Robert Harris's Fatherland is one of the books I consider in a forthcoming Common Review piece on alternative history. I am not sure this one is alternative history.
Ghastly Times
Robert Harris "Ghost" Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Ian Williams for the Catskill Review of Books
There are times when fiction is “essentially” true, when we get more insight about the motivations and characters of real historical figures from a novel than from any amount of breathless prose based on privileged access interviews.
Primary Colors certainly evoked the essence of the Clintons' and inadvertently and tangentially said much about the appalling state of media and publishing when bitchy editorialists spent more time lamenting the originally anonymous author Joe Klein’s refusal to ‘fess up when the suspicious fingers pointed his way than they did considering the accuracy of his artistry.
Robert Harris’s “Ghost” explores what many would consider to be the essence of Tony Blair – which plausibly explores how a lightweight but charismatic politician vaulted to become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom despite an almost complete lack of political pedigree, or indeed of visible ideology. It provides an answer to the mystery of how someone who was apparently sincere and well- wishing in a sort of nondescript "nice" way should have become such a complete helot to the worst kind of American conservatism.
From a writer's point of view, Robert Harris also explores the sad and lonely world of the Ghostwriter – hence, at least in part, the title. For the other part of the explanation you will have to read to the end, but he heads the chapters with apposite quotes from a real "how-to" book on ghostwriting.
The book is told from the viewpoint of a craftsman-like hack, a competent, hard working and cynical drudge who earns his crust form ghosting the memoirs of fading rock starts, soccer plays and celebrity bimbos. He gets an offer he can't refuse. Lang's previous ghost has, ironically, joined the heavenly choir in his own right in mysterious circumstances on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard where the recently resigned Prime Minister of Britain is holed up in a borrowed mansion striving to meet the deadline for his vastly over-advanced memoirs.
The other reason he is holed up is that the International Criminal Court is on his case. He had ordered British forces to kidnap alleged Al Qaeda operatives from Pakistan and hand them to the CIA for rendition to obliging allies with scant regard for international conventions against torture. Britain is a signatory to the ICC treaty and of course, the US is not.
"Ghost" works as a taut and well-written thriller so I would hate to spoil it for readers, but I think it would not spoil it too much to say that Adam Lang (an old Scottish name, like Blair) had fallen under undue influence from the CIA. This is not as far-fetched or paranoid as it seems. During the Cold War, many aspirant Labour politicians were courted by a variety of Atlanticist bodies, many of them funded by the CIA.
Some were genuinely democratic socialists in opposition to Communism and totalitarianism. In that sense taking the American dime was less reprehensible than the likes of Philby taking the Soviet kopek. After all, in general, Washington did not directly interfere with post-War Labour's establishment of the trappings of a West European Social Democracy in Britain. Indeed, the Conservative Party before Thatcher did not try to dismantle the National Health Service or the opening up of educational opportunities.
Nevertheless, the American influence was visible in what was generally regarded as Labour's right wing which in conjunction with the communist influenced members, led to a false dualism that stereotyped those who opposed Soviet-style communism as "right wing, and pro-American. It made life hard for those like Harold Wilson whose desperate attempts as Prime Minister to forge an independent role for Britain and Europe between the two extremes certainly helped provoke the persistent and weird British establishment rumours that he was a KGB agent.
Anyone who has had contacts with the interface between New and Old Labour will recognize the types, and occasionally even the characters in Harris's depiction. This gripping and rewarding novel displays all the skills he has used previously in historical contexts in a contemporary scenario.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
"Non" to Blair
Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to push Tony Blair as president of the new European Union is a stark contrast to previous French treatment of British prime ministers - and not much to the credit of either Blair or Sarkozy.
Two score years ago and five, Charles de Gaulle gave the doigt to Britain's prime minister Harold McMillan and vetoed his application to join the European community. Four years later, the general did it again for Harold Wilson who had succeeded to No 10 Downing Street by then.
Apart from payback time for all the humiliations that he saw heaped on France and himself by Britain - including the British failure to be occupied by the Nazis - De Gaulle's argument was that Britain would be a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. To some extent he was right, even if his real motive was to keep out a rival for influence in Charlemagne's former realms. But it has taken Tony Blair to make him absolutely right about the Trojan horse.
On one level, it is, like Blair's Middle East position, yet another non-job designed to give a redundant statesman a sense of self-importance. But from another point of view, it is an insult to Europe. Symbolically, Blair for European president would be like running the Reverend Ian Paisley for Pope. Elected into office as a Europhile, Blair soon followed the Murdoch line of reflexive contempt for Brussels, while acting as Washington's agent in the continent, fulfilling all of De Gaulle's worst fears.
While Europe is clearly a success story in economic terms, despite the anally retentive influence of German central bankers, it punches way below its weight in global politics, and one reason for that has been Blair's determination to toe whatever line came from Washington. With the League of Nations style of consensus decision-making in Europe, foreign policy decisions are reduced to the lowest common denominator, which for much of the last decade has been Blair, with occasional help from Berlusconi and the Poles.
It is also interesting to contrast Blair's absolute subservience to Washington with his Labour predecessor's role. Wilson managed to keep Britain out of the Vietnam despite Lyndon Baines Johnson's enormous pressure and his speech, in response to de Gaulle's veto, is worth looking at to see an alternative to both pandering and crude anti-Americanism. He said:
While pledging Britain's loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance, he explained:
Ironically, as American industrial hegemony dissolved, and Europe's collective financial strength began to outstrip America's, Blair reduced Britain to absolute diplomatic helotry to the worst and most reactionary White House ever while the dollar declined by levels far worse than the beleaguered pound sterling ever did.
For him to hobble Europe as its president just as it is becoming economically capable of holding its own against the US would have truth emulating the fiction of Robert Harris, whose novel Ghost postulates an uncannily Blair-like British prime minister who had been recruited by the CIA to ensure precisely the kind of helotry we have seen. In retrospect, Harris's scenario looks a lot less paranoid than all those spook inspired stories about Wilson being a KGB plant. The EU should say "non" to Sarkozy's choice.
Two score years ago and five, Charles de Gaulle gave the doigt to Britain's prime minister Harold McMillan and vetoed his application to join the European community. Four years later, the general did it again for Harold Wilson who had succeeded to No 10 Downing Street by then.
Apart from payback time for all the humiliations that he saw heaped on France and himself by Britain - including the British failure to be occupied by the Nazis - De Gaulle's argument was that Britain would be a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. To some extent he was right, even if his real motive was to keep out a rival for influence in Charlemagne's former realms. But it has taken Tony Blair to make him absolutely right about the Trojan horse.
On one level, it is, like Blair's Middle East position, yet another non-job designed to give a redundant statesman a sense of self-importance. But from another point of view, it is an insult to Europe. Symbolically, Blair for European president would be like running the Reverend Ian Paisley for Pope. Elected into office as a Europhile, Blair soon followed the Murdoch line of reflexive contempt for Brussels, while acting as Washington's agent in the continent, fulfilling all of De Gaulle's worst fears.
While Europe is clearly a success story in economic terms, despite the anally retentive influence of German central bankers, it punches way below its weight in global politics, and one reason for that has been Blair's determination to toe whatever line came from Washington. With the League of Nations style of consensus decision-making in Europe, foreign policy decisions are reduced to the lowest common denominator, which for much of the last decade has been Blair, with occasional help from Berlusconi and the Poles.
It is also interesting to contrast Blair's absolute subservience to Washington with his Labour predecessor's role. Wilson managed to keep Britain out of the Vietnam despite Lyndon Baines Johnson's enormous pressure and his speech, in response to de Gaulle's veto, is worth looking at to see an alternative to both pandering and crude anti-Americanism. He said:
"The concept of a powerful Atlantic partnership can be realised only when Europe is able to put forth her full economic strength so that we can, in industrial affairs, speak from strength to our Atlantic partners."
