For three days this week representatives of Polisario and Morocco secluded themselves in Manhasset in the New York suburbs, allegedly in an attempt to reach a solution to the western Sahara issue. At stake was not just the fate of the half of the Saharawis baking in desert exile and the other half suffering consistent Moroccan occupation and repression, but whether international law actually has any force or meaning in the 21st century.
However, the talks were not about solving, but about evading, the real issue, which is Morocco's persistent refusal to abide by international law, UN decisions or its own promises and the refusal of the United Nations and its members to enforce them.
No country recognises Moroccan ownership of the territory, not least since a long series of UN resolutions in the general assembly and the security council have declared that the people of the former Spanish colony of western Sahara should be allowed to determine their own fate. Morocco quibbled, and got the UN to ask the International Court of Justice to rule on the issue in 1974. The court ruled against Morocco and said there should be an act of self-determination.
In 1975, Morocco and Mauritania carved up the territory from which Spain had made an undignified exit. While Madrid did not officially hand the territory over, it almost certainly cut a deal with Rabat in return for silence about the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the coast of Morocco.
While the US voted for the unanimous security council resolutions deploring the Moroccan invasion, US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed in his memoirs: "The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."
For 15 years, the issue simmered in guerrilla warfare until the end of the cold war seemed to open a window. I remember the press conference at the UN back in 1990 when Johannes Manz, the first head of Minurso, the peacekeeping mission intended to supervise a referendum and ceasefire, announced that it would all be settled in a year.
The Moroccans had accepted a referendum, and he explained that the Spanish census taken just before they had left was the definitive basis for the voter's rolls. I asked him then whether he had consulted the King of Morocco on this point, since his majesty was already making it plain that the only vote he would tolerate was one that he would win.
The current and previous kings of Morocco have repeatedly declared their support for a referendum, but have always reneged in the end since no one disputes that the result would be independence. Indeed, Morocco would not even accept the plan produced by former US Secretary of State James Baker, which would have allowed Moroccan settlers in the territory to vote, presumably because the King suspects that they too could support independence.
France, which so memorably upheld international law in the run up to the Iraq invasion, has been consistently shameless in its shilling for Morocco. The US has now joined France more actively. Morocco is Israel's closest friend in the Arab world and has positioned itself as an ally in the war on terrorism.
The UK has no dog in the fight, but did once at least have scruples about actively aiding and abetting an egregious breach of international law, not to mention the multiple breaches of human rights that Morocco perpetrates both at home and in western Sahara.
Since the Iraq invasion washed out the vestiges of Robin Cook's ethical dimension to British foreign policy, the UK is no longer concerned about quarrels in a "far-away country between people of whom we know nothing". That means that three permanent members of the security council are now actively working to force the Saharawis to accede to Moroccan occupation.
But there is plenty of blame to go round. The UN secretariat over the years has proven shamelessly invertebrate about implementing UN resolutions. It may of course just be oversight that the Minurso website omits mention of the security resolutions condemning the occupation and the ICJ decision, but over the decades many UN officials have knuckled under to Moroccan blandishments and pressure. Certainly no secretary general has had the temerity to confront Morocco for its outright defiance of international law and UN resolutions.
The troika of France, the US and the UK, should be forcibly reminded that they cannot expect to sermonise the rest of the world about international law when they connive with Morocco's lawlessness. Let the Saharawis vote.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Practising What You Preach
My latest take on Western Sahara now on the Guardian site
and greetings from Juneau, capital of Alaska, where I am admiring the rapidly shrinking Mindenhall Glacier.
and greetings from Juneau, capital of Alaska, where I am admiring the rapidly shrinking Mindenhall Glacier.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Devil of a Time, full text
Perhaps the best sign that Satan is hard at work is that over the holidays most of the British tabloids carried the story that the Vatican was setting up exorcism squads in each see to counter a global upsurge in Satanism. Clearly it was diabolical journalism since none of them checked with the actual Vatican press office, which, if not infallible, is presumably reliable and discounted the claims of the 82-year-old exorcist in chief which all the newspapers reported, seemingly based on faith alone.
But even if the Pope is not setting up anti-Satan squads just yet, he has declared his belief in the existence of the evil entity, and since the holy father is infallible, we must assume that Tony Blair's recent declaration of allegiance to Roman Catholicism means that he also thinks that Lucifer stalks the globe - and probably also that he was spotted recently in Baghdad, sporting a big moustache not far from the original Garden of Eden. Last we heard though, neither the church's catechism nor the Anglicans' 39 articles had WMDs in Iraq as an article of faith.
Christian theology borrowed the concept of the evil one from the Persians, who at least thought it was a fair fight between light and dark but the church fathers had to reconcile this inheritance with an omnipotent deity - and used Satan to square the circle of why a good God would allow suffering on such a scale.
But Satan's role has always been confusing. For example, no one has ever satisfactorily explained why Satan should fall in with God's vindictive plans on the eternal hellfire-for-sinners front. Why should he cooperate with a vindictive scheme to frighten humanity into doing his rival's bidding? If he is a real rebel, and he is supposed to be diabolically cunning, Satan should surely let the good times roll for those who followed his bidding, and leave po-faced eternity to the pious.
When writing Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton was clearly rather taken with the rebellious Satan, and did a rather better job of explaining his insurgent manifesto than he did of "explaining the works of God to man".
But if we see Satan as the trickster, armed with a wicked sense of humour, the 21st century almost makes sense. Who else could persuade so many of the leading American presidential candidates to get their fingers on the nuclear button to believe so many impossible things before the primaries?
Evangelical Mike Huckabee thinks the world began 6,000 years ago, while Mormon Mitt Romney believes that tribes of Israelites were battling it out with Indians in North America and that the record of this event was discovered in upstate New York by someone who could translate it with the aid of a seer stone but sadly forgot where he filed the original.
It makes Ron Paul's eccentric views on taxation, slavery and the role of government seem quite sane by comparison. But while commentators feel free to criticise Paul's off-the-wall ideas, and in so far as they notice, Dennis Kucinich's brush with aliens, it is somehow forbidden to question a candidate's theological faith.
Yet while mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani professed a belligerently tribal Catholicism even as he blithely divorced his wife at a press conference with neither the act nor the venue being close to what the Cardinal ordered.
This omerta about personal "faith", unless it is one eccentric cultist calling hellfire on another, is puzzling, since all the leading candidates profess some religious affiliation, so we can conclude either that they all believe some variant of the official Christian dogma, or that they are in fact closet agnostics whose religious adherence is a politically expedient membership in some sort of do-gooding deist equivalent of a Rotary club.
Satan has to be laughing in his eternally hedonistic hell if the competition for the power to launch the apocalypse is between the bonkers and the banal. If the candidates' faith means anything at all, then of course it will influence their political actions. And conversely, if they are hedging, then their hypocrisy will reflect on their behaviour in office. Maybe we should write in the Vicar of Bray as the most honestly shameless candidate.
But even if the Pope is not setting up anti-Satan squads just yet, he has declared his belief in the existence of the evil entity, and since the holy father is infallible, we must assume that Tony Blair's recent declaration of allegiance to Roman Catholicism means that he also thinks that Lucifer stalks the globe - and probably also that he was spotted recently in Baghdad, sporting a big moustache not far from the original Garden of Eden. Last we heard though, neither the church's catechism nor the Anglicans' 39 articles had WMDs in Iraq as an article of faith.
