Me and John Bolton! In agreement, sort of.
FACE-TO-FACE WITH TAIWAN PRESIDENT CHEN SHUI-BIAN
Barred from setting foot in the United States, Taiwan’s president will discuss his
efforts to avoid international isolation, mounting economic ties with mainland China
and military tensions across the Taiwan Straits.
A panel discussion and video conference with President Chen, co-sponsored by the Overseas Press Club and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office:
PANELISTS:
William J. Holstein former Overseas Press Club president and international
Moderator business journalist
John Bolton former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, now senior
research fellow, American Enterprise Institute,
Washington, D.C.
Bruce Dunning long-time CBS News correspondent in Asia
Therese Shaheen chair, American Institute in Taiwan, 2002-2004
Ian Williams correspondent, the Guardian online
DATE: Friday, September 14, 2007
TIME: 8:30am Breakfast Buffet, Metropolitan Room, 28th floor
9:30am Conversation with President Chen, Riverview Room, 28th floor
PLACE: UN Millennium Plaza Hotel, 44th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues
RSVP: Abby Lee, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office
abby@taipei.org or 212-317-7355
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Osama at large: full text
This is still up on the Guardian site, where the faithbased legions have been frothing. Go check the comments...
Osama bin Laden is still alive, unharmed and making videos. If the White House wasn't so incompetent, you might think it was no coincidence.
Ian Williams
September 10, 2007 9:00 AM Guardian Unlimited
The US senate, in all solemnity, sat last week and voted to double the reward for the apprehension of Osama bin Laden to $50m. So $25m was not enough to motivate the military and security forces of the world's superpower to catch the slippery Saudi? Or is it possible that there is another reason why Osama, for all the rewards being offered, has still not been caught?
Reading Cif commenters can often lead one to the conclusion that not a sparrow falls unless it has been shot by Islamic militants, poisoned by the CIA, or had its sense of direction befuddled by the Trilateral Commission. In my experience most such "plots" are just an attempt by bystanders to rationalize unbelievable and culpable stupidity on the part of governments.
On September 11, 2001, I lived down by the World Trade Centre, watched it happen, and lived in the poisonous fug of the noxious funeral pile for the rest of the year.
The Murdoch tabloids at the time carried front page pics of the beturbanned Osama Bin Laden which all the downtown shops prominently displayed:"Wanted, Alive or Dead," they proclaimed. Understandable. And then they disappeared as the war drums began to beat against Iraq, too be replaced with the omnipresent triptych of Osama, Saddam and the burning WTC.
Of course neither the tabloids nor the cable news media went out of their way to point out that Osama bin Laden was a former protégé of the CIA and its Pakistani surrogates, which is why one of my earliest hopes for a silver lining, that Americans might realize that foreign policy was not something that exclusively happened to foreigners, soon evaporated.
But reading the transcript of the latest OBL tape - which apart from its invocation to Islamic conversion could indeed read like a Guardian editorial on geopolitics - does raise the question of what he is still doing at large, with access to video cameras, hair dye and barbers?
Is it significant that OBL did not discourse on issues such as gay marriage, evolution, abortion and faith-based organizations, where his black heart beats in close harmony with those of the conservative right?
Conspiracy theorists should be asking the question: "Objectively, who benefits from allowing this malevolent, self-confessed mass murderer to remain at large?"
Well, think about an administration that has used the terrorist bogeyman to justify outright war on two countries and threatens another. One that has declared economic and diplomatic war on others; that has used the terrorist threat to build up its arms budget to unprecedented heights; that has extended the prerogatives of the president beyond all constitutional measure - and invented a whole set of them for the vice-president.
Would all this have been possible if Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice and revealed to be just a ramblingly discursive, albeit murderous, faith-based fanatic?
It's a tough call, and on the face of it, it's more plausible than the average conspiracist plot to think that OBL is out on license to allow the Bush administration to frighten voters when they go to bed.
But on the realist side, the spectacular incompetence and mendacity of this White House is demonstrable. They did indeed get the wrong man and go after Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with 9/11 - while letting the man in the turban escape.
On the dilemma front it's the equivalent of choosing between the proffered conversion to Islam or the callow conservative brand of fundamentalist evangelism espoused by the White House.
But I rather discount the chances of anyone collecting the senate's munificent reward until after the coming debacle in Iran, which we will, of course, have to bomb in case the Ayatollahs there are sheltering the man who regards Iranian Shi'as to be heretical abominations.
Osama bin Laden is still alive, unharmed and making videos. If the White House wasn't so incompetent, you might think it was no coincidence.
Ian Williams
September 10, 2007 9:00 AM Guardian Unlimited
The US senate, in all solemnity, sat last week and voted to double the reward for the apprehension of Osama bin Laden to $50m. So $25m was not enough to motivate the military and security forces of the world's superpower to catch the slippery Saudi? Or is it possible that there is another reason why Osama, for all the rewards being offered, has still not been caught?
Reading Cif commenters can often lead one to the conclusion that not a sparrow falls unless it has been shot by Islamic militants, poisoned by the CIA, or had its sense of direction befuddled by the Trilateral Commission. In my experience most such "plots" are just an attempt by bystanders to rationalize unbelievable and culpable stupidity on the part of governments.
On September 11, 2001, I lived down by the World Trade Centre, watched it happen, and lived in the poisonous fug of the noxious funeral pile for the rest of the year.
The Murdoch tabloids at the time carried front page pics of the beturbanned Osama Bin Laden which all the downtown shops prominently displayed:"Wanted, Alive or Dead," they proclaimed. Understandable. And then they disappeared as the war drums began to beat against Iraq, too be replaced with the omnipresent triptych of Osama, Saddam and the burning WTC.
Of course neither the tabloids nor the cable news media went out of their way to point out that Osama bin Laden was a former protégé of the CIA and its Pakistani surrogates, which is why one of my earliest hopes for a silver lining, that Americans might realize that foreign policy was not something that exclusively happened to foreigners, soon evaporated.
