer of both political tracts and novels.

Buckley's writings had greatest effect in the political field. He ruminated over a style of conservatism that fed into the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater's defeat to Lyndon Johnson did little to deter Buckley. The National Review magazine, which he founded in 1955, became the avenue of assault on liberalism in America. His column 'On the Right' offered readers a punchy, polemical style which led to its national syndication in 1962. In 1966, he stepped further into the national limelight with Firing Line, a television program featuring gladiatorial contests between conservatives and liberals.

Buckley never quite departed from the anti-liberal manifesto that became God and Man at Yale. A fresh but angry graduate of Yale University, he penned a philosophy on the assassination of the institution at the mercy of liberal, secular ideologues. The roots of his matricide lay in a faith he had nourished since his days in a Jesuit-run boarding school in Old Windsor in the 1930s. His sense of elitism and moral outrage were further developed as a member of Yale's Skull and Bones Society, to which he was admitted in 1950.

Yale might as well have been his template for what America was becoming, in his eyes: a country of eroding liberties and declining faith. Growing government, with rising public expenditure, and the brooding shadow of President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, did much to excite his anger. Conversations with the economist Milton Friedman over skiing ventures in Alta, Utah would have reinforced his core beliefs: social welfare is ill-fare; God is a political minimalist; and grand international schemes such as the United Nations were corrupt ventures doomed to failure.

Exiling God from society was a tendency he shunned, and he spent most of his life bringing faith and small government back from political exile. The Reagan coalition of the 1980s, with its noisy evangelicals, trenchant individualists, and bellicose nationalists, did much to satisfy Buckley's vision. Reagan, in turn, had many a good thing to say about Buckley, calling him a "clipboard-bearing Galahad". President George Bush Jr could do little to improve on that, suggesting that Buckley had been one of the "finest writers and thinkers" in the US.

A stint in the Central Intelligence Service, working directly under Howard Hunt, did much to engender the character of Blackford Oakes, the protagonist of Buckley's spy novel series. Oakes was a poor man's James Bond - an Ivy-League response to Oxbridge espionage prowess. Buckley himself was something of a downsized Ian Fleming. Still, a novel such as Stained Glass, featuring the drama between the German politician Count Alex Wintergrin and Oakes, offers readers more than just a passing thrill.

His politics tended to be the politics of meanness, a pugilistic approach that emphasised the individual valour of the chequebook. His criticism of the toiling poor came from a luxury measured by five boats, an extensive wine cellar and regular ski trips to Switzerland. The growing poor of America were deaf to his taunts, even as the New Deal's programs were being dismantled like a child's Lego set. Welfare recipients, as he suggested in his policy platform for the 1965 mayoral elections in New York, would be banished from the city's environs.

Some fellow conservatives did not have the luxury of being deaf to his politics. The Russian born émigré Ayn Rand was abused and hounded after the publication her weighty Atlas Shrugged. Buckley joined such observers as Whittaker Chambers in giving the book a pasting through the conduit of the National Review. (Chamber's review was re-run on 5 January 2005 in a 50th anniversary issue of the magazine.)

Despite excoriating Rand and savaging his long-time rival of the left, the novelist and critic Gore Vidal, Buckley could be generous. He fostered an army of protégés, not all of the same political inclination. One of them, Joan Didion, would, once leaving National Review, contribute to the New York Review of Books - a publication usually less than sympathetic with the belligerent crankiness of Buckley's.

He could also surprise commentators with the odd swerve on policy: he would one day defend Jim Crow segregation in the South as justifiable, but drop it a decade later. He also supported the decriminalistion of marijuana during the Reagan Administration's 'war on drugs'; smoking it may have been harmful, he surmised, but it hardly deserved a jail sentence.

To see Buckley in action was to see a very distinct American at work: making money in an environment freed of government constraint, achieving power and worshipping God were all fine, even patriotic, attributes.

The 'Sermon on the Mount' (Matthew 6:24) makes the case that it is impossible to serve two masters - God and Mammon tend to deserve an exclusive flock. Buckley managed both pursuits rather well. As, for that matter, does America.

The Virtues and Vices of Striking

2008-02-19T05:44:00.000-08:00

The Writers' Strike in the U.S. has ended. An article in New Matilda finds many villains and few heroes.