Christian theology borrowed the concept of the evil one from the Persians, who at least thought it was a fair fight between light and dark but the church fathers had to reconcile this inheritance with an omnipotent deity - and used Satan to square the circle of why a good God would allow suffering on such a scale.
But Satan's role has always been confusing. For example, no one has ever satisfactorily explained why Satan should fall in with God's vindictive plans on the eternal hellfire-for-sinners front. Why should he cooperate with a vindictive scheme to frighten humanity into doing his rival's bidding? If he is a real rebel, and he is supposed to be diabolically cunning, Satan should surely let the good times roll for those who followed his bidding, and leave po-faced eternity to the pious.
When writing Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton was clearly rather taken with the rebellious Satan, and did a rather better job of explaining his insurgent manifesto than he did of "explaining the works of God to man".
But if we see Satan as the trickster, armed with a wicked sense of humour, the 21st century almost makes sense. Who else could persuade so many of the leading American presidential candidates to get their fingers on the nuclear button to believe so many impossible things before the primaries?
Evangelical Mike Huckabee thinks the world began 6,000 years ago, while Mormon Mitt Romney believes that tribes of Israelites were battling it out with Indians in North America and that the record of this event was discovered in upstate New York by someone who could translate it with the aid of a seer stone but sadly forgot where he filed the original.
It makes Ron Paul's eccentric views on taxation, slavery and the role of government seem quite sane by comparison. But while commentators feel free to criticise Paul's off-the-wall ideas, and in so far as they notice, Dennis Kucinich's brush with aliens, it is somehow forbidden to question a candidate's theological faith.
Yet while mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani professed a belligerently tribal Catholicism even as he blithely divorced his wife at a press conference with neither the act nor the venue being close to what the Cardinal ordered.
This omerta about personal "faith", unless it is one eccentric cultist calling hellfire on another, is puzzling, since all the leading candidates profess some religious affiliation, so we can conclude either that they all believe some variant of the official Christian dogma, or that they are in fact closet agnostics whose religious adherence is a politically expedient membership in some sort of do-gooding deist equivalent of a Rotary club.
Satan has to be laughing in his eternally hedonistic hell if the competition for the power to launch the apocalypse is between the bonkers and the banal. If the candidates' faith means anything at all, then of course it will influence their political actions. And conversely, if they are hedging, then their hypocrisy will reflect on their behaviour in office. Maybe we should write in the Vicar of Bray as the most honestly shameless candidate.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Friday, January 04, 2008
Up To Our Eyes in CRAP
This is my Speculator Column from the October issue of Investor Relations Magazine, written during the summer when it was a joking matter. No longer!
Ian
The continuing tsunami of Chinese cash into the US and global financial system has helped create an insatiable demand for new financial instruments that offer long-term security and returns to mop up the flood of liquidity. The banking sector rose to the challenge with its characteristic ingenuity by inventing 'Collateralized Mortgage Obligations,' the financial equivalent of quantum indeterminacy. Money managers, bankers, and many other investors rapidly seized upon CMO's, before the idea became unfathomably unfashionable this year.
Much has been written about the slicing and dicing, the tranches, the algorithmic acrobatics that the sector undertook to package and resell dubious loans for overpriced properties to under-salaried borrowers. A banker friend of mine in his sixties was delighted to be offered a 30 year fixed interest mortgage on his property. His reaction was the same as a patient of my former doctor who had just tested HIV positive at the age of 86. When our mutual doctor began his set-piece speech warning that he might only have 15 years to live, the aging Lothario promptly responded with a question, 'Promise?'
But quite apart from collateral beneficiaries like my banking friend, the CMO's were a triumph of globalization. For example, German bankers, who would have shown the door to any down at heel inner city resident of Frankfurt who knocked on their door asking for a loan, were eager to assume decades-long responsibility for the loan for a ghetto dweller in New Orleans whose home was a fathom or two below the Mississippi water table. The bonds were being sold globally as long-term instruments when on the ground brokers were fostering continual churning of mortgages among borrowers eager to get lower interest rates.
Although, with the customary lemming-like solidarity of the financial community, investors are now pulling out of CMO's with the same alacrity that they were earlier buying into them, there is still, notwithstanding the fads and fashions of capricious investment bankers, a need for stable long-term financial instruments. Standing on the shoulders of others, like most geniuses, I would like to offer a refinement of the CMO's. I propose 'Collateralized Recently-owned Auto Promises,' or CRAP's, as people will inevitably call them.
All across the United States people take out bank loans and get credit from car dealers to buy used cars. This represents collateral every bit as sound as the flakey modular homes in dubious sub-prime hotspots. There are risks in selling instruments backed by collateral of uncertain worth, and on debtors of uncertain risk, but no one seemed to notice when the CMO's were introduced. And so we think that the CRAP will go down well in view of the insatiable historical appetite for such products. Consider what people swallowed with the CMO.
The program is also virtuous from a macro-economic point of view. Along with construction, the auto industry is the gyroscope of the US economy. Just as the demand for new homes is predicated on people being able to sell their existing properties, the US auto industry depends up the buying and selling of previously owned cars. After homes, cars are the single most expensive consumer product that Americans buy, so it is essential for the economic welfare of the nation that there should be ample liquidity in the used car business, while meeting the demand for high-paying paper for brokers and investment managers to palm off on their clients.
There is an obvious synergy here. The skills that enabled these highly paid and motivated bankers to sell CMO's are precisely those that are traditionally associated with the second-hand car salesperson: a robust emphasis on the up-side of the transaction with a scorn for pessimistic downside details.
There is a lot of scope for creative selling of Collateralized Recently-owned Auto Promises, and I have little doubt that before long everyone will have forgotten how they turned up their noses at CMO's and we will all be up to our eyes in CRAP.
Ian
The continuing tsunami of Chinese cash into the US and global financial system has helped create an insatiable demand for new financial instruments that offer long-term security and returns to mop up the flood of liquidity. The banking sector rose to the challenge with its characteristic ingenuity by inventing 'Collateralized Mortgage Obligations,' the financial equivalent of quantum indeterminacy. Money managers, bankers, and many other investors rapidly seized upon CMO's, before the idea became unfathomably unfashionable this year.
Much has been written about the slicing and dicing, the tranches, the algorithmic acrobatics that the sector undertook to package and resell dubious loans for overpriced properties to under-salaried borrowers. A banker friend of mine in his sixties was delighted to be offered a 30 year fixed interest mortgage on his property. His reaction was the same as a patient of my former doctor who had just tested HIV positive at the age of 86. When our mutual doctor began his set-piece speech warning that he might only have 15 years to live, the aging Lothario promptly responded with a question, 'Promise?'
But quite apart from collateral beneficiaries like my banking friend, the CMO's were a triumph of globalization. For example, German bankers, who would have shown the door to any down at heel inner city resident of Frankfurt who knocked on their door asking for a loan, were eager to assume decades-long responsibility for the loan for a ghetto dweller in New Orleans whose home was a fathom or two below the Mississippi water table. The bonds were being sold globally as long-term instruments when on the ground brokers were fostering continual churning of mortgages among borrowers eager to get lower interest rates.
Although, with the customary lemming-like solidarity of the financial community, investors are now pulling out of CMO's with the same alacrity that they were earlier buying into them, there is still, notwithstanding the fads and fashions of capricious investment bankers, a need for stable long-term financial instruments. Standing on the shoulders of others, like most geniuses, I would like to offer a refinement of the CMO's. I propose 'Collateralized Recently-owned Auto Promises,' or CRAP's, as people will inevitably call them.
