No way to heaven, but at least missing Hell

My column in this week's Tribune, on the primaries.

After a year, the final decisive round of the great Primary Circus is upon us. Last week the best-qualified Democratic candidate for the presidency dropped out. Bill Richardson had been a congressman, ambassador to the UN, Energy Secretary and Governor of New Mexico, in between being a negotiator with the North Koreans. His thoughtful policies, on global warming, and pulling out of Iraq for example, were clear and explicit, unlike the evasions and temporizing of most of the other candidates.

While the headline writers stressed Barack Obama’s race and Hillary Clinton’s gender, they all overlooked the fact that Richardson was Hispanic – half Mexican, which was in itself groundbreaking. However, he lacked one essential qualification: money. The media and the TV networks that are the prime beneficiaries of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the candidates raised would not accept him as a major candidate without corporate backing on a huge scale. The sums that the Labour Party deputy leadership campaigns raised would not buy a single TV spot in an American primary. Indeed, they are literally a thousandth of the amounts that the American front-runners solicited. They represent a massive IOU to corporate America on the part of the Democrats.

When I spoke to him recently, the Senate’s only avowed Socialist, Bernie Sanders, gave his preference as John Edwards first, Obama second, and Hillary Clinton last. While the unions and many more progressive Democrats are indeed supporting Edwards, who is voicing what one might call “Old Democrat” values, the media have concentrated on Hillary and Obama. That could reflect their charisma, but it only takes a soupcon of paranoia to wonder whether an underlying reason is to ensure a Democratic candidate almost guaranteed to excite negative feelings among voters. For example, while the Iowa caucuses, which mobilize Democratic activists, voted for Obama, the New Hampshire vote, which is open to anyone who registers as a Democrat, reversed what they told the pollsters before about supporting him. That does suggest a large degree of latent racial prejudice, observed before, where conflicted white voters claim to be voting for a black candidate when polled, but in the safety of the voting booth cannot bring themselves to do so.

Even so, while Obama is clearly a fresh voice, one should not be too dewy-eyed about him – he has shown distressing signs of learning from the Clinton school of political contortionism. Hillary herself excites paroxysms of vituperation and misogyny from conservatives, to the extent of gaining a feminist backlash. The irony is, of course, that her own policies on almost every issue are actually very conservative, reflecting her funding base from Wall St. Hillary Clinton’s career suggests that for her, it is the advancement of one woman that matters, and that the uninsured mothers on welfare will have to sink and swim without too much in the way of sisterly support.

However, what could induce even the most jaundiced anti-Clintonista to vote for her in general election is the Republican ticket. Most of them were bad to start with, but their efforts to win the support of the Evangelical and wacko right have most of them choking on their own words. What will be even more nauseating will be watching them regurgitate their more recent verbal mastications as they try to retriangulate back to the centre after securing the nomination with the wacko votes. Outstanding in this respect is John McCain, who five years ago was the victim of Karl Rove’s dirty tricks, and who showed some independence and integrity, which he has now traded for the support of the Republican leadership, which is of course concerned about the prospects off the rest of the field.

Who can blame them? Think of Rudolf Giuliani who preached Catholic family values while announcing his impending divorce at a press conference, without telling her, and who busily disappearing up his own rectum as promises to stack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion and anti-gay justices even though not holding those positions himself. Mike Huckabee, a creationist, has equally faith-based views on economics, wanting to abolish income tax, while Mitt Romney, a Mormon, does a jig on a Moronic angel pinhead as he explains his vision of a faith based America that evades some major points of his theology. In this context, the campaign of Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas Congressman, is almost refreshing. He does not triangulate at all. He puts his programmes up on a pole and rallies supporters by the hundreds of thousands. Ordinary Americans have given his campaign an amazing amount of money. He does not get corporate support, and Murdoch’s Fox excluded him from their screens and debates, thus alienating a vociferous group who had hitherto slavishly supported Fox News through its decade of distortion and libel of Democrats. His grass roots campaign certainly pulls in the wackos but his populist, anti big government, not to mention anti-war, policies reveal a fissure line in the working class white vote that an astute Democrat could appeal to.

One of the purposes or at least an effect of recent Primaries has been for Democratic candidates to render each other unelectable. This year the effect will be stronger on the Republican side, where ideology rather than pragmatic policies are the chosen grounds for challenge. In end, the race is for the Democrats, which after two disastrous Bush terms has to be a step forward. To paraphrase what an American Secretary of State said about the UN, a Democratic victory may stop us going to Hell, but is unlikely to advance us far towards Heaven.