Carboard Comedians and Fast Food Fare.
By Binoy Kampmark
"My plumber doesn't charge me every time I flush the toilet." Lew Wasserman

The writers' strike, orchestrated by the Writers Guild of America West and its sibling East wing, came to an end last week. Until it did, it supposedly crippled the American entertainment industry. The supply of humorous tender and drama had dried up (though you wouldn't necessarily know it); the only laughs to be found were on the picket line and the websites that sprung up to support the WGA.
Some might argue that the strike was a blessing. The US entertainment industry is so clogged by cardboard comedians and fast food fare that a pause was probably needed. After years in the business, David Letterman, Jay Leno and David Kimmel don't seem to be getting any better. And the actors didn't care: they voiced their solidarity with the writers, thinning out award ceremonies at a rate of knots.
Instead, the strike has given audiences a chance to take stock of what exactly is being produced. As scriptwriter Andrew Johnston commented on the BBC website in November, the strike was necessary less for royalties than a reappraisal of "the mind-numbing quality of what we are churning out."
Besides, someone like Letterman ought to know his train of supply better - he suffered a disruption when working for NBC in 1988, the last time writers decided to withhold their scripts. Desperate for jokes, this time he struck a deal with the WGA before an official resolution of hostilities. Tom Cruise's United Artists Films also struck an early deal. Producers and writers need each other.
Reality shows and repeats streamed into US living rooms in greater numbers than ever. Some projects were simply scrapped, while others - such as the prequel to the Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons - were mercifully delayed.
So what did the strike actually accomplish? For one, according to Patric M Verrone of WGAW (the western branch of WGA), the strike was designed to "win jurisdiction and establish appropriate residuals for writing in new media and on the internet". He seemed confident that writers now had "a foothold in the digital age".
On paper, the writers got less than Verrone's optimism might suggest. A minute slice of the digital revenues - a percentage payment on the distributor's gross - was promised, but the practicalities of distributing said revenue were never worked out. New wireless technologies and devices will not make obtaining the promised revenue easier.
A body like the WGA is hard to love. The Guild's requirements for admission in the first place have raised the ire of writers. And it's difficult to sympathise with the scribes who front such a homogenous industry.
But if the WGA is unlikable, the producers - fronted by their hydra-headed corporations - are the true monsters. The producers' negotiating alliance (AMPTP) baulked at the idea that writers would ask for two-thirds of a penny for every dollar spent on a DVD (as opposed to the current one-third). They proceeded to argue that the entire residual system should be abolished.
There is even an argument to be made - as Roger Wolfson did in the Huffington Post - that the companies engineered the situation in the first place, putting writers into a position in which they wanted a strike. Give the writers small beer at first instance - a mere fraction of what they might otherwise earn on future DVD sales - and save billions. This was the effect of the deal struck 20 years ago on video sales. The longer the strike, the more diffuse the resistance.
In the end, the writers held firmer than the producers would have liked. But the future in terms of how they capitalise on their gains is far from rosy.
In the meantime, we can return to the procession of thankless jokes and await the completion of Angels and Demons.

The Problem with John McCain

2008-02-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

John McCain may be the presumptive nominee for the Republican ticket in the race for the White House, but there are many conservatives who beg to differ. New Matilda (14 Feb 2008) features a piece on the breakdown of the Republican consensus:

An Ersatz Conservative

By Binoy Kampmark

"John McCain has a lot of work to do to get the Republican Party solidly behind him."Kris Kobach, Kansas GOP Chairman, 9 Feb 2008

As Republican Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain begins to look like the anointed nominee for the Republican Party, his obstacles are not necessarily growing any smaller. An entourage suffering from what has been termed "McCain-Derangement Syndrome" has begun a savage campaign against the Senator from Arizona. And they are not Democrats.

At the start of the campaign, when labels were being shed like light clothing on a summer day, one thing kept coming back to haunt McCain: he was not a "true" conservative. For David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute, who first encouraged George Bush to use the term "axis of evil", McCain is flawed, an ersatz conservative: liberal on immigration, liberal on taxation, questionable on gun rights. He may even be soft on gay rights. John Podhoretz of the conservative magazine Commentary suggests that McCain is disliked because "he is not a team player".