All across the United States people take out bank loans and get credit from car dealers to buy used cars. This represents collateral every bit as sound as the flakey modular homes in dubious sub-prime hotspots. There are risks in selling instruments backed by collateral of uncertain worth, and on debtors of uncertain risk, but no one seemed to notice when the CMO's were introduced. And so we think that the CRAP will go down well in view of the insatiable historical appetite for such products. Consider what people swallowed with the CMO.
The program is also virtuous from a macro-economic point of view. Along with construction, the auto industry is the gyroscope of the US economy. Just as the demand for new homes is predicated on people being able to sell their existing properties, the US auto industry depends up the buying and selling of previously owned cars. After homes, cars are the single most expensive consumer product that Americans buy, so it is essential for the economic welfare of the nation that there should be ample liquidity in the used car business, while meeting the demand for high-paying paper for brokers and investment managers to palm off on their clients.
There is an obvious synergy here. The skills that enabled these highly paid and motivated bankers to sell CMO's are precisely those that are traditionally associated with the second-hand car salesperson: a robust emphasis on the up-side of the transaction with a scorn for pessimistic downside details.
There is a lot of scope for creative selling of Collateralized Recently-owned Auto Promises, and I have little doubt that before long everyone will have forgotten how they turned up their noses at CMO's and we will all be up to our eyes in CRAP.
To See Ourselves As Others See Us
My review of John Bolton's book in Chatham House's "World Today"
THEWORLDTODAY.ORG JANUARY 2008 PAGE 16 BOOK REVIEW
Ian Williams
In no way is John Bolton's lengthy book a cerebral consideration of American foreign policy, although those intrigued by why that policy has so often been confused and contradictory will find enlightenment in this obsessively detailed memoir of Washington infighting and United Nations pugilistics. There is much on how policy on Korea, Iran and UN reform came about, but little on why. His Manichaean view divides the world between those who support the United States and everybody else. Almost reassuringly, the long list of implied anti-Americans begins inside his own country, and indeed his own administration: ‘Eastern Elitists’, State Department' careerists’, the ‘High Minded’, the ‘True Believers’, the‘EAPeasers’ (State Department East Asia and Pacific staffers), and eventually those whom the ‘Risen Bureaucrats' seduced – Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – and, although he avoids direct criticism, President George Bush.
POLICY MACHINE
As the little boy calling into question the imperial wardrobe, he evokes some sympathy as he berates ‘EUroids’, and ‘the EU’s proclivity to avoid confronting and actuallyrecognising problems’. Similarly his exasperation with the sausage-making machine of US policy and the UN ‘process' that substitutes ‘consensus’ or the ‘unity of the Council’ for actual results, will resonate with anyone who observed the Balkans’ resolution-strewn trail to Srebrenica, or now, Khartoum's juggling with resolutions and statements. But such limited appreciation fades in the face of his partisanship. He had no compunction about using the same processes to get his own way. Belabouring the tediously consensual processes of the UN, he reveals his real grouse: ‘consensus’ was supposed to mean that the US was satisfied. He genuinely cannot see that other members could claim an equal right to paralyse decision-making. As he complains, the Human Rights Council certainly fails to live up to expectations, but a major reason for that is Bolton's active sabotage of European Union efforts to negotiate and subsequent American abstention from involvement. Disturbingly, Bolton describes UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s wholesale adoption of his agenda for UN reform, but more reassuringly, he also notes that this did not survive his own departure from the UN when it became clear that he would not get confirmation from the US Congress.
NO THANKS
Above all, his book should inform over-fond adherents of the' Special Relationship’. Pervading it is visceral contempt for Britain and its representatives, especially when they disagree with him. Like the former UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who makes him doubt how Britain won an Empire but explains why it lost America, and indeed for Jones Parry’s successor John Sawers and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. He sneers, ‘Many Brits believed their role in life was to play Athens to America’s Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges.’ Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's loyalty to the Bush administration gets no thanks whatsoever. Among the few he praises is UN Special Representative, Terje Roed-Larsen of Norway, whose ‘propensity for speaking his mind’ was ‘always a source of delight to me.' The delight was not for ‘speaking truth to power’, but because Roed-Larsen fought tenaciously for the American view of the Middle East inside former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s administration. Similar outspokenness from the ‘petty bureaucrat’, Mark Malloch Brown – British swell! – and Annan himself, provoked petulant rage. Bolton's vigorous pursuit of national self-interest was not in itself innovative, but his rejection of the normal forms of alliance building and negotiation to pursue those interests was. His book is a Parthian machine gun salvo at the ‘Risen Bureaucrats’ of the State Department who defeated him, with their view that US interests are best served by recognising that other countries can have their own interests, and still be allies – if you listen to them. Bolton famously did sticks, not carrots. And got diplomatic peanuts in return.
Surrender Is Not an Option’ by John Bolton, Threshold Editions, ISBN-13:978-1-4165-5284-0 $27/£18.
THEWORLDTODAY.ORG JANUARY 2008 PAGE 16 BOOK REVIEW
Ian Williams
In no way is John Bolton's lengthy book a cerebral consideration of American foreign policy, although those intrigued by why that policy has so often been confused and contradictory will find enlightenment in this obsessively detailed memoir of Washington infighting and United Nations pugilistics. There is much on how policy on Korea, Iran and UN reform came about, but little on why. His Manichaean view divides the world between those who support the United States and everybody else. Almost reassuringly, the long list of implied anti-Americans begins inside his own country, and indeed his own administration: ‘Eastern Elitists’, State Department' careerists’, the ‘High Minded’, the ‘True Believers’, the‘EAPeasers’ (State Department East Asia and Pacific staffers), and eventually those whom the ‘Risen Bureaucrats' seduced – Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – and, although he avoids direct criticism, President George Bush.
POLICY MACHINE
As the little boy calling into question the imperial wardrobe, he evokes some sympathy as he berates ‘EUroids’, and ‘the EU’s proclivity to avoid confronting and actuallyrecognising problems’. Similarly his exasperation with the sausage-making machine of US policy and the UN ‘process' that substitutes ‘consensus’ or the ‘unity of the Council’ for actual results, will resonate with anyone who observed the Balkans’ resolution-strewn trail to Srebrenica, or now, Khartoum's juggling with resolutions and statements. But such limited appreciation fades in the face of his partisanship. He had no compunction about using the same processes to get his own way. Belabouring the tediously consensual processes of the UN, he reveals his real grouse: ‘consensus’ was supposed to mean that the US was satisfied. He genuinely cannot see that other members could claim an equal right to paralyse decision-making. As he complains, the Human Rights Council certainly fails to live up to expectations, but a major reason for that is Bolton's active sabotage of European Union efforts to negotiate and subsequent American abstention from involvement. Disturbingly, Bolton describes UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s wholesale adoption of his agenda for UN reform, but more reassuringly, he also notes that this did not survive his own departure from the UN when it became clear that he would not get confirmation from the US Congress.
