Dicing with Armageddon: Trita Parsi on Iran

A Single Roll of the Dice

A Single Roll of the Dice

Trita Parsi

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The New Age of Work- CRoB

National healthcare - essential for full employment, says Jim Huntington in this week's CROB.
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talking to Ian Williams

Work's New Age

James B. Huntingto...

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It does make a difference

Obama - least worst by a long shot

Ian Williams

Obama is not perfect, but at least he is not deranged

by Ian Williams

Saturday, May 19th, 2012

Those of us who said it made no difference and went on to let Margaret Thatcher win power in Britain were disastrously wrong. We still live with the consequences. And the current crop of Republicans makes Thatcher look like everyone’s favourite aunt.
Barack Obama is actually a traditional Chicago politician. He takes large donations from corporate interests. His recent reconversion to the cause of same-sex marriage probably owes more to the potential munificence of gay donors than any deep attachment to civil rights. Nonetheless Obama is very different from the recidivist Jurassic conservatives. The gay marriage issue is emblematic. Heaven knows that, in the land of serial philandering and rich divorce lawyers, heterosexual marriage is a somewhat compromised issue – even discounting Mitt Romney’s polygamous Mormon ancestors. Interestingly, the real die-hard conservatives who bankroll the election campaigns are not socially or religiously conservative all, any more than their neo-conservative chums are. But, between them, they know how to pull the strings of those who are.
It is hardly surprising that they can work this on conservative and evangelical voters when allegedly progressive Americans are prepared to ignore their own collective economic and social interests, and abstain or throw their vote to protest candidates because they see Obama as insufficiently supportive, just as millions on the right will vote against him because they see him as insufficiently fervent against gay marriage or anti-abortion.
Approaching the presidential election, the Supreme Court is pondering the constitutionality of the Obama healthcare bill, and it seems sadly likely that, in the 21st century, they will decide that this faltering step forward into the 20th century is not what the Founding Fathers intended. The conservative majority on the bench looks at the world through a politically expedient prism and, like most Republican legislators, are prepared to exact any price from their fellow citizens in the interests of ensuring the defeat of Obama. One almost has to admire their almost Bolshevik determination of purpose compared with the wobbly Democrats. Ironically, the much-reviled “Obamacare” is modelled on the system introduced by then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Symptomatic of the conservative success in promoting a fact-thin agenda, opinion polls show that most of the elements of Obamacare enjoy popular support, but that the overall bill has been calumniated into negative ratings.  But playing fast and loose with the facts goes naturally with a flexible attitude to history, as was shown when Republicans chased each other baying into the Fox News hole about Obama’s temerity in claiming credit for ordering the assault on Osama bin Laden’s household. Scarcely a single Republican seems to remember President George W Bush, let alone the famous “Mission Accomplished” banner when he landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln – at the beginning of10 years of war in Iraq.
While reality-based voters should accept that a system that insures almost everyone is an advance on one that left more than 40 million people uninsured, some on the American left are as ideologically obsessed as the right – which is why so many find common ground in supporting the derangedly conservative Ron Paul in preference to a President whose signature achievements in bringing millions into the healthcare system and saving large swathes of American industry are so easily overlooked when your vantage point is an ivory tower of political correctness.
A big issue for some on the left, who would have picketed the Normandy landings as foreign intervention, is that Ron Paul is from the isolationist wing of American politics and wants to cut support for Israel. Obama finished combat operations in Iraq and is winding down inAfghanistan . But ideologues would rather be complicit in re-electing the people who started the wars. Millions may die, but the political purity survives intact. On the Middle East, Obama has not shone, despite being a marginal improvement over recent predecessors. But let Benjamin Netanyahu bear oblique witness: his nightmare is a second-term Obama holding his feet to the fire. While the President might not be inspiring, as was said about the United Nations, he might not take us to heaven, but at least he will stop us descending to hell.