While pledging Britain's loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance, he explained:
"Loyalty never means subservience. Still less must it mean an industrial helotry under which we in Europe produce only the conventional apparatus of a modern economy, while becoming increasingly dependent on American business for the sophisticated apparatus which will call the industrial tune in the 70s and 80s."
Ironically, as American industrial hegemony dissolved, and Europe's collective financial strength began to outstrip America's, Blair reduced Britain to absolute diplomatic helotry to the worst and most reactionary White House ever while the dollar declined by levels far worse than the beleaguered pound sterling ever did.
For him to hobble Europe as its president just as it is becoming economically capable of holding its own against the US would have truth emulating the fiction of Robert Harris, whose novel Ghost postulates an uncannily Blair-like British prime minister who had been recruited by the CIA to ensure precisely the kind of helotry we have seen. In retrospect, Harris's scenario looks a lot less paranoid than all those spook inspired stories about Wilson being a KGB plant. The EU should say "non" to Sarkozy's choice.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Annapolis and the UN
Anniversaries
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 28-29
United Nations Report
Annapolis Conference Coincided With Resolution 181, Har Homa Anniversaries
By Ian Williams
A week after the Nov. 27 Annapolis conference, and a decade after the Clinton administration vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning a new illegal Israeli settlement at Abu Ghneim/Har Homa outside Bethlehem, Israel announced plans to expand it by 300 homes. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex).
THE ANNAPOLIS PHOTO-EVENT took place as scheduled, and since no one had any concrete expectations from the event, it was a great success. In fact, it was such a hit that we can expect to see many more repeat performances.
Everyone turned up for it—except the winners of the last Palestinian elections, who were not invited—and pretty much everyone went away empty-handed, except perhaps the U.S. and Israel, who could tell the world that they were doing their best with yet another lap of the road map.
One can never be sure about anniversaries and their significance, but the week of the conference coincided with several which the schedulers in the State Department either overlooked or puckishly giggled at when they set the date.
It was the 60th anniversary of U.N. Resolution 181, where the international community forced partition on the participants. Within a week, we also saw the 40th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 242, which is cited much more often than 181. It is interesting how this has developed.
Resolution 181, which established a Jewish state, was a General Assembly resolution. Since the U.S. lost its automatic majority in the Assembly, it has become usual to say that its resolutions—including the one accepting the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s annexation wall is illegal—are non-binding.
This is something of an anomaly for a state whose raison d’être is based on historical claims, since if General Assembly resolutions are not binding, then the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not binding on the Arabs or anyone else. The resolution does in fact say that any breach by any party is a threat to peace and security to be dealt with by the Security Council—which is, of course, still “dealing” with it 60 years later.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have somersaulted in the opposite direction, however, arguing that General Assembly resolutions are binding—but they tend to overlook Resolution 181, which the Arab states in the U.N. at the time disregarded. It certainly was unjust in terms of self-determination, but legal.
The Jewish state held barely a majority of Jews and thus incorporated, presumably against their will, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. The resulting map broke many existing principles—not least that of cartography. It produced a checkerboard state, without consulting the occupants directly.
For a non-binding resolution, 181 certainly has had some strong repercussions, not least international legal support for a Jewish state, which still exists, but also about the status of Jerusalem. Under the resolution it was to become “corpus separatum” under U.N. direction—which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the U.S., will build an embassy there, or recognize it as Israel’s capital, eternal or otherwise.
Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital—but, for obvious reasons, not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
On the other hand, Israel’s legal claim to the strip of land along Lake Tiberias that Syria occupied from 1948 to 1967 is based solely on 1947’s resolution's apportioning that to the Jewish State.
Of course, the Syrian claim, such as it is, actually falls in line behind that of the Palestinian Authority, if it is accepted that the 1948 armistice line is now the basis of negotiation.
To add to the sense of historical irony, it is also 10 years since the U.S., under President Bill Clinton, vetoed a Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement building in the Abu Ghneim/Har Homa area. The General Assembly subsequently passed the resolution.
A week after Annapolis, as if to celebrate, Israel announced that it was building 300 more homes in the illegal settlement. It is worth remembering what now presidential contender and then U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson said on behalf of the Clinton administration when he cast the veto: that the United States “shared the concerns expressed about the decision of the Israeli Government to begin construction on the East Jerusalem site,” but “it disagreed on the best method of addressing the situation.
“The United States opposition to the resolution should not be interpreted as an expression of support for the construction in East Jerusalem,” Richardson continued. “Construction on the site was not helpful to the peace process. The parties must take special care to avoid pre-emptive actions that could be seen to prejudge the outcome of negotiations. The decision on East Jerusalem was regrettable. The controversy would not be resolved, however, by interference from the Council. It could only be resolved by the parties themselves.”
So there we are. Some 15 years after Oslo and the so-called peace process, and the Clintonian decision that the parties should negotiate their differences, the illegal settlement is up, running and expanding in defiance of the latest pledges from the Israeli government to their American sponsors, who are still pushing the Palestinians into negotiations with no legal preconditions.
Perhaps now is the time for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to draw a line on the road map between the initial resolution and the final status. He should apologize for the failure of the Arab states to accept Resolution 181 and its determination that there should be a Jewish state. But he should then state his intention to use the resolution’s map as the starting point for negotiations to get back to the 1967 armistice line, rather than start at the latter and negotiate backward to the Separation Wall.
While Resolution 181 may seem anachronistic, its drafters realized that the boundaries made no geographic or economic sense, and drew up plans for an economic and customs union with free transit—which would almost make a two-state solution feasible.
It allowed people to reside in one state while holding citizenship of the other, which points to solutions to populations left behind any new boundaries established. Abbas might offer to allow the settlers to stay under Palestinian jurisdiction, after suitable compensation for the value of the land that was stolen to settle them—in return for the settlement of an equal number of Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line.
The Palestinian Mission to the U.N. has consistently realized the importance of international law and United Nations resolutions, and so, obliquely, do the Israelis and the Americans. They know that the only way to legalize a settlement is for the United Nations to accept it, and that the only way that can happen is if the Palestinian representatives give away their legal rights.
Hence the emphasis from Clinton onward on “negotiations” with no legal context, and the continuous efforts of Israel and the U.S. to find Palestinian negotiators to talk to who will give up those rights. The Israeli subtext has always been that they will talk only to people who they think will give them what they want.
The sad thing is that the United Nations, as a body, far from asserting its own decisions and principles, has been roped in, by being included in the “Quartet,” in an attempt to bend and break the world body.
But almost unobserved across the world, the tide might be turning. In the European Union, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone, leaving behind a trail of party funding scandals that keep returning to active pro-Israeli groups, and in Poland the government that always agreed with Bush has also lost, so there is now a possibility for a slightly more assertive European Union policy. The Australian government of John Howard, which swung to support both Bush and Israel, also has been ousted. Maybe there is hope yet for international law.
Ian Williams, a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations, is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at. His last book was Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 28-29
United Nations Report
Annapolis Conference Coincided With Resolution 181, Har Homa Anniversaries
By Ian Williams
A week after the Nov. 27 Annapolis conference, and a decade after the Clinton administration vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning a new illegal Israeli settlement at Abu Ghneim/Har Homa outside Bethlehem, Israel announced plans to expand it by 300 homes. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex).
THE ANNAPOLIS PHOTO-EVENT took place as scheduled, and since no one had any concrete expectations from the event, it was a great success. In fact, it was such a hit that we can expect to see many more repeat performances.
Everyone turned up for it—except the winners of the last Palestinian elections, who were not invited—and pretty much everyone went away empty-handed, except perhaps the U.S. and Israel, who could tell the world that they were doing their best with yet another lap of the road map.
One can never be sure about anniversaries and their significance, but the week of the conference coincided with several which the schedulers in the State Department either overlooked or puckishly giggled at when they set the date.