NO THANKS
Above all, his book should inform over-fond adherents of the' Special Relationship’. Pervading it is visceral contempt for Britain and its representatives, especially when they disagree with him. Like the former UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who makes him doubt how Britain won an Empire but explains why it lost America, and indeed for Jones Parry’s successor John Sawers and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. He sneers, ‘Many Brits believed their role in life was to play Athens to America’s Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges.’ Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's loyalty to the Bush administration gets no thanks whatsoever. Among the few he praises is UN Special Representative, Terje Roed-Larsen of Norway, whose ‘propensity for speaking his mind’ was ‘always a source of delight to me.' The delight was not for ‘speaking truth to power’, but because Roed-Larsen fought tenaciously for the American view of the Middle East inside former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s administration. Similar outspokenness from the ‘petty bureaucrat’, Mark Malloch Brown – British swell! – and Annan himself, provoked petulant rage. Bolton's vigorous pursuit of national self-interest was not in itself innovative, but his rejection of the normal forms of alliance building and negotiation to pursue those interests was. His book is a Parthian machine gun salvo at the ‘Risen Bureaucrats’ of the State Department who defeated him, with their view that US interests are best served by recognising that other countries can have their own interests, and still be allies – if you listen to them. Bolton famously did sticks, not carrots. And got diplomatic peanuts in return.
Surrender Is Not an Option’ by John Bolton, Threshold Editions, ISBN-13:978-1-4165-5284-0 $27/£18.
Redder than the real thing: full text
Redder than the real thing
Taiwan's brand of democratic socialism succeeds and improves on the Chinese model
Ian Williams
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian
The leaders of China move into 2008 in celebratory mood in anticipation of this summer's Olympics - the culmination of two decades of unprecedented growth. The scale of that economic achievement has blunted criticism of the democracy deficit that is in inverse proportion to the payment surplus. But it is legitimate to ask how the "people" are doing in the people's republic. China's disparities of wealth and power are now greater than anywhere else in the world, even though most of its trading partners are prepared to shrug off the poverty and lack of democracy as the inescapable cost of growth or of some mystic Confucian cultural trait.
Ironically, across the straits, Taiwan shows that it is possible to combine prosperity and democracy, and indeed practice socialism - or at least European style social democracy - in a Chinese culture. Indeed we know it must be so, since Condoleezza Rice has just criticized Taiwan for wanting to hold a democratic referendum on its own future.
This is a turnaround. For years, based on a traditional reflexive anti-communism, American rightists were vociferous supporters of Taiwan. Needless to say, a paleo-conservative such as John Bolton speaking on Taiwan's behalf does not really do much to win support for the island from the left, many of whom already suffer from a historical hangover based on their former support for the mainland's claims for international recognition against Chiang Kai-shek's defeated rump "Republic of China", which had fled to the island.
One has to wonder whether Bolton knows that Taiwan is more like one of the European social democracies that he and his conservative friends hate so much. Chiang has long gone and Taiwan is far more socialist in every real sense than the alleged "people's" republic, whose people get shot for joining unions, organising strikes, or voicing opinions their government does not like.
With universal literacy, Taiwan has a vigorous and demanding media, free of the censorship and imprisonment that greets the unauthorised disclosure of information on the mainland. It is introducing a national pension scheme, even as Bolton's pals keep struggling to dismantle the US's social security system. It has unemployment insurance and social welfare programmes with none of the draconian welfare-for-work measures that Bill Clinton introduced under conservative pressure.
To be fair, many on the left are just as hidebound as Bolton. In the old days, leftists of the kind that could overlook purges, gulags, mass famines and bullets in skulls could point to China's advances in literacy, healthcare and the "iron rice bowl" guaranteed for workers as "actually existing socialism".
To maintain that illusion, they now have to close their eyes not only to the lack of democracy and human rights in mainland China, but to the disappearance of medical services and social welfare programmes under the new post-Mao regime. Indeed, the untold millions of migratory workers whose muscles are fuelling Chinese economic expansion do not have the most elementary rights, not even the assured right to live in the cities in which they toil.
Whatever passed for "socialist" in the Chinese Communist party agenda has been thrown overboard, to be replaced by a nationalist and militarist doctrine threatening to "reunify" Taiwan by force - whether its people like it or not.
In fact, the Taiwanese clearly do not want it, as repeated elections have shown. In Taiwan, not only is Chiang dead, his old party introduced free elections, and lost them.
Democratic socialists and supporters of democracy should support Taiwan in its bid for (social) democratic expression, free of the peculiar cocktail of unfettered capitalism and Beria-like political repression of the mainland. Certainly in the old Labour party sense, Taiwan is much redder than China - indeed, in terms of income distribution, its record is better than New Labour's.
·
Taiwan's brand of democratic socialism succeeds and improves on the Chinese model
Ian Williams
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian
The leaders of China move into 2008 in celebratory mood in anticipation of this summer's Olympics - the culmination of two decades of unprecedented growth. The scale of that economic achievement has blunted criticism of the democracy deficit that is in inverse proportion to the payment surplus. But it is legitimate to ask how the "people" are doing in the people's republic. China's disparities of wealth and power are now greater than anywhere else in the world, even though most of its trading partners are prepared to shrug off the poverty and lack of democracy as the inescapable cost of growth or of some mystic Confucian cultural trait.
Ironically, across the straits, Taiwan shows that it is possible to combine prosperity and democracy, and indeed practice socialism - or at least European style social democracy - in a Chinese culture. Indeed we know it must be so, since Condoleezza Rice has just criticized Taiwan for wanting to hold a democratic referendum on its own future.
This is a turnaround. For years, based on a traditional reflexive anti-communism, American rightists were vociferous supporters of Taiwan. Needless to say, a paleo-conservative such as John Bolton speaking on Taiwan's behalf does not really do much to win support for the island from the left, many of whom already suffer from a historical hangover based on their former support for the mainland's claims for international recognition against Chiang Kai-shek's defeated rump "Republic of China", which had fled to the island.
One has to wonder whether Bolton knows that Taiwan is more like one of the European social democracies that he and his conservative friends hate so much. Chiang has long gone and Taiwan is far more socialist in every real sense than the alleged "people's" republic, whose people get shot for joining unions, organising strikes, or voicing opinions their government does not like.
With universal literacy, Taiwan has a vigorous and demanding media, free of the censorship and imprisonment that greets the unauthorised disclosure of information on the mainland. It is introducing a national pension scheme, even as Bolton's pals keep struggling to dismantle the US's social security system. It has unemployment insurance and social welfare programmes with none of the draconian welfare-for-work measures that Bill Clinton introduced under conservative pressure.
To be fair, many on the left are just as hidebound as Bolton. In the old days, leftists of the kind that could overlook purges, gulags, mass famines and bullets in skulls could point to China's advances in literacy, healthcare and the "iron rice bowl" guaranteed for workers as "actually existing socialism".
To maintain that illusion, they now have to close their eyes not only to the lack of democracy and human rights in mainland China, but to the disappearance of medical services and social welfare programmes under the new post-Mao regime. Indeed, the untold millions of migratory workers whose muscles are fuelling Chinese economic expansion do not have the most elementary rights, not even the assured right to live in the cities in which they toil.
Whatever passed for "socialist" in the Chinese Communist party agenda has been thrown overboard, to be replaced by a nationalist and militarist doctrine threatening to "reunify" Taiwan by force - whether its people like it or not.
In fact, the Taiwanese clearly do not want it, as repeated elections have shown. In Taiwan, not only is Chiang dead, his old party introduced free elections, and lost them.
Democratic socialists and supporters of democracy should support Taiwan in its bid for (social) democratic expression, free of the peculiar cocktail of unfettered capitalism and Beria-like political repression of the mainland. Certainly in the old Labour party sense, Taiwan is much redder than China - indeed, in terms of income distribution, its record is better than New Labour's.