But reading the transcript of the latest OBL tape - which apart from its invocation to Islamic conversion could indeed read like a Guardian editorial on geopolitics - does raise the question of what he is still doing at large, with access to video cameras, hair dye and barbers?
Is it significant that OBL did not discourse on issues such as gay marriage, evolution, abortion and faith-based organizations, where his black heart beats in close harmony with those of the conservative right?
Conspiracy theorists should be asking the question: "Objectively, who benefits from allowing this malevolent, self-confessed mass murderer to remain at large?"
Well, think about an administration that has used the terrorist bogeyman to justify outright war on two countries and threatens another. One that has declared economic and diplomatic war on others; that has used the terrorist threat to build up its arms budget to unprecedented heights; that has extended the prerogatives of the president beyond all constitutional measure - and invented a whole set of them for the vice-president.
Would all this have been possible if Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice and revealed to be just a ramblingly discursive, albeit murderous, faith-based fanatic?
It's a tough call, and on the face of it, it's more plausible than the average conspiracist plot to think that OBL is out on license to allow the Bush administration to frighten voters when they go to bed.
But on the realist side, the spectacular incompetence and mendacity of this White House is demonstrable. They did indeed get the wrong man and go after Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with 9/11 - while letting the man in the turban escape.
On the dilemma front it's the equivalent of choosing between the proffered conversion to Islam or the callow conservative brand of fundamentalist evangelism espoused by the White House.
But I rather discount the chances of anyone collecting the senate's munificent reward until after the coming debacle in Iran, which we will, of course, have to bomb in case the Ayatollahs there are sheltering the man who regards Iranian Shi'as to be heretical abominations.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Friday, September 07, 2007
No bother about Big Brother: full text
No bother about Big Brother
George Orwell would have been delighted to know he was being spied upon by the state. It's a badge of honour - just ask any stroppy teenage Maoist.
Ian Williams
Guardian Comment is Free
September 6, 2007 2:30 PM | Printable version
The recent revelation from opened UK government files that George Orwell was kept under surveillance by British security services has led to lots of playful banter about Big Brother. But the tidings should have been underwhelming.
From the establishment point of view it would have been gross dereliction of duty not to keep an eye on a self-professed revolutionary. It is difficult to believe it would have surprised Orwell too much, and more likely he would have been proud that as a mere hack he had excited that much attention with his writings and doings.
When I was a teenage Maoist, and unemployed for a long time, the local police Special Branch officer in Liverpool sidled up to me at a meeting and commiserated. " I hear you're having difficulty finding a job", he grinned, and maliciously recited a list of applications I'd recently made. I was not ecstatic, but I could not resent it too much. Indeed it was almost a badge of merit that the forces of the bourgeois state thought a naive and stroppy youth worthy of scrutiny, so I felt no resentment. After all, if your intention is to overthrow a state that you consider repressive, then how could you cry foul if they took relatively moderate counter-measures?
It is not as if they hauled me off for thoughtcrime to room 101 and beat the bejasus out of me with rubber truncheons. Indeed, in my maturity I had an enjoyable interview with the north-west director of the Economic League, which maintained a blacklist of troublemakers for subscribing companies, and was happy to help him publicise his employers' shabby treatment of him, which had led to his defection with the lists.
However, while in the novel 1984 Big Brother's representative O'Brien showed signs of omniscience about what his victims thought as well what they did, the amusing part of the Orwell file is that the local plods did not have a clue what their target was up to, which is one reason they commented on his "Bohemian" attire.
In fact, if they had gone for a chat with him, he would probably have told them, in great detail what he was doing, but one can see that superiors would be worried about the exposure of their officers to seductively seditious ideas. Indeed, back in the 1980s a Special Branch officer seconded to the diplomatic protection group unconsciously revealed the dangers. Charged with protecting the PLO envoy to Britain, he had to go to lots of meetings with him. He told me "You know, I never realised, the Palestinians have really had some shitty treatment, haven't they?"
As it happens, the plods were overruled during the war by the more sophisticated MI5 who realised that the war had changed things in general and Orwell too. At least one can be sure that the case officer involved was not a crypto-communist of the kind that happily overlooked actual communist spies Philby, Burgess and MacLean, since the Communist party hated Orwell with a passion that has scarcely died down 60 years later.
That was shown with the eagerness to attack Orwell for the list he compiled of people he suspected were Communists or sympathizers who should not be employed by the agency that the Labour government had set up to promulgate democratic socialism abroad. "Snitch" was one of the kindest epithets heaped on him, appropriately enough by another public-school wannabe prole, Alexander Cockburn. Orwell's accusers were generally urbane and forgiving about those who hauled off thought-criminals to the basement of the Lubyanka never to emerge again but unforgiving about Orwell's proxy personnel management.
Orwell, as often, has the last word about such Vishinskish language when he defined of the totalitarian mindset: "To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like."
W Ogilvie, the Home Office official who questioned the dull constabulary judgment, was clearly much more in that school of thought than the Gulag nostalgics who continue to bite at the ankles of Orwell's reputation.
Sadly the authorities concerned will learn no lessons from all of this. The FBI in the US and the reformed Special Branch in the UK continue to attract the prejudiced and the ignorant - and the results of recent persecutions in the US suggest that their evidence should also be almost totally discounted. The insubstantial types of evidence against Orwell may have been enough to put him in the dock in the contemporary United States if the plods had not started chasing Muslims instead of Reds.
And almost tragically, for most people today, "Big Brother" no longer evokes images of totalitarian control, but of a successful mind-deadening TV show of the kind that Orwell's Big Brother designed to keep the masses' minds off the real world.
George Orwell would have been delighted to know he was being spied upon by the state. It's a badge of honour - just ask any stroppy teenage Maoist.
Ian Williams
Guardian Comment is Free
September 6, 2007 2:30 PM | Printable version
The recent revelation from opened UK government files that George Orwell was kept under surveillance by British security services has led to lots of playful banter about Big Brother. But the tidings should have been underwhelming.