It was the 60th anniversary of U.N. Resolution 181, where the international community forced partition on the participants. Within a week, we also saw the 40th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 242, which is cited much more often than 181. It is interesting how this has developed.
Resolution 181, which established a Jewish state, was a General Assembly resolution. Since the U.S. lost its automatic majority in the Assembly, it has become usual to say that its resolutions—including the one accepting the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s annexation wall is illegal—are non-binding.
This is something of an anomaly for a state whose raison d’être is based on historical claims, since if General Assembly resolutions are not binding, then the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not binding on the Arabs or anyone else. The resolution does in fact say that any breach by any party is a threat to peace and security to be dealt with by the Security Council—which is, of course, still “dealing” with it 60 years later.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have somersaulted in the opposite direction, however, arguing that General Assembly resolutions are binding—but they tend to overlook Resolution 181, which the Arab states in the U.N. at the time disregarded. It certainly was unjust in terms of self-determination, but legal.
The Jewish state held barely a majority of Jews and thus incorporated, presumably against their will, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. The resulting map broke many existing principles—not least that of cartography. It produced a checkerboard state, without consulting the occupants directly.
For a non-binding resolution, 181 certainly has had some strong repercussions, not least international legal support for a Jewish state, which still exists, but also about the status of Jerusalem. Under the resolution it was to become “corpus separatum” under U.N. direction—which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the U.S., will build an embassy there, or recognize it as Israel’s capital, eternal or otherwise.
Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital—but, for obvious reasons, not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
On the other hand, Israel’s legal claim to the strip of land along Lake Tiberias that Syria occupied from 1948 to 1967 is based solely on 1947’s resolution's apportioning that to the Jewish State.
Of course, the Syrian claim, such as it is, actually falls in line behind that of the Palestinian Authority, if it is accepted that the 1948 armistice line is now the basis of negotiation.
To add to the sense of historical irony, it is also 10 years since the U.S., under President Bill Clinton, vetoed a Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement building in the Abu Ghneim/Har Homa area. The General Assembly subsequently passed the resolution.
A week after Annapolis, as if to celebrate, Israel announced that it was building 300 more homes in the illegal settlement. It is worth remembering what now presidential contender and then U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson said on behalf of the Clinton administration when he cast the veto: that the United States “shared the concerns expressed about the decision of the Israeli Government to begin construction on the East Jerusalem site,” but “it disagreed on the best method of addressing the situation.
“The United States opposition to the resolution should not be interpreted as an expression of support for the construction in East Jerusalem,” Richardson continued. “Construction on the site was not helpful to the peace process. The parties must take special care to avoid pre-emptive actions that could be seen to prejudge the outcome of negotiations. The decision on East Jerusalem was regrettable. The controversy would not be resolved, however, by interference from the Council. It could only be resolved by the parties themselves.”
So there we are. Some 15 years after Oslo and the so-called peace process, and the Clintonian decision that the parties should negotiate their differences, the illegal settlement is up, running and expanding in defiance of the latest pledges from the Israeli government to their American sponsors, who are still pushing the Palestinians into negotiations with no legal preconditions.
Perhaps now is the time for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to draw a line on the road map between the initial resolution and the final status. He should apologize for the failure of the Arab states to accept Resolution 181 and its determination that there should be a Jewish state. But he should then state his intention to use the resolution’s map as the starting point for negotiations to get back to the 1967 armistice line, rather than start at the latter and negotiate backward to the Separation Wall.
While Resolution 181 may seem anachronistic, its drafters realized that the boundaries made no geographic or economic sense, and drew up plans for an economic and customs union with free transit—which would almost make a two-state solution feasible.
It allowed people to reside in one state while holding citizenship of the other, which points to solutions to populations left behind any new boundaries established. Abbas might offer to allow the settlers to stay under Palestinian jurisdiction, after suitable compensation for the value of the land that was stolen to settle them—in return for the settlement of an equal number of Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line.
The Palestinian Mission to the U.N. has consistently realized the importance of international law and United Nations resolutions, and so, obliquely, do the Israelis and the Americans. They know that the only way to legalize a settlement is for the United Nations to accept it, and that the only way that can happen is if the Palestinian representatives give away their legal rights.
Hence the emphasis from Clinton onward on “negotiations” with no legal context, and the continuous efforts of Israel and the U.S. to find Palestinian negotiators to talk to who will give up those rights. The Israeli subtext has always been that they will talk only to people who they think will give them what they want.
The sad thing is that the United Nations, as a body, far from asserting its own decisions and principles, has been roped in, by being included in the “Quartet,” in an attempt to bend and break the world body.
But almost unobserved across the world, the tide might be turning. In the European Union, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone, leaving behind a trail of party funding scandals that keep returning to active pro-Israeli groups, and in Poland the government that always agreed with Bush has also lost, so there is now a possibility for a slightly more assertive European Union policy. The Australian government of John Howard, which swung to support both Bush and Israel, also has been ousted. Maybe there is hope yet for international law.
Ian Williams, a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations, is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Machine-made Victory
Super Tuesday: Clinton may have won New York, but the breadth of Obama's support was heartening
Ian Williams
February 6, 2008 4:18 AM | Guardian
With minutes of the last lever on New York's voting machines clunking over, all the agencies were announcing for certain a Clinton victory. It was based on exit polls, but the media presented it with such absolute certitude that it smacked of a North Korean general election result announced the day before the vote.
In fact, it was hard to choose. With a hundred million plus dollars each in their campaign war chests, one could not predict victory on the generally accepted (eccentric millionaires like Forbes and Huffington apart) grounds of who spent the most on advertising.
Never mind the voting, or even the fundraising, it is fashion week in New York, and the campaign was about style rather than content. And no wonder Obama was gaining. He certainly has more style than Clinton, whose marriage did not endow her with her husband's unsurpassed worldly wealth of charisma.
On the streets of New York, young and enthusiastic Obama supporters certainly outnumbered Clintonistas, and the Calypso King of the Caribbean, the Mighty Sparrow weighed in on his behalf with a jaunty lyric, "Barack the Magnificent" whose chorus
"Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honest government.
Barack is doggedly defiant: phenomenal strength, and wisdom beyond comment,"
made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in scansion.
In the smoke-filled rooms of the New York Democratic establishment, Clinton had it sewn up, at least in public with Charley Rangel, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus enthusiastically supporting her even if his constituents voted entirely differently. And there are certain incumbent New York advantages such as some all-Hasidic districts which pull in 100% of the return for her.
It had been noticed that Governor Elliot Spitzer, despite a formal obeisance to the Clinton camp, was somewhat missing in action as the vote approached. Perhaps he was just repaying Hillary for her quickness in repudiating his driving licences for illegals initiative, or maybe it was just nervous apprehension that Obama would continue rising, but he managed to screw his support to the sticking place and turned up with all the other Dem pols to the Clinton victory party.
Yes, Clinton won New York, but it was her home state and with the full support of the machine behind her it was no landslide. Similarly in New Jersey, the machine delivered, but in Connecticut, where the machine does not rule, Obama won.
His entirely respectable showing guarantees him a significant share of the New York delegation and the implication that many white Democrats supported him was substantiated in other wins beyond the Confederacy.
In the end, he clearly does represent change to a lot of voters, and his showing should reassure some tactical voters who wonder how he would fare in a general election. While we know that Clinton is in the pocket of the corporate interests who have bankrolled her so handsomely, Obama is still an unknown quantity. They have also been writing cheques for him on a munificent scale. One only hopes that he does not disappoint his enthusiastic supporters by staying bought.
But whatever his policies, his victory would mean not just an end to the Bush era, but to the ghosts of Jim Crow that have been the basis for Republican victories ever since the party of Lincoln played the race card in the old Confederacy - and, one might add, Rudi Giuliani's mayoralty in New York City, which is why the breadth of his support there is so heartening.