Murder She Wrote in the Mountains

WJFF CRoB Sat 28 April http://www.wjffradio.org/parchive/xml/bookreview.xml
My interview with Anita Page on "Damned if You Don't" on murder in Catskill town
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Hard times for left in battle with New Right

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank
Harvill Secker, £14.99

by Ian Williams Tribune

Friday, April 20th, 2012

In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, published in 2004, Thomas Frank tried to explain how millions of financially challenged Americans voted for the very people who had picked their pockets – and not even paid taxes on their loot – and showed every intention of continuing so to do. Since then, there has been a financial catastrophe and the response was a grassroots uprising. But, until Occupy Wall Street, it was led by the Tea Party and a massive surge in populist conservatism. That the worst recession in modern history should foment popular movements is not surprising. But that they should favour the people whose ideas brought about the crash is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive.
Examining the conservative surge, which became really angry when Barack Obama succeeded George W Bush, the main architect of the disaster, Frank points out that, as grassroots go, this grass was well-watered with corporate money and organising skills – astroturf, in fact.
Analysing their words, he shows how the New Right studied the Great Depression and stole the tactics of the left in that era, right down to their vocabulary and methods of organisation. The generation whose own experience would have contradicted the curious theory that FDR and the New Deal caused the Great Depression has now mostly gone to the great Rock Candy Mountain in the sky. There are now many Americans with no reality-based immunity to historical bovine excreta.
While the left cherishes the idea that its heyday was in the 1930s, the historical evidence is contradictory. Think of the Nazis, for example, (or the Blackshirts in Britain) the Ku Klux Klan and Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest in the United States. France got the Popular Front while Britain got a Conservative-dominated coalition for the duration of the decade.
Although it seems odd that so many believe the problems of the current era were caused by too much regulation and government interference, it is, as Frank suggests, not much more anomalous than those who believed that a country of gulags and purges and show trials held the answer.
As he says, “the new right has not met its goals by deception alone – although there has been a great deal of this – but by offering an idealism so powerful that it clouds its partisans’ perceptions of reality”. The invocation of freedom and attacks on an
all-powerful state resonate, as Ron Paul’s deluded followers demonstrate. Even the “right to life” is a powerful semantic coup, on a par with the “death tax”, for conservatives. Union-busting in America is, by long tradition, the “right to work”. Not since Arbeit Macht Frei has language been set so radically athwart reality.
In contrast, Frank points out, “modern Democrats don’t do things the way Roosevelt and Truman did because their eye is on people who believe, per Obama’s description, ‘in the free market’ almost as piously as do Tea Partyers. Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the new Dems; off-limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to think of their organisation as the vanguard of enlightened professionalism and the shrine of purest globaloney”.
Obama’s State of the Union speech was typical – a technocratic exercise that threw scraps to his supporters. He did not have a dream, authentic or otherwise, to move the masses. Our only hope is that the dream that moves the right is a nightmare to the majority of Americans.
One drawback with this book is that, in his effort to counter the
left’s prejudices about grassroots conservatives, Frank backpedals on the recurrent American subtext of racism. The leaders of the right might not be racists, personally, but they know their audience. The anger at Obama burns far brighter in many quarters because he is a black man in the previously all-White House. The not so coded references implying that welfare beneficiaries are mostly black (they aren’t; poverty in America is an equal opportunity programme) are designed to enlist white support against government welfare programmes.
And, of course, there is now a stream of Islamophobia to match the anti-Semitism of the 1930s.However, those deficiencies in some ways enhance the relevance of Pity the Billionaire for Britons wondering why, when the Opposition stops opposing, people start worshipping at strange altars. The description here of the New Democrats suggests that Bill Clinton’s Third Way still has them in its grip, just as Tony Blair’s New Labour project still has its slimy tentacles wrapped around Labour and the left in Britain. Electors abhor a vacuum: nationalism, racism and clear ideas, no matter how loony, are preferable to leaders disappearing up their own colons to agree with the enemy.