·
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Kristol Clear on the Right
Guardian Comment is Free, full text,
1 January 2008
I am all in favour of a good verbal punch up, and have often played the role of liberal lion thrown to the Christian Right, (indeed not always "Christian right") on the likes of Fox News. The rules of the arena are usually refreshingly simple. The conservative anchor always has the last word, and often brings on tag teams of alleged experts for the baiting. All you have to do is to confound their prejudices - expressing dislike for Clinton and or Albright usually throws them off completely, allowing a few facts to enter the debate while they try to reprogram.
But conservative newspapers rarely if ever allow a left or liberal voice unmoderated, unchallenged or unanchored on their pages - which probably accounts for the wails of horror from the American left at the news that the New York Times has engaged Bill Kristol as a regular columnist.
However, this should only be a shock to the deranged conservative bloggers and Fox pundits who think that the Gray Lady is a liberal publication. In fact, to have a hereditary joke like Kristol on board is entirely fitting for a newspaper that for so many years tolerated "Out of my mind" Abe Rosenthal as the regular conduit for neoconservativism. One of my favorites was the one where he described Kofi Annan as "Saddam Hussein's greatest single asset at the UN."
There is a circularity in Abe's son, Andy Rosenthal, the NYT's editorial page director, now appointing Bill, the son of Irving Kristol, the former Trotskyist who coined neoconservativism with its twin faces, that Israel could no wrong and the Soviet Union no right.
The New York Times always pretended to a spurious objectivity in its news pages, claiming to keep analysis and commentary to the op-ed page, but the Judith Miller escapades rather dented that "just the facts" posture, revealing the "never mention inconvenient facts."
But the contract really does defy logic. Kristol, deservedly known as "Quayle's Brain," is a light weight, recidividist wrongist, whose magazine, the Weekly Standard, makes massive losses for Rupert Murdoch, its owner. These conservatives go on about market disciplines, but it is noteworthy how many of their thinktanks and publications - the Standard, the New York Sun, the National Review - depend on the kindness of strangers to reason, eccentric billionaires with political agendas. Their minute circulation suggests little or no backing in the marketplace, but their editors and pundits are elevated by all that patronage to slots on Fox and the rest of the conservative echo chamber. How else could someone like Kristol still get a platform for his Panglossian view of the Iraq invasion? I really suspect that if Murdoch endowed the Flat Earth Society, his organs would soon carry solemn pundits exposing the myth of Columbus and the moon landings.
There was a time when newspapers felt that the sound of a rabid rightist dog barking on their editorial page was necessary to keep up with the Murdochs, but the Financial Times, for example, realized that the likes of Amity Shlaes gave the editors too much work to do. The newspaper is much improved by her absence.
In contrast, the Wall Street Journal, perhaps with the prophetic aberration of Christopher Hitchens, has never really felt compelled to find a liberal commentator to balance its columns. Amid all the gasps of horror at Murdoch's acquisition of the Journal, one really has to puzzle how he could shift the op-ed pages any further to the right. Indeed, one rather suspects that whenever his commercial and political interests dictate, he may even push them towards sanity and bring them down from the extraplanetary ideological orbit they are now parked in.
Murdoch will almost certainly have a similar baleful effect on the Journal's news coverage as he has on his other acquisitions, but since his aim is to sink the New York Times, I would not be entirely surprised if he were to bring on board some more balanced columnists for the WSJ.
And that raises the question of why Murdoch's targeted victim, the New York Times, should hire the continuing editor of a News Corporation publication as a columnist, when its readers certainly have not asked for it. One hopes they have budgeted for extra fact checkers as well.
1 January 2008
I am all in favour of a good verbal punch up, and have often played the role of liberal lion thrown to the Christian Right, (indeed not always "Christian right") on the likes of Fox News. The rules of the arena are usually refreshingly simple. The conservative anchor always has the last word, and often brings on tag teams of alleged experts for the baiting. All you have to do is to confound their prejudices - expressing dislike for Clinton and or Albright usually throws them off completely, allowing a few facts to enter the debate while they try to reprogram.
But conservative newspapers rarely if ever allow a left or liberal voice unmoderated, unchallenged or unanchored on their pages - which probably accounts for the wails of horror from the American left at the news that the New York Times has engaged Bill Kristol as a regular columnist.
However, this should only be a shock to the deranged conservative bloggers and Fox pundits who think that the Gray Lady is a liberal publication. In fact, to have a hereditary joke like Kristol on board is entirely fitting for a newspaper that for so many years tolerated "Out of my mind" Abe Rosenthal as the regular conduit for neoconservativism. One of my favorites was the one where he described Kofi Annan as "Saddam Hussein's greatest single asset at the UN."
There is a circularity in Abe's son, Andy Rosenthal, the NYT's editorial page director, now appointing Bill, the son of Irving Kristol, the former Trotskyist who coined neoconservativism with its twin faces, that Israel could no wrong and the Soviet Union no right.
The New York Times always pretended to a spurious objectivity in its news pages, claiming to keep analysis and commentary to the op-ed page, but the Judith Miller escapades rather dented that "just the facts" posture, revealing the "never mention inconvenient facts."
But the contract really does defy logic. Kristol, deservedly known as "Quayle's Brain," is a light weight, recidividist wrongist, whose magazine, the Weekly Standard, makes massive losses for Rupert Murdoch, its owner. These conservatives go on about market disciplines, but it is noteworthy how many of their thinktanks and publications - the Standard, the New York Sun, the National Review - depend on the kindness of strangers to reason, eccentric billionaires with political agendas. Their minute circulation suggests little or no backing in the marketplace, but their editors and pundits are elevated by all that patronage to slots on Fox and the rest of the conservative echo chamber. How else could someone like Kristol still get a platform for his Panglossian view of the Iraq invasion? I really suspect that if Murdoch endowed the Flat Earth Society, his organs would soon carry solemn pundits exposing the myth of Columbus and the moon landings.
There was a time when newspapers felt that the sound of a rabid rightist dog barking on their editorial page was necessary to keep up with the Murdochs, but the Financial Times, for example, realized that the likes of Amity Shlaes gave the editors too much work to do. The newspaper is much improved by her absence.
In contrast, the Wall Street Journal, perhaps with the prophetic aberration of Christopher Hitchens, has never really felt compelled to find a liberal commentator to balance its columns. Amid all the gasps of horror at Murdoch's acquisition of the Journal, one really has to puzzle how he could shift the op-ed pages any further to the right. Indeed, one rather suspects that whenever his commercial and political interests dictate, he may even push them towards sanity and bring them down from the extraplanetary ideological orbit they are now parked in.
Murdoch will almost certainly have a similar baleful effect on the Journal's news coverage as he has on his other acquisitions, but since his aim is to sink the New York Times, I would not be entirely surprised if he were to bring on board some more balanced columnists for the WSJ.
And that raises the question of why Murdoch's targeted victim, the New York Times, should hire the continuing editor of a News Corporation publication as a columnist, when its readers certainly have not asked for it. One hopes they have budgeted for extra fact checkers as well.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Kristol Balls Up
Happy New Year!
From the snowbound Catskills, in between digging out the drive way, I managed to celebrate the new year with a new column on the New York Times anilingual attitude to the conservatives. See Guardian Comment is Free
From the snowbound Catskills, in between digging out the drive way, I managed to celebrate the new year with a new column on the New York Times anilingual attitude to the conservatives. See Guardian Comment is Free
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
I am travelling deep in the darkest and dankest UK, where free wi-fi is as rare as working central heating. Normal service will be resumed in the New Year
Seasons Greetings to all,
Eid Mubarak, Happy Hannukak, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and don't forget that whatever you are celebrating... rum is the best spirit of the holiday!