Right-wing darling Ann Coulter spearheads the anti-McCain drive. She prefers scattergun abuse to reflective commentary, and has intimated that she might leave the US - or at the very least vote for Hillary Clinton - if McCain is confirmed as the Republican nominee. But this pundit and self-proclaimed "angry minx", who once called Senator John Edwards a "faggot" and sees Christianity as a "fast-track program" to spiritual perfection, has made McCain-hating an article of faith.

Some of the following stems from her Young America's Foundation address earlier this month. On McCain's age: "[He] is working for the New York Times obituary." On McCain's Prisoner of War record: "I know that [he was a POW] because he mentions it more often than [John] Kerry mentions Vietnam. There were thousands of POWs and we are not going to make all of them President." Voting for Clinton would be the necessary antidote, an unnatural alliance akin to the World War II alliance between the West and Generalissimo Stalin. She would not even compare McCain to Hitter - "Hitler had a coherent tax policy."

Rush Limbaugh, shock-jock heard on no less than 600 stations across the US, is another convert of McCain-hating. To a caller on his radio show, he claimed that voting for either McCain or former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee would kill the GOP. As Super Tuesday was taking place, Limbaugh insisted that McCain had embraced the left "in order to stab the back of his own party". A letter of plea from the 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole to tone down the vitriol was rebuffed. Limbaugh could only assume that Dole had been "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.

Other radio personalities, like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, assume similar positions. McCain, claimed Ingraham on Bill O'Reilly's Fox program, conspired with "liberals" to curtail free speech, sabotage Bush's tax cuts, and offer amnesty to illegal immigrants. The GOP, laments another conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, has lost its "soul", and McCain's success so far is a symptom of it. Like Coulter, a McCain nomination would lead Beck to cross the floor. The Clintons must be amused. The very people who made Hillary-hating a pastime in the 1990s are flocking to her in droves.

Commentators can barely believe it. CNN contributor Roland S Martin could only call such tribal invective "irrational and hysterical", more than a touch "silly" . McCain's enemies do not necessarily reflect rank-and-file opinion within the GOP - a Pew Poll suggests that McCain's approval lies at a healthy 72 percent, with only 19 distinctly unhappy. His voting record, far from being liberal, is solidly conservative.

What are the alternatives? Mitt Romney has suspended his campaign, disabling a crucial anti-McCain front in the process. But his delegates lie in the wings, waiting to be wooed before the Republican Convention. Huckabee could snatch them, which would satisfy those like James Dobson, who openly declared his opposition against McCain on Super Tuesday. Huckabee, who Dobson endorsed, comes across as a paragon of conservatism, unflinchingly devout, with an appealing brand that has done well with evangelicals. Newsweek's recent poll showed McCain leading Huckabee among conservatives by a small margin (49 to 43 percentage points). Yet Huckabee, with the help of such groups as Kansans for Life won 104 out of 105 counties in the Kansas caucus, plus Louisiana.

But Huckabee is not, as Limbaugh and Hannity argue, a suitable conservative either. He does not market himself as an imitative cowboy in the guise of either Bush President, but a squirrel-eating, salt of the earth "hick". His reluctance to employ the death penalty, and his class origins, mark him out as unreliable. Notwithstanding these obstacles he promises to remain a significant threat - some conservative groups aligned against McCain, along with the large number of typing voices in the blogosphere, see Huckabee as the only hope. Prominent Republicans who don't are simply, as Tim Einenkel of Air America Radio put it, keen on taking "southern hick votes" but not the candidacy of "an actual red-dirt, poor, working class guy". The GOP is dividing along class lines.

The position of McCain's noisy opponents on the right is this: far better ensure defeat for the conservatives than elect a leader who will unalterably change them. The change they all fear is historical inevitability: the dissolution of the Reagan coalition, that powerful group that included libertarians, traditionalists and evangelicals. That change will involve moving to the political centre, embracing fiscal restraint and closing Guantánamo's detention facilities. But they can't endorse the alternative: a working class Baptist preacher who will fan class populism and religious fervor, the voice of low-income America that rages against the IRS.

Limbaugh and company are just not interested in the business of governing, preferring a resume of ideological horn blowing. A party that continues to believe in tax cuts in times of war even as the world's largest economy heads into a recession must have overdosed on too many Fox News specials. That much Frum admits. But neither McCain or Huckabee will kill the GOP. That, in a sense, has already happened. And the executor, as Peggy Noonan put it in the Wall Street Journal was the younger Bush, the man who sundered "a great political coalition" by detaching the White House from its core supporters.