From the establishment point of view it would have been gross dereliction of duty not to keep an eye on a self-professed revolutionary. It is difficult to believe it would have surprised Orwell too much, and more likely he would have been proud that as a mere hack he had excited that much attention with his writings and doings.
When I was a teenage Maoist, and unemployed for a long time, the local police Special Branch officer in Liverpool sidled up to me at a meeting and commiserated. " I hear you're having difficulty finding a job", he grinned, and maliciously recited a list of applications I'd recently made. I was not ecstatic, but I could not resent it too much. Indeed it was almost a badge of merit that the forces of the bourgeois state thought a naive and stroppy youth worthy of scrutiny, so I felt no resentment. After all, if your intention is to overthrow a state that you consider repressive, then how could you cry foul if they took relatively moderate counter-measures?
It is not as if they hauled me off for thoughtcrime to room 101 and beat the bejasus out of me with rubber truncheons. Indeed, in my maturity I had an enjoyable interview with the north-west director of the Economic League, which maintained a blacklist of troublemakers for subscribing companies, and was happy to help him publicise his employers' shabby treatment of him, which had led to his defection with the lists.
However, while in the novel 1984 Big Brother's representative O'Brien showed signs of omniscience about what his victims thought as well what they did, the amusing part of the Orwell file is that the local plods did not have a clue what their target was up to, which is one reason they commented on his "Bohemian" attire.
In fact, if they had gone for a chat with him, he would probably have told them, in great detail what he was doing, but one can see that superiors would be worried about the exposure of their officers to seductively seditious ideas. Indeed, back in the 1980s a Special Branch officer seconded to the diplomatic protection group unconsciously revealed the dangers. Charged with protecting the PLO envoy to Britain, he had to go to lots of meetings with him. He told me "You know, I never realised, the Palestinians have really had some shitty treatment, haven't they?"
As it happens, the plods were overruled during the war by the more sophisticated MI5 who realised that the war had changed things in general and Orwell too. At least one can be sure that the case officer involved was not a crypto-communist of the kind that happily overlooked actual communist spies Philby, Burgess and MacLean, since the Communist party hated Orwell with a passion that has scarcely died down 60 years later.
That was shown with the eagerness to attack Orwell for the list he compiled of people he suspected were Communists or sympathizers who should not be employed by the agency that the Labour government had set up to promulgate democratic socialism abroad. "Snitch" was one of the kindest epithets heaped on him, appropriately enough by another public-school wannabe prole, Alexander Cockburn. Orwell's accusers were generally urbane and forgiving about those who hauled off thought-criminals to the basement of the Lubyanka never to emerge again but unforgiving about Orwell's proxy personnel management.
Orwell, as often, has the last word about such Vishinskish language when he defined of the totalitarian mindset: "To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like."
W Ogilvie, the Home Office official who questioned the dull constabulary judgment, was clearly much more in that school of thought than the Gulag nostalgics who continue to bite at the ankles of Orwell's reputation.
Sadly the authorities concerned will learn no lessons from all of this. The FBI in the US and the reformed Special Branch in the UK continue to attract the prejudiced and the ignorant - and the results of recent persecutions in the US suggest that their evidence should also be almost totally discounted. The insubstantial types of evidence against Orwell may have been enough to put him in the dock in the contemporary United States if the plods had not started chasing Muslims instead of Reds.
And almost tragically, for most people today, "Big Brother" no longer evokes images of totalitarian control, but of a successful mind-deadening TV show of the kind that Orwell's Big Brother designed to keep the masses' minds off the real world.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Orwell and Big Brother
Big Bother About Big Brother - Why Orwell would not have been surprised that he was being spied upon in today's Guardian Comment is Free
And remember the Cambridge Companion to Orwell is now out! see the thumbnail in the left column.
And remember the Cambridge Companion to Orwell is now out! see the thumbnail in the left column.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Obama, Clinton, Castro, full text
A new start on Cuba
I'm pleased to note it was picked up and republished widely elsewhere. I'd be even more pleased if they all sent a cheque, but still!
Telling the truth about Washington's policy towards Cuba can be dangerous - but it may pay off for Barack Obama next year.
Ian Williams
August 31, 2007 7:30 PM | Printable version
The news that Fidel Castro is betting on the Clinton-Obama dream ticket should be taken with a large Mohito. It makes you wonder which TV station denied to ordinary Cubans that he is relying on for his news.
Even so, Barack Obama is doing well by doing good with his pledge to reform the administration's counterproductive Cuba policy. It may annoy the hysterical anti-Castro faction in Miami, but lots of sane Americans, including many Cuban immigrants, will support someone who breaks with the inane and inept foreign policy that has got the US nowhere in Cuba and led it up the Tigris elsewhere.
Anyone who has compared the complexions of the diehard anti-Castro types in Miami to those of their former compatriots in Havana will get an inkling of an unspoken truth. There is no way the overwhelming white Cuban supporters of the Cuban American National Foundation would vote for a black candidate, short of him personally delivering the bearded head of Castro on a platter. And even then they would prefer to tip him and send back to the plantation.
Indeed, one of the secrets of the Castro's success is that Afro-Cubans are very well aware that the exiled would-be rulers in Miami are not exactly equal opportunities types. Their ancestors had maintained slavery until 1886 - and many aspects of segregation right up to the revolution. They would not be welcomed as liberators.
From Kennedy onwards, one would hardly accuse Democratic administrations of being soft on Castro - but the Southern strategy of not so subtly coded racism worked to get the former Confederacy voting for the transmuted party of Abraham Lincoln. It is highly likely that like many Anglo whites, the more conservative and anti-Castro Cubans support the Republicans for the same racial reasons more than any perceived Democratic softness towards Castro.