Alaska and the UN!

Here's my talk to the Alaska World Affairs Council in Anchorage, on the UN, with a sideline on Rum, of course!
AWAC Presents: Ian Williams
By Kristin Spack
... Williams explains why the UN is “the worst possible system in the world… except for all of the alternatives.” Ian Williams: Author, Writer, Speaker; Ian Williams: More columns than Parthenon; Ian Williams Blog: Deadline Pundit ...
KSKA Public Radio - http://kska.org/

The World According to Wall St - full text

Foreign Policy magazine in the US complains this month that "in France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind."

The article, written by Newsweek's European economics chief Stefan Theil, is titled Europe's Philosophy of Failure. In fact, Europe is doing quite well by any objective measures, and it seems somewhat counterfactual to cluck on in this unbalanced way just as the US economy, buoyed only by a continuing flood of Chinese money, teeters
on the edge of a crash, as subprime mortgages and derivatives trading erode the financial foundations of Wall Street.

Undaunted by reality, Foreign Policy continues complaining about Germany and France:

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent ... . Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts.

Shocked, shocked, as only the country that gave the world Enron, the savings and loan scandal and the almost obligatory half-billion-dollar CEO golden parachute can be, the magazine inveighs: "In both France and Germany, for instance, schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism. In one 2005 poll, just 36% of French citizens
said they supported the free-enterprise system ... . In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs - 47% in 2007 versus 36% in 1991."

Portentously the article concludes: "A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world's most vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes."

This unsubstantiated prejudice masquerading as economic analysis is pervasive in the US business world. I once interviewed the CEO of an American company that had subsidiaries in Holland and Scotland. He complained that in Holland he had to provide six weeks holiday for the staff and six months of paid sick leave. And although it was not so bad in Scotland, it was far worse than in the US, where he only had to offer two weeks vacation and 10 days sick leave.

I asked him which were his most productive and profitable plants. Holland, Scotland and the US last, he replied. And he could not see the connection. This quasi-theological horror of creeping "socialism" permeates American business, whose leaders have a vision of a Europe mired in perpetual recession.

A country that had built its prosperity behind high tariff walls, with huge government subsidies and infrastructural investments, has spent decades preaching the opposite to a waiting world. George Bush senior had the integrity to call it voodoo economics. The Russians listened and were only rescued from their economic folly when Bush junior's wars quadrupled the price of oil.

The same week that Theil's diatribe was published, the Oxford Economics consultancy calculated that Britain - National Health Service and mandatory holidays notwithstanding - has outstripped the US in terms of GDP per capita. In fact the figures probably understate European living standards compared with the US. While actual workers' income in the US has been stagnant for 30 years and in fact has declined under President Bush, American politicians and business executives have conspired for decades to ensure that the proceeds of the growth in the US economy have flowed overwhelmingly to a tiny
percentage.

In Germany and France, as well as Britain, there is near universal health coverage, and incomes and employment have been growing steadily. The "stagnant" German economy, in taking over East Germany, did the equivalent of the US incorporating Mexico and giving a dollar per peso, and it still grew.

So, serious magazines should really have articles about the amazing country that persuades its students and voters that it has the best health system in the world, when over 45 million of its citizens have no coverage, another 20 million have inadequate coverage and most working people's insurance is effectively revocable at the caprice of greedy executives. They should be pointing out that the US comes 29th in life expectancy, which may also have something to do with the complete absence of legal holidays, statutory paid maternity leave and one in four children in the world's biggest economy living in poverty.

The official excuse for those bloated CEO pay packages is that they make the US economy more productive - but the US comes below "socialistic" Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland in global competitiveness.

Journalists should really analyse a media and education system that persuades voters that its economy leads the world in growth, when all the proceeds are funnelled to the top 1% of the population; that thinks that tax cuts for that 1% help ordinary Americans prosper; or that it is a "death tax", killing enterprise, for Paris Hilton to pay a percentage of her multimillion-dollar legacy to the IRS.

There are indeed lessons that Europe can learn from the US, but, when the reflexive prejudices are discounted, the statistics suggest that there would be much for Americans to learn from Europe, above all that the road to economic success does not entail widening inequality and impoverishing the working population.

Socialistic Europe..

The Rumours of Europe's Economic Decline are much exagerrated in Guardian Comment is Free.

Practising What We Preach, full text

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.

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.

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.

Giving the Devil His Due

Satan and the Primaries in the Guardian CiF today.

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.

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.

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.

·

Red Taiwan

Taiwan - redder than the PRC, in today's Guardian

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.

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