Ian Williams
February 6, 2008 4:18 AM | Guardian
With minutes of the last lever on New York's voting machines clunking over, all the agencies were announcing for certain a Clinton victory. It was based on exit polls, but the media presented it with such absolute certitude that it smacked of a North Korean general election result announced the day before the vote.
In fact, it was hard to choose. With a hundred million plus dollars each in their campaign war chests, one could not predict victory on the generally accepted (eccentric millionaires like Forbes and Huffington apart) grounds of who spent the most on advertising.
Never mind the voting, or even the fundraising, it is fashion week in New York, and the campaign was about style rather than content. And no wonder Obama was gaining. He certainly has more style than Clinton, whose marriage did not endow her with her husband's unsurpassed worldly wealth of charisma.
On the streets of New York, young and enthusiastic Obama supporters certainly outnumbered Clintonistas, and the Calypso King of the Caribbean, the Mighty Sparrow weighed in on his behalf with a jaunty lyric, "Barack the Magnificent" whose chorus
"Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honest government.
Barack is doggedly defiant: phenomenal strength, and wisdom beyond comment,"
made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in scansion.
In the smoke-filled rooms of the New York Democratic establishment, Clinton had it sewn up, at least in public with Charley Rangel, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus enthusiastically supporting her even if his constituents voted entirely differently. And there are certain incumbent New York advantages such as some all-Hasidic districts which pull in 100% of the return for her.
It had been noticed that Governor Elliot Spitzer, despite a formal obeisance to the Clinton camp, was somewhat missing in action as the vote approached. Perhaps he was just repaying Hillary for her quickness in repudiating his driving licences for illegals initiative, or maybe it was just nervous apprehension that Obama would continue rising, but he managed to screw his support to the sticking place and turned up with all the other Dem pols to the Clinton victory party.
Yes, Clinton won New York, but it was her home state and with the full support of the machine behind her it was no landslide. Similarly in New Jersey, the machine delivered, but in Connecticut, where the machine does not rule, Obama won.
His entirely respectable showing guarantees him a significant share of the New York delegation and the implication that many white Democrats supported him was substantiated in other wins beyond the Confederacy.
In the end, he clearly does represent change to a lot of voters, and his showing should reassure some tactical voters who wonder how he would fare in a general election. While we know that Clinton is in the pocket of the corporate interests who have bankrolled her so handsomely, Obama is still an unknown quantity. They have also been writing cheques for him on a munificent scale. One only hopes that he does not disappoint his enthusiastic supporters by staying bought.
But whatever his policies, his victory would mean not just an end to the Bush era, but to the ghosts of Jim Crow that have been the basis for Republican victories ever since the party of Lincoln played the race card in the old Confederacy - and, one might add, Rudi Giuliani's mayoralty in New York City, which is why the breadth of his support there is so heartening.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Darwin Tax not Death Tax
Guardian Comment is Free - full text
Ian Williams
One of the cleverest moves the Republicans have made was to label inheritance tax the "death tax", - an unscrupulous move which in the UK the Conservatives unusually stole a march on New Labour by adopting.
It is clearly not a tax on the deceased, who are beyond even the IRS's intrusive reach. It is a tax on their heirs. As a con trick it is on a par with persuading 70% of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Untold millions of voters, whose only chance of amassing the $4m that is exempted under current rules would be to win the lottery, went into a panic about their post-mortem taxes. Since only 2% of estates fall under inheritance tax, their families' chances of being affected are not that far from their chances of winning the lottery.
Many of their estates will be hard put to pay their funeral costs, never mind approaching the taxable limits. (Personally I think a real death duty - a heavy excise duty on embalming fluid would be an environmentally and socially useful fiscal measure, but that's another issue.)
Perhaps because so many Democratic leaders have ancestral financial advantages - think Gore, think Kennedy - they have not seized upon the appropriate response, and called inheritance tax the "Paris Hilton tax", or the "idle legacy and remittance duty".
Money already talks too loud in contemporary America, and it speaks with forked tongue. When a congressman talks about reducing taxes, they do not rush to raise the tax thresholds on earned income so that already struggling working Americans will escape taxation. In response to the very rich people who pay for their campaigns, most of the relief goes to those who already have lots of money. The dividend tax cut, for example netted Wal-Mart's notoriously shy Walton family hundreds of millions. It is no surprise that they are now leading exponents of a repeal of the inheritance tax.
Wal-Mart is not, of course, a struggling family business. It is a public company in which the Walton family happens to own lots of stock (and on whose board Hillary Clinton once sat). For better or worse, it will not close down if they have to sell their shares. Indeed it may well improve if the dead hand of a family that thinks taxes are for little people is taken off.
There is certainly room for discussions to take the family home out of the equation, or even the family farm (although agribusiness has already pretty much taken most of them out of the discussion) and even to discuss the threshold. But if the bloated rich really care about their heirs, we should watch with interest to see how many of them put "do not revive" or "no heroic measures" clauses in the living wills for 2010, the year when the wrestling in Congress sees the inheritance tax set at zero. After all, Wal-Mart did not hesitate to declare additional dividend pay to take advantage of the reduction of the dividend tax.
In 2010 we should watch the actuarial progress of the Walton family and their peers with interest but few expectations for signs of self-sacrifice. After all, they have bankrolled a party that wants to give them hundreds of billions in tax relief but thinks that paying for health insurance for nine million poor kids would break the Federal Reserve.
In fact, the inheritance tax should really be called the Darwin tax. Anyone with enough money to get caught by the IRS is stupid enough to a) believe that they are immortal, or b) think that they are clever enough to dispense with the services of estate planning accountants and lawyers. The gene pool and society are enhanced if their offspring don't get large dollops of free money. With the very real educational and social advantages that wealthy parents give their progeny, windfall inheritances just deprive them of the get up and go urges that free-marketeers always urge on the unemployed.
This is a view clearly shared by some of the more entrepreneurial souls including Conrad Hilton, who obviously thinks that his daughter can provide for herself by using her own distinctive skills. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates likewise have put their fortunes to use for good works, and Buffet gets years lopped off purgatory by giving his to the Gates Foundation rather than by bidding for nominal immortality with his own eponymous foundation.
Ian Williams
One of the cleverest moves the Republicans have made was to label inheritance tax the "death tax", - an unscrupulous move which in the UK the Conservatives unusually stole a march on New Labour by adopting.
It is clearly not a tax on the deceased, who are beyond even the IRS's intrusive reach. It is a tax on their heirs. As a con trick it is on a par with persuading 70% of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Untold millions of voters, whose only chance of amassing the $4m that is exempted under current rules would be to win the lottery, went into a panic about their post-mortem taxes. Since only 2% of estates fall under inheritance tax, their families' chances of being affected are not that far from their chances of winning the lottery.
Many of their estates will be hard put to pay their funeral costs, never mind approaching the taxable limits. (Personally I think a real death duty - a heavy excise duty on embalming fluid would be an environmentally and socially useful fiscal measure, but that's another issue.)
Perhaps because so many Democratic leaders have ancestral financial advantages - think Gore, think Kennedy - they have not seized upon the appropriate response, and called inheritance tax the "Paris Hilton tax", or the "idle legacy and remittance duty".
Money already talks too loud in contemporary America, and it speaks with forked tongue. When a congressman talks about reducing taxes, they do not rush to raise the tax thresholds on earned income so that already struggling working Americans will escape taxation. In response to the very rich people who pay for their campaigns, most of the relief goes to those who already have lots of money. The dividend tax cut, for example netted Wal-Mart's notoriously shy Walton family hundreds of millions. It is no surprise that they are now leading exponents of a repeal of the inheritance tax.
Wal-Mart is not, of course, a struggling family business. It is a public company in which the Walton family happens to own lots of stock (and on whose board Hillary Clinton once sat). For better or worse, it will not close down if they have to sell their shares. Indeed it may well improve if the dead hand of a family that thinks taxes are for little people is taken off.