But for Hillary Clinton, this is not necessarily about votes. It was her husband, after all, who declared his support for Robert Torricelli's bill cutting trade with Cuba even further after a fundraiser organized by Cuban wannabee Caudillo Jorge Mas Canosa put $275,000 dollars in his campaign treasury back when he was running against George Bush senior in 1992. Mas Canosa knew what he was doing. Bush, who had hitherto pragmatically opposed it, promptly followed Clinton in supporting the amendment.
It would be unfair to accuse Clinton of strictly mercenary motives - although one has detected more than a hint of such in the past. She is a believer. Her hard line on Cuba should be no surprise, since her foreign policy is identical in most respects to the neocons, as her comments on Iraq, Israel and much of the rest of the globe will testify.
Even so, one can only hope that she is getting some big cheques and endorsements for her support. The embargo and the travel restrictions make no sense in diplomatic or humanitarian terms. If we are concerned about democracy and human rights there is a serious double standard being observed. Castro does not have a free press, does not allow free unions, and locks up some dissidents. Neither does China. Who was the last Congressperson to call for an embargo of China over executions and enforced abortions?
The embargo punishes ordinary people in Cuba, depriving them of contact with their families in the US, and of the financial and medical support they offered. Quite apart from damage to ordinary Cubans, who are after all are non-voting foreigners till they land in Florida and so do not count, the laws rob American citizens of their freedom to travel and their rights to contact with their family members.
In short, the restrictions are morally unjustified and are tactically inane -since they tend to prove the point of what Castro is saying about Uncle Sam's vindictive hostility.
And as Bill Clinton himself pointed out when he walked into an ambush with progressive TV host Amy Goodman, they give Castro an excuse for economic policies that contrive to produce food shortages on one of the most fertile islands in the Caribbean.
Obama has been attacked for his callow youth. But the role of the little boy exposing the lack of substance to the imperial wardrobe becomes him. He should keep it up. There is a lot more exposure needed.
I'm pleased to note it was picked up and republished widely elsewhere. I'd be even more pleased if they all sent a cheque, but still!
Telling the truth about Washington's policy towards Cuba can be dangerous - but it may pay off for Barack Obama next year.
Ian Williams
August 31, 2007 7:30 PM | Printable version
The news that Fidel Castro is betting on the Clinton-Obama dream ticket should be taken with a large Mohito. It makes you wonder which TV station denied to ordinary Cubans that he is relying on for his news.
Even so, Barack Obama is doing well by doing good with his pledge to reform the administration's counterproductive Cuba policy. It may annoy the hysterical anti-Castro faction in Miami, but lots of sane Americans, including many Cuban immigrants, will support someone who breaks with the inane and inept foreign policy that has got the US nowhere in Cuba and led it up the Tigris elsewhere.
Anyone who has compared the complexions of the diehard anti-Castro types in Miami to those of their former compatriots in Havana will get an inkling of an unspoken truth. There is no way the overwhelming white Cuban supporters of the Cuban American National Foundation would vote for a black candidate, short of him personally delivering the bearded head of Castro on a platter. And even then they would prefer to tip him and send back to the plantation.
Indeed, one of the secrets of the Castro's success is that Afro-Cubans are very well aware that the exiled would-be rulers in Miami are not exactly equal opportunities types. Their ancestors had maintained slavery until 1886 - and many aspects of segregation right up to the revolution. They would not be welcomed as liberators.
From Kennedy onwards, one would hardly accuse Democratic administrations of being soft on Castro - but the Southern strategy of not so subtly coded racism worked to get the former Confederacy voting for the transmuted party of Abraham Lincoln. It is highly likely that like many Anglo whites, the more conservative and anti-Castro Cubans support the Republicans for the same racial reasons more than any perceived Democratic softness towards Castro.
But for Hillary Clinton, this is not necessarily about votes. It was her husband, after all, who declared his support for Robert Torricelli's bill cutting trade with Cuba even further after a fundraiser organized by Cuban wannabee Caudillo Jorge Mas Canosa put $275,000 dollars in his campaign treasury back when he was running against George Bush senior in 1992. Mas Canosa knew what he was doing. Bush, who had hitherto pragmatically opposed it, promptly followed Clinton in supporting the amendment.
It would be unfair to accuse Clinton of strictly mercenary motives - although one has detected more than a hint of such in the past. She is a believer. Her hard line on Cuba should be no surprise, since her foreign policy is identical in most respects to the neocons, as her comments on Iraq, Israel and much of the rest of the globe will testify.
Even so, one can only hope that she is getting some big cheques and endorsements for her support. The embargo and the travel restrictions make no sense in diplomatic or humanitarian terms. If we are concerned about democracy and human rights there is a serious double standard being observed. Castro does not have a free press, does not allow free unions, and locks up some dissidents. Neither does China. Who was the last Congressperson to call for an embargo of China over executions and enforced abortions?
The embargo punishes ordinary people in Cuba, depriving them of contact with their families in the US, and of the financial and medical support they offered. Quite apart from damage to ordinary Cubans, who are after all are non-voting foreigners till they land in Florida and so do not count, the laws rob American citizens of their freedom to travel and their rights to contact with their family members.
In short, the restrictions are morally unjustified and are tactically inane -since they tend to prove the point of what Castro is saying about Uncle Sam's vindictive hostility.
And as Bill Clinton himself pointed out when he walked into an ambush with progressive TV host Amy Goodman, they give Castro an excuse for economic policies that contrive to produce food shortages on one of the most fertile islands in the Caribbean.
Obama has been attacked for his callow youth. But the role of the little boy exposing the lack of substance to the imperial wardrobe becomes him. He should keep it up. There is a lot more exposure needed.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Fangs & frivolity
My "Speculator" column in the July 2007 Investor Relations MagazineFangs & frivolity
Ian Williams wants to see richer shareholders, smarter management – and poorer lawyers
When politicians on Capitol Hill try to put limits on tort litigation, it's a reasonably safe assumption that lobbyists are paying them on behalf of companies seeking impunity to put asbestos in lungs, lead in children and poisons in petrol – or at least to get a free pass for doing so in the past.