On Catskill Review of Books I talk to Andrew Nagorski about Hitlerland - views from US dips & reporters on Nazis. Podcast available

Adds interesting new insights into an era that one would have thought had been thoroughly worked over!

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Scimitars, Sorcery and Boomerangs

On the Catskill Review of Books the last two weeks

http://www.wjffradio.org/parchive/xml/bookreview.xml

24 March
Ian talks to prize winning SF author Saladin Ahmed about his novel "The Throne of the Crescent Moon," the genre itself and how, when travelling while being Mohamed can get you detained, writing while Saladin can get you accolades!
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17 March
Leigh Stein
Ian and Leigh talk about "The Fall Back Plan" -Leigh Stein's fun "Coming of Age" novel, the boomerang generation, novel-writing and publishing and her venture into poetry publishing.
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Croesus for Crisis!

Ian Williams recognizes a cry for attention when he hears one

Speculator, IR Magazine March 2012
Even the UK prime minister and the US president have problems with the vaulting ambition and augmenting vaults of top executives.

But is it possible we have it all wrong? That what afflicts CEOs is not greed – which would be gross – but rather a hunger for recognition, which is almost touching?

After all, treated as Lords of the Universe while in office, once retired, chief executives become just more boring tellers of corporate war stories on the country club links; they need money to establish their status!

But there are other ways they can get the recognized eminence they crave, notwithstanding the clause in the constitution that states, ‘No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States’.

The desire for titular recognition is rooted in American history, which is one reason why so many worthies maintain their functional titles long after they have left the jobs that entitled them: governor, senator, ambassador – even president – stay attached, limpet-like, to their names.

Something must be done, however, for ex-captains of industry to satisfy the need for due honor and recognition without their having to amass huge piles of cash to prop up their egos. And the term ‘captain’ would presume on military prerogatives.

Benjamin Franklin tended to agree with the great jurist Blackstone that ‘the distinction of rank and honors’ was at least plausible, if not strictly necessary, ‘in order to reward such as are eminent for their services to the public, in a manner the most desirable to individuals, and yet without burthen to the community; exciting thereby an ambitious yet laudable ardor, and generous emulation in others.’

In the UK, nobility is no longer usually hereditary, which was certainly Franklin’s objection and what the Founding Fathers wanted to stop. Any constitution flexible enough to endow corporations with a soul can surely update such outdated prohibitions.

Strangely, the US has a little-known hereditary Society of Cincinnati composed of descendants of Revolutionary War officers. They are entitled to wear its ribbon and medal on their military uniforms and claim ‘federal civil rank equivalent to a warrant officer pursuant to Congressional Order’. These descendants keep a low-enough profile to excite any conspiracy theorist worth his or her salt, but seem to be accepted.

So how about a Society of Croesus to represent CEOs in their struggle for a living wage? The precise title they or their descendants would bear is open to discussion. We could use the name of one of the great entrepreneurs – Edison, say, or Jobs. I suppose Kozlowski might send the wrong message, although Conrad has a stately titular ring to it.

On balance, however, I think ‘boss’ has a pioneering frontier ring to it and even the AFL is unlikely to object to its usage, since in its perverse mirror universe it is pejorative, which should add to its luster among the right-thinking people the Croesus Society members might want to impress.

We will have to assume the trickle-up theory, of course, that when thus embossed CEOs would be happy with less cash, but since trickle-down worked so well, there shouldn’t be too many problems, should there?