There is certainly room for discussions to take the family home out of the equation, or even the family farm (although agribusiness has already pretty much taken most of them out of the discussion) and even to discuss the threshold. But if the bloated rich really care about their heirs, we should watch with interest to see how many of them put "do not revive" or "no heroic measures" clauses in the living wills for 2010, the year when the wrestling in Congress sees the inheritance tax set at zero. After all, Wal-Mart did not hesitate to declare additional dividend pay to take advantage of the reduction of the dividend tax.
In 2010 we should watch the actuarial progress of the Walton family and their peers with interest but few expectations for signs of self-sacrifice. After all, they have bankrolled a party that wants to give them hundreds of billions in tax relief but thinks that paying for health insurance for nine million poor kids would break the Federal Reserve.
In fact, the inheritance tax should really be called the Darwin tax. Anyone with enough money to get caught by the IRS is stupid enough to a) believe that they are immortal, or b) think that they are clever enough to dispense with the services of estate planning accountants and lawyers. The gene pool and society are enhanced if their offspring don't get large dollops of free money. With the very real educational and social advantages that wealthy parents give their progeny, windfall inheritances just deprive them of the get up and go urges that free-marketeers always urge on the unemployed.
This is a view clearly shared by some of the more entrepreneurial souls including Conrad Hilton, who obviously thinks that his daughter can provide for herself by using her own distinctive skills. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates likewise have put their fortunes to use for good works, and Buffet gets years lopped off purgatory by giving his to the Gates Foundation rather than by bidding for nominal immortality with his own eponymous foundation.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
Lest We Forget, Cohen's Peter Panglossianism, full text
From the Guardian 31 January
In tragedy, hubris, over-reaching pride, is what leads to the fall from fortune of the hero.
Roger Cohen's boosterism in the New York Times on "America's Riveting Democracy" is symptomatic. In Recessional, at the height of the Pax Britannica, Rudyard Kipling could foresee:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Not to mention a special mention for the neocons:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard -
All valiant dust that builds on dust.
But there are no signs off such maudlin introspection in Cohen, who claims that the Pax Americana is "the unsung success story that gives pessimistic pontificators the time and luxury to postulate its demise". That would of course be a reference to making Iraq an economic and social desert and calling it peace, or practicing interventio interruptus in Afghanistan before pulling out to hunt the Snark in Iraq. Or it could be a reference to the peace that American partisanship has brought about in Gaza and the West Bank.
If he had contented himself with saying that the USA is still the most important superpower in the world, and had great potential for good, he would have had a point. But his exultant tone gives jingoism a bad name. He lacks the foresight even of the neocon and Star War boosters. At least they foresaw the eclipse of American economic power, and want to consolidate military supremacy.
Cohen cheers: "Obamania shows how great America's hold on the planetary imagination remains." Let us consider this. Maybe the rest of the world realises what many Americans seem to have forgotten, that Senator Obama's parents could not legally marry in the 16 states with miscegenation laws. The rest of the world might be seeing Obama's candidacy as a civility test for the superpower: has it exorcised Jim Crow, or is it still waiting for the Republicans (or indeed ex-President Clinton) to wheel it out the closet?
"As this election campaign is demonstrating, the United States remains the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth," says Cohen, referring to elections in which the primaries are open only to those who can raise $120 million in campaign contributions. As Will Sutton went to the banks, so candidates go to the plutocrats, because that's where the money is - and that is why the money, in corporate welfare and tax breaks, will continue to go to the rich no matter who is elected. They are nails in the coffin, not rivets, until there is serious reform of election financing.
That is also why his Panglossian analysis of the "wishful thinking" that "the military strains in Iraq and Afghanistan, a credit crunch, spiraling debt and the specter of recession form a picture of American overreach and decline."
The US is running a huge fiscal deficit, a huge balance of payments crisis, and is bogged down in self-inflicted military commitments that it cannot successfully cope with. In doing so, it is dependent on the kindness of strangers, whom it habitually insults, including Chinese and other Asian central banks and Muslim oil producers. Roger really should have a touch of the recessionals.
The usual excuses are offered. "At a piddling 232 years old, the United States is a mere teen in historical terms. Demography, Google and the political fever of these primaries all indicate its vigor."
In fact, at 232 years, the US is old enough to know better. As an independent polity it is older than Italy, Germany, India and probably 180 other members of the United Nations. It is time for it, and Roger Cohen, to grow up and stop making excuses like a self-indulgent aging baby boomer with Peter Panglossian syndrome.
The citizens of Sweden, Holland, Britain, France and Spain can testify that there are positive advantages to giving up on hegemony and empire. Your children are not sent to die in faraway countries. The resources that used to go on military power can stay at home and provide education, health and pensions for your own citizens rather than bombs for denizens of other lands.
Yes, the US could exercise leadership, but it could also do some catching up and join the world community so people will listen. The next president and Congress could sign and ratify the Land Mine and Child Soldiers Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocols, like all the countries you actually want to lead. The US could actually adhere to the Geneva Conventions and stop kidnapping and torturing people. It would indeed be a small step for the next president, but a giant leap forward for mankind.
Even with your breathless patriotic purple prose, Roger, I bet you can't hold your breath that long.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe -
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Rudyard Kipling was a patriot, who also welcomed rising American power even as he regretted what he saw as British decline. The US needs patriots like him, who can welcome a sharing of responsibility.
In tragedy, hubris, over-reaching pride, is what leads to the fall from fortune of the hero.
Roger Cohen's boosterism in the New York Times on "America's Riveting Democracy" is symptomatic. In Recessional, at the height of the Pax Britannica, Rudyard Kipling could foresee:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Not to mention a special mention for the neocons:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard -
All valiant dust that builds on dust.
But there are no signs off such maudlin introspection in Cohen, who claims that the Pax Americana is "the unsung success story that gives pessimistic pontificators the time and luxury to postulate its demise". That would of course be a reference to making Iraq an economic and social desert and calling it peace, or practicing interventio interruptus in Afghanistan before pulling out to hunt the Snark in Iraq. Or it could be a reference to the peace that American partisanship has brought about in Gaza and the West Bank.
If he had contented himself with saying that the USA is still the most important superpower in the world, and had great potential for good, he would have had a point. But his exultant tone gives jingoism a bad name. He lacks the foresight even of the neocon and Star War boosters. At least they foresaw the eclipse of American economic power, and want to consolidate military supremacy.
Cohen cheers: "Obamania shows how great America's hold on the planetary imagination remains." Let us consider this. Maybe the rest of the world realises what many Americans seem to have forgotten, that Senator Obama's parents could not legally marry in the 16 states with miscegenation laws. The rest of the world might be seeing Obama's candidacy as a civility test for the superpower: has it exorcised Jim Crow, or is it still waiting for the Republicans (or indeed ex-President Clinton) to wheel it out the closet?
"As this election campaign is demonstrating, the United States remains the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth," says Cohen, referring to elections in which the primaries are open only to those who can raise $120 million in campaign contributions. As Will Sutton went to the banks, so candidates go to the plutocrats, because that's where the money is - and that is why the money, in corporate welfare and tax breaks, will continue to go to the rich no matter who is elected. They are nails in the coffin, not rivets, until there is serious reform of election financing.
That is also why his Panglossian analysis of the "wishful thinking" that "the military strains in Iraq and Afghanistan, a credit crunch, spiraling debt and the specter of recession form a picture of American overreach and decline."
The US is running a huge fiscal deficit, a huge balance of payments crisis, and is bogged down in self-inflicted military commitments that it cannot successfully cope with. In doing so, it is dependent on the kindness of strangers, whom it habitually insults, including Chinese and other Asian central banks and Muslim oil producers. Roger really should have a touch of the recessionals.
The usual excuses are offered. "At a piddling 232 years old, the United States is a mere teen in historical terms. Demography, Google and the political fever of these primaries all indicate its vigor."