But while companies should pay compensation to those who have suffered from their actions, there is one exception where the anti-tort lobbyists are halfjustified: shareholder suits.
Fangs and frivolity Shareholder suits are perplexing. A corporation is a body with rights and responsibilities, just as if it were a human. At the same time, shareholders own the company. In fact, together they are the company, so a shareholder suing a company is, on the face of it, like a vampire bleeding his own blood into a glass and drinking it. It may offer temporary satisfaction but it is unlikely to add much to the food pyramid for the fanged feeder.
However, there is one class of beneficiary that is more like a creature of the night: the lawyers who initiate, negotiate and bleed dry shareholder suit settlements. Of course, some corporate executives have been regularly ripping off shareholders and other stakeholders like employees and pensioners, so it would make sense if shareholder suits were not against the corporation but against the management as individuals.
On the other hand, employees of a company, including management, are entitled to protection against frivolous litigation for actions they carried out for the benefit of their company – insofar as their actions were within the law. If a CEO is charged with the murder of a business rival, we would not, in general, expect directors and officers insurance to cover the costs of his or her defense, except in the unlikely event that a board decision authorized the whacking.
There are several ways to tackle this: one is to give juries the power to order the costs of both parties to be paid by frivolous litigants and their lawyers. The other would be to legislate that no company should pay, either directly or indirectly through insurance, for the legal defense of management teams that did not meet certain corporate governance criteria that demonstrate they were acting on behalf of the company.
Even though I suspect this may not play well in Delaware, it would be conducive to putting some truth in the legal fiction that a public company is a joint enterprise of its shareholders rather than a management-dominated Ponzi scheme while reducing frivolous shareholder litigation. If individual managers make decisions that tortuously steal from shareholders, they should pay the price – by being both forced out and made to pay back their own gains.
Finally, there is the Gordian knot solution: remove the conflict of interest from senior executives by removing their incentive to manipulate stock values and financial reporting. Pay them a salary – and nothing else.
Ian Williams wants to see richer shareholders, smarter management – and poorer lawyers
When politicians on Capitol Hill try to put limits on tort litigation, it's a reasonably safe assumption that lobbyists are paying them on behalf of companies seeking impunity to put asbestos in lungs, lead in children and poisons in petrol – or at least to get a free pass for doing so in the past.
But while companies should pay compensation to those who have suffered from their actions, there is one exception where the anti-tort lobbyists are halfjustified: shareholder suits.
Fangs and frivolity Shareholder suits are perplexing. A corporation is a body with rights and responsibilities, just as if it were a human. At the same time, shareholders own the company. In fact, together they are the company, so a shareholder suing a company is, on the face of it, like a vampire bleeding his own blood into a glass and drinking it. It may offer temporary satisfaction but it is unlikely to add much to the food pyramid for the fanged feeder.
However, there is one class of beneficiary that is more like a creature of the night: the lawyers who initiate, negotiate and bleed dry shareholder suit settlements. Of course, some corporate executives have been regularly ripping off shareholders and other stakeholders like employees and pensioners, so it would make sense if shareholder suits were not against the corporation but against the management as individuals.
On the other hand, employees of a company, including management, are entitled to protection against frivolous litigation for actions they carried out for the benefit of their company – insofar as their actions were within the law. If a CEO is charged with the murder of a business rival, we would not, in general, expect directors and officers insurance to cover the costs of his or her defense, except in the unlikely event that a board decision authorized the whacking.
There are several ways to tackle this: one is to give juries the power to order the costs of both parties to be paid by frivolous litigants and their lawyers. The other would be to legislate that no company should pay, either directly or indirectly through insurance, for the legal defense of management teams that did not meet certain corporate governance criteria that demonstrate they were acting on behalf of the company.
Even though I suspect this may not play well in Delaware, it would be conducive to putting some truth in the legal fiction that a public company is a joint enterprise of its shareholders rather than a management-dominated Ponzi scheme while reducing frivolous shareholder litigation. If individual managers make decisions that tortuously steal from shareholders, they should pay the price – by being both forced out and made to pay back their own gains.
Finally, there is the Gordian knot solution: remove the conflict of interest from senior executives by removing their incentive to manipulate stock values and financial reporting. Pay them a salary – and nothing else.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Come back Karl Rove, all is forgiven: FULL TEXT
Come back Karl Rove, all is forgiven
Without Bush's Brain in the White House, the wheels are starting to fall off. Just look at the president's last speech.
Ian Williamss
GUARDIAN COMMENT IS FREE
August 23, 2007 9:00 PM |
There can have been few speeches more laughable than George Bush's latest. Referring to books he has surely never read, laden with specious historical parallels guaranteed to turn round and bite him in the bum, it is one long "speechwriter wanted at the White House" ad.
But bad speechwriting notwithstanding, didn't the president remember that Karl Rove's parting words were almost certainly "Don't mention Vietnam"? The parallels are obvious: a prolonged war started on false pretences in which untold thousands on both sides die and the US is eventually driven out anyway.
Quite apart from the historical echoes - the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the invented weapons of mass destruction - it has to be a definition of chutzpah for George Bush, of all people, to turn up at all at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. But to invoke Vietnam really takes the prize.
This was, after all, the war that he made his very own by spending five years actively avoiding participation. While his father left school immediately to fly in combat in world war two, as Vietnam heated up George W flew - to Texas, to join the Texas Air National Guard, a nepotistic boondoggle. Even that eventually proved too much for him - so he deserted. This was not a war he disagreed with. On the contrary, he took time off from his arduous and perilous National Guard service to campaign for politicians who wanted the war to continue.
And now he has the absolute gall to say that more Americans, more Cambodians, more Laotians, more Vietnamese should have died, and the war that he was dodging should have been continued.