Ian
Seasons Greetings to all,
Eid Mubarak, Happy Hannukak, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and don't forget that whatever you are celebrating... rum is the best spirit of the holiday!
Ian
Friday, December 21, 2007
Serbia's self-defeating posture
This was in Guardian Comment is Free while I was travelling and attracted some 260 traditionall splenetic comments. Go and enjoy them!
Serbia's self-defeating posture
Independence for Kosovo is going to happen, despite Belgrade's strenuous objections
Ian Williams
All Ian Williams articles
About Webfeeds December 15, 2007 6:00 PM | Printable version
One of the peculiarities of Balkan politics is how leaders have photographic memories for events that took place centuries ago, but total amnesia about what happened recently. On the face of it, Belgrade's offer of almost complete autonomy as long as Kosovo and the rest of the world accept Serb sovereignty seems, if somewhat dottily obsessive, eminently placatory. But the essential claim that Kosovo is theirs because a Serb prince lost a battle to the Turks there 700 years ago, is a bit like the British claiming France because of Dunkirk.
In recent reality, the Kosovar Albanians have seen what use Serb nationalists have made of such residual claims: from Slobodan Milosevic's dissolution of Kosovo's autonomy and imposition of apartheid on Albanians there to his pogroms and ethnic cleansing just before the Nato intervention (which a Russian diplomat at the time described to me as "absolutely insupportable", before in effect going on to support it).
For better or worse (frankly mostly for worse) most post-second world war dissolutions have followed established provincial or state boundaries, without too much regard for local feeling. Those who talk about taking away the "Serbian" areas north of Mitrovica again tend to amnesia.
Those are areas that were ethnically cleansed of Albanians in 1999 and stayed that way with the connivance of the French foreign legion who stopped Albanians going across the bridge where the bridge watchers from the Dolce Vita café waited to assault any who dared.
When I went I had a UN press pass, so they could not stop me, but assured me that they would not lift a finger if I were assaulted. In fact I had a good time and good coffee in the café and gave a radio interview to the local Serb station, telling them that, notwithstanding the legion, they should get used to it - UN security council resolution 1244 meant that this area was lost to Serbia.
As was clear at the time, the resolution implied eventual self-determination for Kosovo but tried to save Russian face by deciding "that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based on the general principles in annex 1 and as further elaborated in the principles and other required elements in annex 2", which in turn referred to the Rambouillet accords.
Those accords, which incidentally precluded partition, were hazed in another level of ambiguity, promising that within three years "an international meeting" would "determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each party's efforts regarding the implementation of this agreement and the Helsinki final act", which the Americans induced the KLA to sign on to by promising that it meant there would be a referendum.
After Rambouillet of course, Milosevic, assuming that with Sarajevo and Srebrenica behind him he was a modern day Achilles impenetrable to western weapons, went ahead with his ethnic cleansing and was overthrown after his defeat.
The old spiritual about Noah had a line about animals who went up two by two into the ark: "Said the ant to the elephant, 'who are you shovin'?" It came to mind at the self-deluding bluster from Belgrade about Kosovo, where successive nationalist worthies have warned of the terrible consequences of European acceptance of Kosovar independence - Serbia may not join the EU. Brussels is doubtless quaking with fear.
Even more preposterous is the military threat. Kostunica did not disagree with Milosevic for starting wars with his neighbours but for losing them. He has no intention of taking on the Kosovars, let alone Nato. The bellicose Serb nationalist militias would not be confronting and killing unarmed civilians this time.
Serbia and Russia are quoting the sanctity of security council resolutions. They would have been better off reading 1244 before they signed it to save Milosevic from the ground invasion that would have finished him off immediately.
If the leaders in Belgrade, not to mention Moscow, really cared about the Serbs in Kosovo, they would stop posturing about the fig leaf of Serb sovereignty and work to ensure the maximum EU, Nato and UN presence in a Kosovo under probationary independence. The genuine victimhood of Kosovar Albanians does not make them saints, any more than the crimes that some of them commit against the remaining Serbs mitigates Milosevic's deeds against them.
The best future in the region is for everyone to join the EU with its freedom of movement and shared citizenship.
Independence is going to happen, and Belgrade's threat to cut off diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe and the USA will have somewhat less effect than a declaration of war by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Serbia's self-defeating posture
Independence for Kosovo is going to happen, despite Belgrade's strenuous objections
Ian Williams
All Ian Williams articles
About Webfeeds December 15, 2007 6:00 PM | Printable version
One of the peculiarities of Balkan politics is how leaders have photographic memories for events that took place centuries ago, but total amnesia about what happened recently. On the face of it, Belgrade's offer of almost complete autonomy as long as Kosovo and the rest of the world accept Serb sovereignty seems, if somewhat dottily obsessive, eminently placatory. But the essential claim that Kosovo is theirs because a Serb prince lost a battle to the Turks there 700 years ago, is a bit like the British claiming France because of Dunkirk.
In recent reality, the Kosovar Albanians have seen what use Serb nationalists have made of such residual claims: from Slobodan Milosevic's dissolution of Kosovo's autonomy and imposition of apartheid on Albanians there to his pogroms and ethnic cleansing just before the Nato intervention (which a Russian diplomat at the time described to me as "absolutely insupportable", before in effect going on to support it).
For better or worse (frankly mostly for worse) most post-second world war dissolutions have followed established provincial or state boundaries, without too much regard for local feeling. Those who talk about taking away the "Serbian" areas north of Mitrovica again tend to amnesia.
Those are areas that were ethnically cleansed of Albanians in 1999 and stayed that way with the connivance of the French foreign legion who stopped Albanians going across the bridge where the bridge watchers from the Dolce Vita café waited to assault any who dared.
When I went I had a UN press pass, so they could not stop me, but assured me that they would not lift a finger if I were assaulted. In fact I had a good time and good coffee in the café and gave a radio interview to the local Serb station, telling them that, notwithstanding the legion, they should get used to it - UN security council resolution 1244 meant that this area was lost to Serbia.
As was clear at the time, the resolution implied eventual self-determination for Kosovo but tried to save Russian face by deciding "that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based on the general principles in annex 1 and as further elaborated in the principles and other required elements in annex 2", which in turn referred to the Rambouillet accords.
Those accords, which incidentally precluded partition, were hazed in another level of ambiguity, promising that within three years "an international meeting" would "determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each party's efforts regarding the implementation of this agreement and the Helsinki final act", which the Americans induced the KLA to sign on to by promising that it meant there would be a referendum.
After Rambouillet of course, Milosevic, assuming that with Sarajevo and Srebrenica behind him he was a modern day Achilles impenetrable to western weapons, went ahead with his ethnic cleansing and was overthrown after his defeat.
The old spiritual about Noah had a line about animals who went up two by two into the ark: "Said the ant to the elephant, 'who are you shovin'?" It came to mind at the self-deluding bluster from Belgrade about Kosovo, where successive nationalist worthies have warned of the terrible consequences of European acceptance of Kosovar independence - Serbia may not join the EU. Brussels is doubtless quaking with fear.
Even more preposterous is the military threat. Kostunica did not disagree with Milosevic for starting wars with his neighbours but for losing them. He has no intention of taking on the Kosovars, let alone Nato. The bellicose Serb nationalist militias would not be confronting and killing unarmed civilians this time.