In fact, at 232 years, the US is old enough to know better. As an independent polity it is older than Italy, Germany, India and probably 180 other members of the United Nations. It is time for it, and Roger Cohen, to grow up and stop making excuses like a self-indulgent aging baby boomer with Peter Panglossian syndrome.
The citizens of Sweden, Holland, Britain, France and Spain can testify that there are positive advantages to giving up on hegemony and empire. Your children are not sent to die in faraway countries. The resources that used to go on military power can stay at home and provide education, health and pensions for your own citizens rather than bombs for denizens of other lands.
Yes, the US could exercise leadership, but it could also do some catching up and join the world community so people will listen. The next president and Congress could sign and ratify the Land Mine and Child Soldiers Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocols, like all the countries you actually want to lead. The US could actually adhere to the Geneva Conventions and stop kidnapping and torturing people. It would indeed be a small step for the next president, but a giant leap forward for mankind.
Even with your breathless patriotic purple prose, Roger, I bet you can't hold your breath that long.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe -
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Rudyard Kipling was a patriot, who also welcomed rising American power even as he regretted what he saw as British decline. The US needs patriots like him, who can welcome a sharing of responsibility.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
State of Doublespeak
From the Guardian, this morning.
Ian Williams
In the annals of doublespeak there can have been few such impressive achievements as George Bush's final state of the union address. It was a bit like listening to the emperor Honorius give his self-congratulatory state of the empire speech around 410 - just before Alaric had his Roman holiday.
"Let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases," says the president who has tried to sabotage the already inadequate Kyoto protocol and whose minions have sedulously blacked out any references to global warming from scientific documents.
For all these years, the president has fiddled while the globe heated up - and now he has suddenly become green-friendly, talking of renewable clean energy. But the only tangible thing he has done about conservation is to more than double oil prices since taking office by starting and threatening to start wars in the world's major oil-bearing regions. One supposes that Exxon-Mobil, one of the major Republican funders and opponents of Kyoto, may devote some of its quintupled profits to energy research ... but on the other hand, maybe not.
And it all comes back to Iraq. The Pentagon eats up half the US budget, and more than half the world's military spending but suddenly programmes like social security, self-financing for many decades to come from workers' contributions, are too expensive for the richest country on Earth.
After seven years of condoning pork-barrelling, the president discovers that it is a bad thing and the US economy cannot afford the "earmarks", the pet projects that Congressmen have traditionally funnelled back in their districts. They are half what they were when his party controlled the Congress, and a tiny fraction of his earmark for the war in Iraq.
And in case anyone has forgotten, Osama Bin Laden is still free and uncaught while the process of catching him makes Hunting the Snark seem like rocket science. The bulk of US forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq, while rattling sabres at Iran.
"We must trust in the wisdom of our founders and empower judges who understand that the constitution means what it says," comes with chutzpah from an administration that has defended and practised torture, imprisonment without trial, wiretapping, and the right of the president to disregard any parts of any act that Congress passes which he does not like.
On one point he inadvertently speaks the truth. He says "We must trust American workers to compete with anyone in the world and empower them by opening up new markets overseas." Indeed, on current trends, they will be earning less than most of their rivals in Asia. Income levels in most other countries are rising. While he has been president, the median income for American working families has dropped by $1,100: there are millions more Americans without health insurance, and below the poverty line. And to make them even more competitive, the US dollar has almost devalued by 45% against the euro, while the trade deficit has doubled.
Motivating his sudden affection for bipartisanship is the hope that Democrat party leaders will forget the previous years of uncompromisingly dismissive diktat from the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill and go along with what he wants. And sadly, enough of them might just do that, and thwart the chances of a real change.
Ian Williams
In the annals of doublespeak there can have been few such impressive achievements as George Bush's final state of the union address. It was a bit like listening to the emperor Honorius give his self-congratulatory state of the empire speech around 410 - just before Alaric had his Roman holiday.
"Let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases," says the president who has tried to sabotage the already inadequate Kyoto protocol and whose minions have sedulously blacked out any references to global warming from scientific documents.
For all these years, the president has fiddled while the globe heated up - and now he has suddenly become green-friendly, talking of renewable clean energy. But the only tangible thing he has done about conservation is to more than double oil prices since taking office by starting and threatening to start wars in the world's major oil-bearing regions. One supposes that Exxon-Mobil, one of the major Republican funders and opponents of Kyoto, may devote some of its quintupled profits to energy research ... but on the other hand, maybe not.
And it all comes back to Iraq. The Pentagon eats up half the US budget, and more than half the world's military spending but suddenly programmes like social security, self-financing for many decades to come from workers' contributions, are too expensive for the richest country on Earth.
After seven years of condoning pork-barrelling, the president discovers that it is a bad thing and the US economy cannot afford the "earmarks", the pet projects that Congressmen have traditionally funnelled back in their districts. They are half what they were when his party controlled the Congress, and a tiny fraction of his earmark for the war in Iraq.
And in case anyone has forgotten, Osama Bin Laden is still free and uncaught while the process of catching him makes Hunting the Snark seem like rocket science. The bulk of US forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq, while rattling sabres at Iran.
"We must trust in the wisdom of our founders and empower judges who understand that the constitution means what it says," comes with chutzpah from an administration that has defended and practised torture, imprisonment without trial, wiretapping, and the right of the president to disregard any parts of any act that Congress passes which he does not like.
On one point he inadvertently speaks the truth. He says "We must trust American workers to compete with anyone in the world and empower them by opening up new markets overseas." Indeed, on current trends, they will be earning less than most of their rivals in Asia. Income levels in most other countries are rising. While he has been president, the median income for American working families has dropped by $1,100: there are millions more Americans without health insurance, and below the poverty line. And to make them even more competitive, the US dollar has almost devalued by 45% against the euro, while the trade deficit has doubled.
Motivating his sudden affection for bipartisanship is the hope that Democrat party leaders will forget the previous years of uncompromisingly dismissive diktat from the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill and go along with what he wants. And sadly, enough of them might just do that, and thwart the chances of a real change.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Public Schools- An Education Swindle
From the current edition of Tribune, 25 January
deals with the elitist education system and its origins in, surprise, pillaging the poor.
The report of the Charity Commission on how to implement the “public benefit” provisions of the 2006 Charities Act has provoked an intriguing mixture of indignation and philanthropic endeavour on the part of the public schools.
Eton accused the Charity Commission of "flawed reasoning" and Harrow it had misinterpreted charity law. They claim that it should have taken into account the savings to the government of not educating the public school types, which of course ignores the counter effect of the increased difficulty for state pupils in entering universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, afterwards.
The Act’s biggest apparent change was to extend test of “public benefit” to the other traditional heads of charity: the promotion of religion, education, and the relief of poverty. But this is restitution rather than a revolution. The public schools are morally at least stolen property.
The new guidelines are simply restating a long-standing maxim of Charity Law that no charity could exclude the poor. When a government Commission in 1818 asked it why there were so many rich boys at Winchester, a school founded five centuries earlier d for seventy "poor and needy" scholars, the headmaster replied that the boys were totally without money -- it was their parents who were rich. From the responses to this Commission's report, the excuses have not improved over the centuries.
However, the judges whose decisions have created charity law over the centuries stretched that to breaking point – particularly in the case of public schools, which so many of them attended.
The privileges claimed by the schools are not nearly as ancient as their original obligations as charities. In Victorian times, many of the schools paid tax on their profits. It took years of assiduous lobbying by the Headmasters' Conference before Winston Churchill’s 1927 Finance Act exempted profits from trade if they arose from the primary purpose of the charity.
But that is minor compared with the original sin of elite purloining of ancient foundations begun as endowments for the “education of poor and indigent scholars,” In a striking demonstration of the solidarity and power of the public school boys in parliament, the actual Endowed Schools Act that parliament passed in 1869 totally reversed the direction of the Bill’s original intentions of establishing a modern education system that would equip the nation for the modern world.