He is, of course, quite right about the totalitarian nature of the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. But that leaves out a few details. That would of course be the Khmer Rouge whose accession to power was made possible by the American bombing of neutral Cambodia that led to the overthrow of the Sihanouk regime. It would also be the Khmer Rouge regime that was allowed to keep its UN seat even after it had been driven into the jungle - because Britain, China and the US insisted that it was the legitimate government.
The Vietnamese government is the one that is now hosting American trade delegations on a daily basis, and allowing American teams to search for US war dead.
In his speech, Bush laughably cited Graham Green's "Quiet American" as typical of the Leftist thinking that led to the defeat in Vietnam. Anyone want a bet on whether he has ever read the book? We do know he is unlikely to have seen the very good film version with Michael Caine, because Hollywood, following 9/11, refused to give it commercial showing. The idea that Americans could arrange bombings was too sensitive, and may have interrupted the process of demonization that Bush and Cheney were fomenting.
Bush also invoked Pearl Harbour and the fight against the Japanese empire as the equivalent of fighting back against Al Qaeda after 9/11. But attacking Iraq was the equivalent of invading Argentina after Pearl Harbour while giving Japan a free pass.
Bush withdrew forces from Afghanistan to attack Iraq - which is why the turbaned poster boy is still free. Last year the president told the same convention: "Victory will come when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation". This year he told the veterans: "The terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognize Iraq as the central front in the war against the terrorists".
As chicken and eggs go, this is the big one. Saddam's Iraq was totalitarian, vicious, and belligerent, but it had nothing to do with al-Qaida. "Victory" was in our hands because Iraq, for all its faults, was al-Qaeda free before 2003. It was the invasion that wrested "victory" from our hands.
And while George Bush was only marginally responsible for inciting war in Vietnam and dodging it, in Iraq the buck stops on his desk for yet another pointless conflict heading for failure. And he stands to be condemned for his inane speeches. Karl Rove has indeed left with the president's brain.
Without Bush's Brain in the White House, the wheels are starting to fall off. Just look at the president's last speech.
Ian Williamss
GUARDIAN COMMENT IS FREE
August 23, 2007 9:00 PM |
There can have been few speeches more laughable than George Bush's latest. Referring to books he has surely never read, laden with specious historical parallels guaranteed to turn round and bite him in the bum, it is one long "speechwriter wanted at the White House" ad.
But bad speechwriting notwithstanding, didn't the president remember that Karl Rove's parting words were almost certainly "Don't mention Vietnam"? The parallels are obvious: a prolonged war started on false pretences in which untold thousands on both sides die and the US is eventually driven out anyway.
Quite apart from the historical echoes - the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the invented weapons of mass destruction - it has to be a definition of chutzpah for George Bush, of all people, to turn up at all at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. But to invoke Vietnam really takes the prize.
This was, after all, the war that he made his very own by spending five years actively avoiding participation. While his father left school immediately to fly in combat in world war two, as Vietnam heated up George W flew - to Texas, to join the Texas Air National Guard, a nepotistic boondoggle. Even that eventually proved too much for him - so he deserted. This was not a war he disagreed with. On the contrary, he took time off from his arduous and perilous National Guard service to campaign for politicians who wanted the war to continue.
And now he has the absolute gall to say that more Americans, more Cambodians, more Laotians, more Vietnamese should have died, and the war that he was dodging should have been continued.
He is, of course, quite right about the totalitarian nature of the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. But that leaves out a few details. That would of course be the Khmer Rouge whose accession to power was made possible by the American bombing of neutral Cambodia that led to the overthrow of the Sihanouk regime. It would also be the Khmer Rouge regime that was allowed to keep its UN seat even after it had been driven into the jungle - because Britain, China and the US insisted that it was the legitimate government.
The Vietnamese government is the one that is now hosting American trade delegations on a daily basis, and allowing American teams to search for US war dead.
In his speech, Bush laughably cited Graham Green's "Quiet American" as typical of the Leftist thinking that led to the defeat in Vietnam. Anyone want a bet on whether he has ever read the book? We do know he is unlikely to have seen the very good film version with Michael Caine, because Hollywood, following 9/11, refused to give it commercial showing. The idea that Americans could arrange bombings was too sensitive, and may have interrupted the process of demonization that Bush and Cheney were fomenting.
Bush also invoked Pearl Harbour and the fight against the Japanese empire as the equivalent of fighting back against Al Qaeda after 9/11. But attacking Iraq was the equivalent of invading Argentina after Pearl Harbour while giving Japan a free pass.
Bush withdrew forces from Afghanistan to attack Iraq - which is why the turbaned poster boy is still free. Last year the president told the same convention: "Victory will come when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation". This year he told the veterans: "The terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognize Iraq as the central front in the war against the terrorists".
As chicken and eggs go, this is the big one. Saddam's Iraq was totalitarian, vicious, and belligerent, but it had nothing to do with al-Qaida. "Victory" was in our hands because Iraq, for all its faults, was al-Qaeda free before 2003. It was the invasion that wrested "victory" from our hands.
And while George Bush was only marginally responsible for inciting war in Vietnam and dodging it, in Iraq the buck stops on his desk for yet another pointless conflict heading for failure. And he stands to be condemned for his inane speeches. Karl Rove has indeed left with the president's brain.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Bush's Brain on the lam
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/08/bushs_brain_has_truly_gone.html
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Beware the killer robots
Beware the killer robots
The use of robot soldiers may appeal to the Pentagon. They should not to anyone else.
Ian Williams
check out the Guardian site to see the robotic responses from American nationalists!
August 21, 2007 2:30 PM
The headlines said that the US was moving towards building robot soldiers. My first thought was this was not such a bad idea. Robots could be programmed to refuse to obey illegal orders, ranging from illegal invasions of other countries to violations of the Geneva Conventions.
They would carry out their duties without prejudice and would not get stressed out at being under attack and unleash a torrent of fire against any passing civilians. They could not really take much pleasure in humiliating the "enemy," and so would avoid having them posing for sexually humiliating photographs.