Serbia and Russia are quoting the sanctity of security council resolutions. They would have been better off reading 1244 before they signed it to save Milosevic from the ground invasion that would have finished him off immediately.
If the leaders in Belgrade, not to mention Moscow, really cared about the Serbs in Kosovo, they would stop posturing about the fig leaf of Serb sovereignty and work to ensure the maximum EU, Nato and UN presence in a Kosovo under probationary independence. The genuine victimhood of Kosovar Albanians does not make them saints, any more than the crimes that some of them commit against the remaining Serbs mitigates Milosevic's deeds against them.
The best future in the region is for everyone to join the EU with its freedom of movement and shared citizenship.
Independence is going to happen, and Belgrade's threat to cut off diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe and the USA will have somewhat less effect than a declaration of war by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Two Cheers for the Queen
Well I am touring frozen and damp Britain for the festive season, and discovering that in the motherland there's no such thing as a free wifi. Even the Starbucks charge.
So here's come catch up.Two cheers for the Queen
Australians may want to abolish the monarchy, but the US shows there's some advantage to having a harmless head of state some distance away
Ian Williams
Guardian
Leaving the frozen Catskills for the balmy Caribbean, the transition from minus 12 to plus 30 centigrade puts a different perspective on global warming and even on the monarchy.
Being greeted by the Royal Saint Lucian Police Force lends a different perspective to politics. No one in St Lucia seems upset in the slightest at remaining subjects of a transplanted Teutonic alleged descendent of Woden. It's not that the St Lucians are fervent monarchists. All my local friends seem blithely indifferent to the subject and are quite happy to have the Queen's local representative, governor-general Dame Pearlette Louisy, do the honours at local ceremonies while the prime minister gets on with the actual governance.
The matter-of-fact pragmatism reminds of the Jamaican Rasta interviewed on the occasion of Mrs Windsor-Battenberg's trip to see her subjects there. "We like she so much, man, maybe she give us a visa so we can go visit she back home."
With John Howard downed down under, it seems the leaders of both the government and the opposition in Canberra are now republicans who want to abolish the monarchy in Australia, even if they differ on what to replace it with.
They really should be laid back about it. Elitist symbolism apart, there is some considerable pragmatic advantage to having a harmless head of state shelved at a safe distance on the opposite side of the globe. The US, with a Hanoverian monarch elected every four years disguised as a president, is a forcible demonstration that competence and rationality are no more guaranteed by cash-dominated elections than by the hereditary principle. But maybe that's not fair: does anyone really think that George Bush would have been elected to any office higher than municipal dog-catcher if he were not his father's son?
No one ever said "I must support my governor-general," let alone "I must support my prime minister," but you do hear people say they must support their president.
But ability notwithstanding, having a head of state elected on a party platform is conducive to abusing the office and the electorate's patriotism, as we witness with the nauseating sight of President Bush, deserter-in-chief, wrapping himself in the flag at every army base or veterans' gathering he can.
Indeed, St Lucians, forgiving though they are, have good reasons to remember Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, who accepted large donations from Carl Lindner of Chiquita, owners of vast Central American banana plantations, and immediately initiated a World Trade Organisation case against European preferences for bananas from Caribbean countries like St Lucia. Formerly dependent on the bendy yellow fruit, St Lucia today exports only a quarter of the bananas it used to and is now almost completely dependent on tourism. Tourism has been a lifeline for the country, and it's a very pleasant place to visit - but the hotel and resort development was not dependent on wiping out a whole class of independent farmers.
In one of those quantum entanglements of history, Sandals, one of St Lucia's major resorts, sports a huge portrait of Clinton in the William J Clinton Ballroom. The ex-president came to open the place - and one suspected accepted a handsome speaking fee to come to do so.
The St Lucians were too polite to put any banana skins on the marble floors of the banqueting hall. But who knows, between that and Bush threatening them for not signing agreements to exclude Americans from the International Criminal Court, they may have decided that elected presidents were as much a problem as a solution.
Which brings us back to Australia. If, as most Aussies seem to want, they replace the governor-general with a directly elected president, the very act of election invests the office with dangerous significance. Do they really want to risk setting up an office, potentially with someone like Howard, not susceptible to lack-of-confidence votes in the parliament?
It may be better to bite the bullet, knock back a Bundaberg rum and stick with the far away frumpy snob and her eccentric son.
So here's come catch up.Two cheers for the Queen
Australians may want to abolish the monarchy, but the US shows there's some advantage to having a harmless head of state some distance away
Ian Williams
Guardian
Leaving the frozen Catskills for the balmy Caribbean, the transition from minus 12 to plus 30 centigrade puts a different perspective on global warming and even on the monarchy.
Being greeted by the Royal Saint Lucian Police Force lends a different perspective to politics. No one in St Lucia seems upset in the slightest at remaining subjects of a transplanted Teutonic alleged descendent of Woden. It's not that the St Lucians are fervent monarchists. All my local friends seem blithely indifferent to the subject and are quite happy to have the Queen's local representative, governor-general Dame Pearlette Louisy, do the honours at local ceremonies while the prime minister gets on with the actual governance.
The matter-of-fact pragmatism reminds of the Jamaican Rasta interviewed on the occasion of Mrs Windsor-Battenberg's trip to see her subjects there. "We like she so much, man, maybe she give us a visa so we can go visit she back home."
With John Howard downed down under, it seems the leaders of both the government and the opposition in Canberra are now republicans who want to abolish the monarchy in Australia, even if they differ on what to replace it with.
They really should be laid back about it. Elitist symbolism apart, there is some considerable pragmatic advantage to having a harmless head of state shelved at a safe distance on the opposite side of the globe. The US, with a Hanoverian monarch elected every four years disguised as a president, is a forcible demonstration that competence and rationality are no more guaranteed by cash-dominated elections than by the hereditary principle. But maybe that's not fair: does anyone really think that George Bush would have been elected to any office higher than municipal dog-catcher if he were not his father's son?
No one ever said "I must support my governor-general," let alone "I must support my prime minister," but you do hear people say they must support their president.
But ability notwithstanding, having a head of state elected on a party platform is conducive to abusing the office and the electorate's patriotism, as we witness with the nauseating sight of President Bush, deserter-in-chief, wrapping himself in the flag at every army base or veterans' gathering he can.
Indeed, St Lucians, forgiving though they are, have good reasons to remember Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, who accepted large donations from Carl Lindner of Chiquita, owners of vast Central American banana plantations, and immediately initiated a World Trade Organisation case against European preferences for bananas from Caribbean countries like St Lucia. Formerly dependent on the bendy yellow fruit, St Lucia today exports only a quarter of the bananas it used to and is now almost completely dependent on tourism. Tourism has been a lifeline for the country, and it's a very pleasant place to visit - but the hotel and resort development was not dependent on wiping out a whole class of independent farmers.
In one of those quantum entanglements of history, Sandals, one of St Lucia's major resorts, sports a huge portrait of Clinton in the William J Clinton Ballroom. The ex-president came to open the place - and one suspected accepted a handsome speaking fee to come to do so.
The St Lucians were too polite to put any banana skins on the marble floors of the banqueting hall. But who knows, between that and Bush threatening them for not signing agreements to exclude Americans from the International Criminal Court, they may have decided that elected presidents were as much a problem as a solution.