Instead it set up an Endowed Schools Commission, which did just what the Headmasters wanted. On their behalf old statutes and trust deeds were set aside, blowing away all the old semi-feudal relics -- like free places for poor scholars, or provision for the education of the local community -- as well as the more necessary removal of restrictions on curricula. Even more shamelessly, the commissioners confiscated charities that provided food and cash for poor families that they regarded as outmoded, and handed them over to the schools.
In effect, they took bread from the mouths and coal from the hearths of the poor to fund schools for the privileged classes. Even more cynically, they made admission to the public schools dependent on “merit,” which they measured by proficiency in Latin or Greek – subjects that the average workers' children were unlikely to study. That led to the development of fee-paying preparatory schools – which were not charities – to prepare. Paying the fees to those, not "merit," was the real entry test to the public institutions. In fact, the Public Schools owe the whole nation huge reparations for their part in creating and perpetuating a ruling elite that was totally unprepared for a modern technological world.
Opponents of the elitist privileges represented by the public schools often call for the withdrawal of charitable status as if it were just a case of tax relief. They are falling into a trap. The title of “Public” schools is not just some quaint British anomaly. The schools are public institutions, charities, even if they have been hijacked and suborned by the upper classes. Indeed the move to call them “Independent” schools was probably intended to break any inconvenient associations with “public” service.
Their charitable status is not just about tax exemption, it is about all the bequests and endowments made to them because they are charities. Withdrawing their charitable status would be privatization without compensation. The appropriate response is to enforce their charitable obligations as the Charity Commission has now decided.
It is hardly that innovatory. As well as drawing upon centuries-old legal principles, the proposal has been both propounded and procrastinated for decades, indeed centuries. For example in 1975, noted that many public schools "were founded not simply for the advancement of education, but specifically for the education of the poor... We believe that our recommendation to make a test of public benefit the over-riding consideration with that of education accords both with the spirit in which our Sixteenth Century public schools were founded and with a widespread public feeling today that charitable activities should not be manifestly devoted to privilege or exclusiveness."
There will be howls of “confiscation” from the public school lobby, but charities have obligations as well as privileges, and in fact, any such plan to open educational and social advantage to the whole of society would be redressing an historic wrong. To incorporate the public schools into a national education system, in whatever form, would be more in the nature of restitution than expropriation. Those grammar schools that the state system incorporated in the seventies and earlier were not the subject of compensation. Similarly, the National Health Service's takeover of the voluntary charitable hospitals in 1948 involved no compensation for the same reason that they were still being used for the same public benefit as before.
Sadly, just as ex public school boys have suborned charity law in the past, the administrative fixes proposed by the 2006 Charity Act, in effect leaving it to the judiciary, are unlikely to end the self-perpetuating elitism that the public schools represent. Most judges are the beneficiaries of public school education themselves. They are unlikely to want to rock the schools’ boat too much.
In 1931 R H Tawney succinctly summed up the main argument against them. "The idea that differences of educational opportunity among children should depend upon differences in wealth among parents is barbaric." The solution has to be a new Endowed Schools Act,, in which parliament (itself heavily populated by public school alumni but at least directly accountable) sets out an agenda for the schools that reflects their original purposes and the present social needs. In the meantime, the guidelines are step towards correction of the great school robbery of a previous era.
Ian Williams wrote the "Alms Trade: Charities Past Present and Future" published originally by Unwin Hyman, reprinted last year by Cosimo Press which has two chapters on education and charity.
deals with the elitist education system and its origins in, surprise, pillaging the poor.
The report of the Charity Commission on how to implement the “public benefit” provisions of the 2006 Charities Act has provoked an intriguing mixture of indignation and philanthropic endeavour on the part of the public schools.
Eton accused the Charity Commission of "flawed reasoning" and Harrow it had misinterpreted charity law. They claim that it should have taken into account the savings to the government of not educating the public school types, which of course ignores the counter effect of the increased difficulty for state pupils in entering universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, afterwards.
The Act’s biggest apparent change was to extend test of “public benefit” to the other traditional heads of charity: the promotion of religion, education, and the relief of poverty. But this is restitution rather than a revolution. The public schools are morally at least stolen property.
The new guidelines are simply restating a long-standing maxim of Charity Law that no charity could exclude the poor. When a government Commission in 1818 asked it why there were so many rich boys at Winchester, a school founded five centuries earlier d for seventy "poor and needy" scholars, the headmaster replied that the boys were totally without money -- it was their parents who were rich. From the responses to this Commission's report, the excuses have not improved over the centuries.
However, the judges whose decisions have created charity law over the centuries stretched that to breaking point – particularly in the case of public schools, which so many of them attended.
The privileges claimed by the schools are not nearly as ancient as their original obligations as charities. In Victorian times, many of the schools paid tax on their profits. It took years of assiduous lobbying by the Headmasters' Conference before Winston Churchill’s 1927 Finance Act exempted profits from trade if they arose from the primary purpose of the charity.
But that is minor compared with the original sin of elite purloining of ancient foundations begun as endowments for the “education of poor and indigent scholars,” In a striking demonstration of the solidarity and power of the public school boys in parliament, the actual Endowed Schools Act that parliament passed in 1869 totally reversed the direction of the Bill’s original intentions of establishing a modern education system that would equip the nation for the modern world.
Instead it set up an Endowed Schools Commission, which did just what the Headmasters wanted. On their behalf old statutes and trust deeds were set aside, blowing away all the old semi-feudal relics -- like free places for poor scholars, or provision for the education of the local community -- as well as the more necessary removal of restrictions on curricula. Even more shamelessly, the commissioners confiscated charities that provided food and cash for poor families that they regarded as outmoded, and handed them over to the schools.
In effect, they took bread from the mouths and coal from the hearths of the poor to fund schools for the privileged classes. Even more cynically, they made admission to the public schools dependent on “merit,” which they measured by proficiency in Latin or Greek – subjects that the average workers' children were unlikely to study. That led to the development of fee-paying preparatory schools – which were not charities – to prepare. Paying the fees to those, not "merit," was the real entry test to the public institutions. In fact, the Public Schools owe the whole nation huge reparations for their part in creating and perpetuating a ruling elite that was totally unprepared for a modern technological world.
Opponents of the elitist privileges represented by the public schools often call for the withdrawal of charitable status as if it were just a case of tax relief. They are falling into a trap. The title of “Public” schools is not just some quaint British anomaly. The schools are public institutions, charities, even if they have been hijacked and suborned by the upper classes. Indeed the move to call them “Independent” schools was probably intended to break any inconvenient associations with “public” service.
Their charitable status is not just about tax exemption, it is about all the bequests and endowments made to them because they are charities. Withdrawing their charitable status would be privatization without compensation. The appropriate response is to enforce their charitable obligations as the Charity Commission has now decided.
It is hardly that innovatory. As well as drawing upon centuries-old legal principles, the proposal has been both propounded and procrastinated for decades, indeed centuries. For example in 1975, noted that many public schools "were founded not simply for the advancement of education, but specifically for the education of the poor... We believe that our recommendation to make a test of public benefit the over-riding consideration with that of education accords both with the spirit in which our Sixteenth Century public schools were founded and with a widespread public feeling today that charitable activities should not be manifestly devoted to privilege or exclusiveness."
There will be howls of “confiscation” from the public school lobby, but charities have obligations as well as privileges, and in fact, any such plan to open educational and social advantage to the whole of society would be redressing an historic wrong. To incorporate the public schools into a national education system, in whatever form, would be more in the nature of restitution than expropriation. Those grammar schools that the state system incorporated in the seventies and earlier were not the subject of compensation. Similarly, the National Health Service's takeover of the voluntary charitable hospitals in 1948 involved no compensation for the same reason that they were still being used for the same public benefit as before.