If programmed properly, they would not be worried about their career prospects if they refused orders to torture or even take part in "robust" interrogations of prisoners. Free of sexual hang-ups, they would not feel the need to rape or kill the "enemy" civilians. Their database of knowledge would, one hopes, avoid the Murdoch press and so they would not need to exorcise the rancour of blaming whoever the enemy du jour is for September 11.
On the other hand, computer recognition skills being what they are, could you trust a robot to tell the difference between a passing a civilian and enemy combatant, when the Pentagon has so much difficulty itself? Wouldn't the people who wrote programs be drafted in from GOP donor electronic voting machine makers? There might a risk of mis-programed robots gunning down registered Democrats among the GI's.
The robots would also need a regular memory dump so they do not get confused when yesterday's ally suddenly becomes today's hub of the Axis of Evil.
Indeed, if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a hand in writing the military code into the program, a prohibition against torture would probably invoke a contradictory subroutine to fill the bathtub and bring out the water-board! He certainly would not be keying in Asimov's laws of robotics any more than an evangelist military chaplain would tell his flock about turning the other cheek.
In fact, apart from the science-fictional frisson that the headlines invoked, the machines under development are not real robots, but remotely controlled death starlets. That raises other worries. One might think that the absence of existential threat to the operator would give the opportunity for calm and reasoned reactions. Unless, that is, you had seen video game fans at work, and then you consider the effects of physical impunity on an enthusiastic late adolescent operator.
Many veterans report how difficult it is for most soldiers to actually kill an enemy, moving and breathing in front of them. It is part of our essential humanity. But if instead of a live human, all you see is an image in a screen, then the daily holocaust of the videogames suggests it is very easy to overcome those human scruples. The landmine is in fact an elementary robot soldier, killing to a simple program, which almost invariable fails to distinguish between combatant and civilian, enemy and friend. If soldiers kills a civilian, they may get tried. When has a soldier ever been prosecuted for planting a mine after it has disemboweled a child, or seeding an area with cluster bombs?
In the end, one almost has to agree that the NRA has a (strictly limited) point. Robots will not kill people any more than guns do. Those who operate and program them are responsible for their outcomes. The danger is, of course, that the more distance between the commander and the outcome, the less chance there is of retribution and justice, as the White House team responsible for the sorry debacle in Iraq can testify. Guns and lethal robots alike need controlling carefully.
The use of robot soldiers may appeal to the Pentagon. They should not to anyone else.
Ian Williams
check out the Guardian site to see the robotic responses from American nationalists!
August 21, 2007 2:30 PM
The headlines said that the US was moving towards building robot soldiers. My first thought was this was not such a bad idea. Robots could be programmed to refuse to obey illegal orders, ranging from illegal invasions of other countries to violations of the Geneva Conventions.
They would carry out their duties without prejudice and would not get stressed out at being under attack and unleash a torrent of fire against any passing civilians. They could not really take much pleasure in humiliating the "enemy," and so would avoid having them posing for sexually humiliating photographs.
If programmed properly, they would not be worried about their career prospects if they refused orders to torture or even take part in "robust" interrogations of prisoners. Free of sexual hang-ups, they would not feel the need to rape or kill the "enemy" civilians. Their database of knowledge would, one hopes, avoid the Murdoch press and so they would not need to exorcise the rancour of blaming whoever the enemy du jour is for September 11.
On the other hand, computer recognition skills being what they are, could you trust a robot to tell the difference between a passing a civilian and enemy combatant, when the Pentagon has so much difficulty itself? Wouldn't the people who wrote programs be drafted in from GOP donor electronic voting machine makers? There might a risk of mis-programed robots gunning down registered Democrats among the GI's.
The robots would also need a regular memory dump so they do not get confused when yesterday's ally suddenly becomes today's hub of the Axis of Evil.
Indeed, if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a hand in writing the military code into the program, a prohibition against torture would probably invoke a contradictory subroutine to fill the bathtub and bring out the water-board! He certainly would not be keying in Asimov's laws of robotics any more than an evangelist military chaplain would tell his flock about turning the other cheek.
In fact, apart from the science-fictional frisson that the headlines invoked, the machines under development are not real robots, but remotely controlled death starlets. That raises other worries. One might think that the absence of existential threat to the operator would give the opportunity for calm and reasoned reactions. Unless, that is, you had seen video game fans at work, and then you consider the effects of physical impunity on an enthusiastic late adolescent operator.
Many veterans report how difficult it is for most soldiers to actually kill an enemy, moving and breathing in front of them. It is part of our essential humanity. But if instead of a live human, all you see is an image in a screen, then the daily holocaust of the videogames suggests it is very easy to overcome those human scruples. The landmine is in fact an elementary robot soldier, killing to a simple program, which almost invariable fails to distinguish between combatant and civilian, enemy and friend. If soldiers kills a civilian, they may get tried. When has a soldier ever been prosecuted for planting a mine after it has disemboweled a child, or seeding an area with cluster bombs?
In the end, one almost has to agree that the NRA has a (strictly limited) point. Robots will not kill people any more than guns do. Those who operate and program them are responsible for their outcomes. The danger is, of course, that the more distance between the commander and the outcome, the less chance there is of retribution and justice, as the White House team responsible for the sorry debacle in Iraq can testify. Guns and lethal robots alike need controlling carefully.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
beware the killer robots
see the latest in Guardian Comment is Free
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/08/beware_the_killer_robots.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/08/beware_the_killer_robots.html
Monday, August 20, 2007
Padilla: Whose justice? Which rationality? full text
Whose justice? Which rationality?
The suspect conviction of Jose Padilla is a symbol of the straw-clutching weakness and cynical hysteria-mongering of the Bush administration.
guardian comment is free
Ian Williams
August 17, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version
Jose Padilla is no hero. He chose to associate himself with an organization whose methods and aims violated international law and the domestic laws of most countries. But just as in cases where police failed to give arrestees their rights, Padilla should have been allowed to go free after the illegal, constitution-breaking and mentally murderous routine that the US government put him through. The jury missed the chance to send a message to the administration that there is a penalty for depriving citizens of their rights.