Which brings us back to Australia. If, as most Aussies seem to want, they replace the governor-general with a directly elected president, the very act of election invests the office with dangerous significance. Do they really want to risk setting up an office, potentially with someone like Howard, not susceptible to lack-of-confidence votes in the parliament?
It may be better to bite the bullet, knock back a Bundaberg rum and stick with the far away frumpy snob and her eccentric son.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you
Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you
Tribune 14 December 2007
Democracy is an imperfect tool. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others and so it needs sharpening regularly to keep its edge. However, it needs constant work not least since it often seems that every improvement brings new and unforeseen problems.
In the US, the attempt to rescue party nominations from the smoke-and-bribery filled rooms of Tammany Hall led to the primary elections, where the leading Democratic contenders are currently running bills of around $100 million each just to be the candidates. It’s not in the constitution, but you could almost dispense with the formality of elections and declare the candidate with the biggest war-chest the winner.
The Supreme Court adds its own wacko embellishment to this emerging principle of one dollar one vote by rulings that invoke the first amendment right of free speech to stop curbs on money in campaigns. The poor man has an equal right to own newspapers as the rich, just as Murdoch family members have the right to sleep wrapped in their newspapers under a Manhattan flyover.
This election cycle is even worse. More and more states moved their primaries forward to the beginning of 2008, which means that active campaigning and spending began a year ago and has at least six months more to go before the parties’ candidates are chosen. Most of this money goes on television advertising, which at least Britain is spared.
The results of the system are apparent – and undemocratic. Under Blair’s mentor, Bill Clinton, a $100,000 in campaign contributions bought a night in the White House, half a million bought a WTO case against Caribbean banana preferences in the EU, or tightening sanctions on Cuba. Those donations showed clear cause and effect, but on a larger scale the fact that money comes from rich people and businesses explain why
Polls show popular support for universal healthcare, but the lobbyists for the big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and their campaign cheques ensure that almost fifty million Americans have no health insurance and all Americans pay the world’s highest prices for their drugs.
We can guarantee that whoever is elected as the Democratic candidate, or eventually the President, will be the beneficiary of several hundred million dollars in donations from rich individuals and corporations. Their policies will almost certainly reflect that, which is why the gap between rich and poor is widening and why ordinary working families under Bush have become more indebted and impoverished even as the economy has officially been booming.
In Britain, the entirely laudable attempt to extend the franchise for choosing the Labour Party leadership led to similar problems. Candidates had to raise their own money for canvassing and reaaching hundreds of thousands of members, and despite warnings from those who had seen what happened in the US, there was no system to oversee and reveal funding.
Enter Michael Levy, the vanguard of dodgy fundraisers, who made his debut financing Tony Blair’s leadership campaign. We now see where that led. In the name of removing the “undemocratic” influence of the unions that had actually founded the Labour Party, New Labour desperately sold itself to everyone from friends of Formula One Racing to friends of Ariel Sharon.
Being an entrist clique similar to Militant – but without the Trotskyist group’s grassroots appeal – New Labour felt no great need to tell the members of the party, or indeed the NEC, what it was up to. There have always been eccentric millionaires who have supported the Labour Party, and who have done so publicly. The minute money flows under the counter it is reasonable to assume that there is a quo being quidded. Even in the US, for all its faults, candidates must publish the list of donations.
Sadly, the infiltrators have drastically reduced the size of the Labour party electorate that potential leadership candidates have to address even if that does not seem to lessened their appetites for funny money. Those original members whom Michael Levy’s money helped win for Tony Blair, have left in droves, whether in protest or apathy when it became clear that their role in decision making was minimal. It is sad that Gordon Brown should now be carrying the can for decisions made by his predecessor, but it does give him the opportunity to put some serious distance from previous policies. Above all, if he wants to increase individual membership and ensure continued and increasing support from unions and their members, then he has to ensure that they have an effective voice in everything from the selection of candidates to the direction of policies.
The alternative is to follow through on the American road, and put a big “For Sale” sign up.
Tribune 14 December 2007
Democracy is an imperfect tool. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others and so it needs sharpening regularly to keep its edge. However, it needs constant work not least since it often seems that every improvement brings new and unforeseen problems.
In the US, the attempt to rescue party nominations from the smoke-and-bribery filled rooms of Tammany Hall led to the primary elections, where the leading Democratic contenders are currently running bills of around $100 million each just to be the candidates. It’s not in the constitution, but you could almost dispense with the formality of elections and declare the candidate with the biggest war-chest the winner.
The Supreme Court adds its own wacko embellishment to this emerging principle of one dollar one vote by rulings that invoke the first amendment right of free speech to stop curbs on money in campaigns. The poor man has an equal right to own newspapers as the rich, just as Murdoch family members have the right to sleep wrapped in their newspapers under a Manhattan flyover.
This election cycle is even worse. More and more states moved their primaries forward to the beginning of 2008, which means that active campaigning and spending began a year ago and has at least six months more to go before the parties’ candidates are chosen. Most of this money goes on television advertising, which at least Britain is spared.
The results of the system are apparent – and undemocratic. Under Blair’s mentor, Bill Clinton, a $100,000 in campaign contributions bought a night in the White House, half a million bought a WTO case against Caribbean banana preferences in the EU, or tightening sanctions on Cuba. Those donations showed clear cause and effect, but on a larger scale the fact that money comes from rich people and businesses explain why
Polls show popular support for universal healthcare, but the lobbyists for the big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and their campaign cheques ensure that almost fifty million Americans have no health insurance and all Americans pay the world’s highest prices for their drugs.
We can guarantee that whoever is elected as the Democratic candidate, or eventually the President, will be the beneficiary of several hundred million dollars in donations from rich individuals and corporations. Their policies will almost certainly reflect that, which is why the gap between rich and poor is widening and why ordinary working families under Bush have become more indebted and impoverished even as the economy has officially been booming.
In Britain, the entirely laudable attempt to extend the franchise for choosing the Labour Party leadership led to similar problems. Candidates had to raise their own money for canvassing and reaaching hundreds of thousands of members, and despite warnings from those who had seen what happened in the US, there was no system to oversee and reveal funding.
Enter Michael Levy, the vanguard of dodgy fundraisers, who made his debut financing Tony Blair’s leadership campaign. We now see where that led. In the name of removing the “undemocratic” influence of the unions that had actually founded the Labour Party, New Labour desperately sold itself to everyone from friends of Formula One Racing to friends of Ariel Sharon.
Being an entrist clique similar to Militant – but without the Trotskyist group’s grassroots appeal – New Labour felt no great need to tell the members of the party, or indeed the NEC, what it was up to. There have always been eccentric millionaires who have supported the Labour Party, and who have done so publicly. The minute money flows under the counter it is reasonable to assume that there is a quo being quidded. Even in the US, for all its faults, candidates must publish the list of donations.
Sadly, the infiltrators have drastically reduced the size of the Labour party electorate that potential leadership candidates have to address even if that does not seem to lessened their appetites for funny money. Those original members whom Michael Levy’s money helped win for Tony Blair, have left in droves, whether in protest or apathy when it became clear that their role in decision making was minimal. It is sad that Gordon Brown should now be carrying the can for decisions made by his predecessor, but it does give him the opportunity to put some serious distance from previous policies. Above all, if he wants to increase individual membership and ensure continued and increasing support from unions and their members, then he has to ensure that they have an effective voice in everything from the selection of candidates to the direction of policies.
The alternative is to follow through on the American road, and put a big “For Sale” sign up.
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