Sadly, just as ex public school boys have suborned charity law in the past, the administrative fixes proposed by the 2006 Charity Act, in effect leaving it to the judiciary, are unlikely to end the self-perpetuating elitism that the public schools represent. Most judges are the beneficiaries of public school education themselves. They are unlikely to want to rock the schools’ boat too much.
In 1931 R H Tawney succinctly summed up the main argument against them. "The idea that differences of educational opportunity among children should depend upon differences in wealth among parents is barbaric." The solution has to be a new Endowed Schools Act,, in which parliament (itself heavily populated by public school alumni but at least directly accountable) sets out an agenda for the schools that reflects their original purposes and the present social needs. In the meantime, the guidelines are step towards correction of the great school robbery of a previous era.
Ian Williams wrote the "Alms Trade: Charities Past Present and Future" published originally by Unwin Hyman, reprinted last year by Cosimo Press which has two chapters on education and charity.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
How much for a pound of flesh -full text
Last week the state of New York moved towards its revenge on the body-snatchers - the ghoulish gang that plundered corpses of transplant material on their way to the crematorium.
Certainly they deserve severe punishment for their clinical ineptitude, which included selling bones from bone-cancer victims, but if they hadn't been so sloppy, one has to wonder if this were not, in essence, a victim-free crime.
Alistair Cooke, the famous journalist whose bones were disturbed by the ghouls would probably have been very pleased to think that he could help someone else live - but equally very displeased with the idea that others may catch cancer because of the greed of the ghouls.
Those who opt for cremation tend not to pay much heed to the idea of bodily resurrection and it raises the question of who actually owns our earthly remains. My father for example left his body to Liverpool School of Medicine, which refused to accept it because, they told me, they only took "healthy bodies". It was an intriguing concept, since most cadavers of my acquaintance have been terminally unhealthy, but it was, a term of art which presumably applies to transplants as well as dissection.
The philosopher John Harris once posed a thought experiment to solve the problem of organ shortages: a lottery would pick which person who would be sacrificed to save others, and since more people would live as a result, society as a whole would be enhanced by the exercise. But not even Ron Paul has taken up the idea.
Different countries have different strokes. Reputedly, transplant hospitals in China are close to execution grounds, ensuring a steady supply of "healthy bodies" for dismemberment. In countries with civilised healthcare systems, altruism rules. Donors and doctors give their organs and services pro bono publico. But that does not work in more robustly entrepreneurial economies.
My father's main concern was to stop the undertakers' making a profit from his corpse, and in similar vein, I must say that my only compunction about filling in the organ donation section on my driving license is that in the US, so many people, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and others, would make a killing, if you forgive the expression, from any of the organs that my dissolute lifestyle have left fit for transplant.
In the US, the alleged bastion of property rights, religious obscurantism is robbing American citizens of their birthright. Everyone, no matter how poor, is wandering around with some quarter of a million dollars worth of transplant material: but because of the 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act, they cannot cash in their chips.
The surgeons and hospitals of America can charge an arm and a leg for hoisting out hearts and replanting them, and it seems some morticians can eke out their bottom line on the side, but the donors have no financial incentive whatsoever. Talk about a "death tax!" This no mere Republican rhetorical trope - it's the real thing. The federal government, almost unchallenged, has deprived us of the usufruct of our most personal property.
Adam Smith's invisible hand is just waiting to be transplanted into this field. Of course you may object that it is difficult for a cadaver to take profits from such a sale, but think futures. If bankers can sell stinkers like collateralised debt obligations, they should easily be able to devise an actuarially advised organ options market which would make a return for the living, and help a return to life for those in need of the spare parts.
The principle is the same as the viaticals market in which for example, HIV sufferers were able to cash in their life insurance early so they could enjoy the proceeds while still alive.
The people who would rush to sell organ futures would very likely also be those who are least likely to have a private pension scheme and who would benefit most from topping up their social security funds.
If the government really must get involved, it could help solve the alleged social security crisis by insisting that at least some, if not all, of the proceeds, would be invested in some sort of individual retirement account, but a cash handout would also help boost the recession-verging economy by putting money into the hands of people who would rush out and spend it.
Once the market is up and running, we would see that old invisible hand in operation, matching supply and demand and fixing appropriate prices for organs and tissue, going beyond the old barter economics of a cornea for a cornea. We would see the rapid development of a spot market, of derivatives, futures, hedging. Investors could go long or short on the organ of their choice. At last we would get a serious price for a pound of flesh.
Rescind the US organ transplant act now, and save America!
Certainly they deserve severe punishment for their clinical ineptitude, which included selling bones from bone-cancer victims, but if they hadn't been so sloppy, one has to wonder if this were not, in essence, a victim-free crime.
Alistair Cooke, the famous journalist whose bones were disturbed by the ghouls would probably have been very pleased to think that he could help someone else live - but equally very displeased with the idea that others may catch cancer because of the greed of the ghouls.
Those who opt for cremation tend not to pay much heed to the idea of bodily resurrection and it raises the question of who actually owns our earthly remains. My father for example left his body to Liverpool School of Medicine, which refused to accept it because, they told me, they only took "healthy bodies". It was an intriguing concept, since most cadavers of my acquaintance have been terminally unhealthy, but it was, a term of art which presumably applies to transplants as well as dissection.
The philosopher John Harris once posed a thought experiment to solve the problem of organ shortages: a lottery would pick which person who would be sacrificed to save others, and since more people would live as a result, society as a whole would be enhanced by the exercise. But not even Ron Paul has taken up the idea.
Different countries have different strokes. Reputedly, transplant hospitals in China are close to execution grounds, ensuring a steady supply of "healthy bodies" for dismemberment. In countries with civilised healthcare systems, altruism rules. Donors and doctors give their organs and services pro bono publico. But that does not work in more robustly entrepreneurial economies.
My father's main concern was to stop the undertakers' making a profit from his corpse, and in similar vein, I must say that my only compunction about filling in the organ donation section on my driving license is that in the US, so many people, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and others, would make a killing, if you forgive the expression, from any of the organs that my dissolute lifestyle have left fit for transplant.
In the US, the alleged bastion of property rights, religious obscurantism is robbing American citizens of their birthright. Everyone, no matter how poor, is wandering around with some quarter of a million dollars worth of transplant material: but because of the 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act, they cannot cash in their chips.
The surgeons and hospitals of America can charge an arm and a leg for hoisting out hearts and replanting them, and it seems some morticians can eke out their bottom line on the side, but the donors have no financial incentive whatsoever. Talk about a "death tax!" This no mere Republican rhetorical trope - it's the real thing. The federal government, almost unchallenged, has deprived us of the usufruct of our most personal property.
Adam Smith's invisible hand is just waiting to be transplanted into this field. Of course you may object that it is difficult for a cadaver to take profits from such a sale, but think futures. If bankers can sell stinkers like collateralised debt obligations, they should easily be able to devise an actuarially advised organ options market which would make a return for the living, and help a return to life for those in need of the spare parts.
The principle is the same as the viaticals market in which for example, HIV sufferers were able to cash in their life insurance early so they could enjoy the proceeds while still alive.
The people who would rush to sell organ futures would very likely also be those who are least likely to have a private pension scheme and who would benefit most from topping up their social security funds.
If the government really must get involved, it could help solve the alleged social security crisis by insisting that at least some, if not all, of the proceeds, would be invested in some sort of individual retirement account, but a cash handout would also help boost the recession-verging economy by putting money into the hands of people who would rush out and spend it.
Once the market is up and running, we would see that old invisible hand in operation, matching supply and demand and fixing appropriate prices for organs and tissue, going beyond the old barter economics of a cornea for a cornea. We would see the rapid development of a spot market, of derivatives, futures, hedging. Investors could go long or short on the organ of their choice. At last we would get a serious price for a pound of flesh.
Rescind the US organ transplant act now, and save America!
Monday, January 21, 2008
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