Additionally, while editorialists intone solemnly that the court and the jury sent a message to the administration that they did not need to break the constitution to secure a conviction, no one should be happy at the looseness of conspiracy charges.
The jury found Padilla and his two co-convicts, who seem to have had precious little contact with him, guilty of conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim individuals in a foreign country, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists." "Terrorism," is not really a legal construct. It is a cynical attempt to raise public hysteria. Murder or attempted murder charges are quite adequate - but they could not find a single case that the indicted were directly involved in.
The US government did not produce a single charge against him to substantiate the years of publicity about his alleged "dirty bomb" plot. Padilla's defence attorneys, already hampered because years of unconstitutional solitary confinement and illegal abuse had made their client, clearly not the full shilling before these events, mentally unfit to plead, could not address these unspoken but omnipresent charges. His application for al-Qaida training was enough to find him guilty by association of everything any other member of the organization ever did.
This application of "six degrees of separation" is dangerous and could easily implicate Kevin Bacon (despite his distinctly non-halal name). To put it in perspective, there should have been many more in that dock. Padilla was training with al-Qaida, which allied to the Taliban, who were financed, armed and supported by the Pakistani intelligence services, which was backed in its work by the CIA, and thus, one may presume, successive presidents.
One can hardly blame the jury. It would have taken very strong-minded individuals to have overcome the social pressures that have put Muslims and Arabs, even US citizens, in a free fire zone. The year after 9/11, at Newark Airport I watched a dapper elderly middle-aged man in a blazer and tie being led away by Immigration while his white American wife ran after him shouting: "What's up Mohamed?" In Padilla's case, it was not just generic, but particular accusations that flooded the airwaves, but were never tested in the court.
Even so, juries across the states have cavilled at such prejudiced charges, only to find the administration invents new charges to justify their persecution of the new pariahs. Nor is this just an American trait: one only has to think of the innocent men who spent decades in prison on trumped charges of IRA terrorism in Britain.
Which really brings us back to the ghost at the feast in the trial? Where is Osama Bin Laden? The US government went into Afghanistan to get him, against the background of millions of "Most Wanted" fliers for the turbaned poster boy. And then it took its troops out to concentrate on Iraq, having somehow given 70% of Americans the impression that Saddam Hussein was behind Bin Laden and 9/11.
Thousands of dead Americans and many more Iraqis later, an embarrassed White House hardly mentions Osama Bin Laden anymore and instead glories in a politically expedient Auto de Fe against Padilla that the Inquisition would have disowned.
Bin Laden is a fugitive from justice, Padilla has not seem much justice at all. And the Bush administration sadly seems to face no prospect of it at all.
The suspect conviction of Jose Padilla is a symbol of the straw-clutching weakness and cynical hysteria-mongering of the Bush administration.
guardian comment is free
Ian Williams
August 17, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version
Jose Padilla is no hero. He chose to associate himself with an organization whose methods and aims violated international law and the domestic laws of most countries. But just as in cases where police failed to give arrestees their rights, Padilla should have been allowed to go free after the illegal, constitution-breaking and mentally murderous routine that the US government put him through. The jury missed the chance to send a message to the administration that there is a penalty for depriving citizens of their rights.
Additionally, while editorialists intone solemnly that the court and the jury sent a message to the administration that they did not need to break the constitution to secure a conviction, no one should be happy at the looseness of conspiracy charges.
The jury found Padilla and his two co-convicts, who seem to have had precious little contact with him, guilty of conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim individuals in a foreign country, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists." "Terrorism," is not really a legal construct. It is a cynical attempt to raise public hysteria. Murder or attempted murder charges are quite adequate - but they could not find a single case that the indicted were directly involved in.
The US government did not produce a single charge against him to substantiate the years of publicity about his alleged "dirty bomb" plot. Padilla's defence attorneys, already hampered because years of unconstitutional solitary confinement and illegal abuse had made their client, clearly not the full shilling before these events, mentally unfit to plead, could not address these unspoken but omnipresent charges. His application for al-Qaida training was enough to find him guilty by association of everything any other member of the organization ever did.
This application of "six degrees of separation" is dangerous and could easily implicate Kevin Bacon (despite his distinctly non-halal name). To put it in perspective, there should have been many more in that dock. Padilla was training with al-Qaida, which allied to the Taliban, who were financed, armed and supported by the Pakistani intelligence services, which was backed in its work by the CIA, and thus, one may presume, successive presidents.
One can hardly blame the jury. It would have taken very strong-minded individuals to have overcome the social pressures that have put Muslims and Arabs, even US citizens, in a free fire zone. The year after 9/11, at Newark Airport I watched a dapper elderly middle-aged man in a blazer and tie being led away by Immigration while his white American wife ran after him shouting: "What's up Mohamed?" In Padilla's case, it was not just generic, but particular accusations that flooded the airwaves, but were never tested in the court.
Even so, juries across the states have cavilled at such prejudiced charges, only to find the administration invents new charges to justify their persecution of the new pariahs. Nor is this just an American trait: one only has to think of the innocent men who spent decades in prison on trumped charges of IRA terrorism in Britain.
Which really brings us back to the ghost at the feast in the trial? Where is Osama Bin Laden? The US government went into Afghanistan to get him, against the background of millions of "Most Wanted" fliers for the turbaned poster boy. And then it took its troops out to concentrate on Iraq, having somehow given 70% of Americans the impression that Saddam Hussein was behind Bin Laden and 9/11.
Thousands of dead Americans and many more Iraqis later, an embarrassed White House hardly mentions Osama Bin Laden anymore and instead glories in a politically expedient Auto de Fe against Padilla that the Inquisition would have disowned.
Bin Laden is a fugitive from justice, Padilla has not seem much justice at all. And the Bush administration sadly seems to face no prospect of it at all.
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