Antithesis Incarnate

http://logosjournal.com/2012/winter_williams/

Antithesis Incarnate: Christopher Hitchens, A Retrospective Glance

by Ian Williams Logos Winter 2012

As a “public intellectual,” Christopher Hitchens’ eminently readable writings helped cast people and events from a different perspective – mostly, it must be said, one based on reality rather than received “wisdom” and prejudice. While his work was certainly refreshing in this age of competing groupthink and duckspeak across the political spectrum, unlike his hero George Orwell, one has to doubt whether his currently impressive work will still be read in seventy years time.
It is useful to compare the two.  While Orwell sought to write a prose that is like a pane of glass and gave his famous list of does and don’ts, Hitchens played with words and often broke many of his mentor’s rules. The uncharitable might conclude that he was often trying to draw attention to the writer rather than the message, and they would often be right.
While Orwell tends to state his theses magisterially, if occasionally cantankerously, Hitchens’ preferred style always came as the polemic. He functioned best when he was arguing with an opponent, to the extent that by the time of the Iraq war he made his own windmill to tilt at – a collective left that did not actually exist.
Even so, re-reading Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory and reflective person than Hitchen’s often intemperate outbursts would suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability for which he was overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as his own “most marked characteristic,” “insecurity,” which I suspect derives from his British upbringing. Like Orwell, from the Lower Upper Middle Classes, his public (that is private)-school and Oxford background had given him a sense of entitlement without the income, and so he had become an inveterate freelancer – who I suspect turned down a commission as rarely as a cocktail invite.
As well being a rung or two down the caste ladder from Orwell, Hitchens came of age when the charm of an upper class accent was wilting in the face of working class heroes like the Beatles. And unlike in Orwell’s day when even working class socialists might defer to a “toff” who was on their side, by the 1960s even the universities were filled with students of working class origin who were more likely to see a posh accent as the mark of Cain, while the residual deference of the proles themselves had long gone. To his credit Hitchens did not attempt the nasalized pastiche plebeian accent to which his Merseyside origins might have given him some claim.
In contrast, as he and others noted, educated British arrivals in the US, particularly English ones, escape the social insecurities of home and land as honorary WASPs with almost instant deference guaranteed. An accent that in Britain would have fathers locking up their daughters and wallets is considered high class in the US! It is no accident that Hollywood chooses that Oxbridge accent for Roman colonialists and Gestapo officers. But the combined effect of his accent and his over-reaction to insecurity enhanced the appearance of almost reflexive arrogance – certainly compared with Orwell, who let the ideas speak for themselves. Better sounding cantankerous than supercilious.
To be fair, the Socialist Workers Party, originally the International Socialist Group, to which he adhered, was more open minded and attractive intellectually than the other quantum particles splitting from the various Fourth Internationals, and its guru, Tony Cliff, although revered and influential, was not as rabbinically omnipotent as his rivals in other sects. Amusingly he anticipated Hitchens’ omniscience in his works by citing other great thinkers, such as A. N. Israel and Ygael Gluckstein, without mentioning that these were some of his pen names.
While Orwell excelled at weighing courses of action in the balance and factoring desirability against feasibility, sects such as the one to which Hitchens subscribed tended to take the full prerogatives of the harlot and assume power without responsibility. That tendency was accentuated even more when he arrived in the US and drifted away from his native home where there is a spectrum of the left from ultra through to centrist with channels of communication and sometimes shared political purpose and action. In Britain even the ultra-left can talk to socialists in Parliament. In the US, many of them regard Bernie Sanders as a reformist sell-out!
Hitchens’ decades in the US accustomed him to the self-denying ordinances of  some of the sectarian American left, who can condemn shrilly while never having to offer practical alternatives.  Particularly in relation to Iraq he should have remembered his own book on Orwell, in which he praises his hero for his realization that there was no facile analogy with appeasement when he opposed calls for a quick war against Stalin’s Russia. With Animal Farm already out, and 1984 in preparation, Orwell opposed what could have been a successful—if bloody—attempt to overthrow a tyrannical evil regime guilty of monstrous crimes against its own people and its neighbors. Orwell thought about the consequences: Hitchens sixty years later did not, until afterwards.
All people, and all writers change over time.  Some can admit to previous follies, but Hitchens found that difficult, hence the temporal consistency in his outlook since he never admitted he had been wrong before. Whatever new apercu he presented fitted over his previous  views like a badly erased palimpsest, which was not always conducive to clarity and impeded a consistent and coherent worldview from his contemporary essays.
The World according to Hitchens is all too often a pointillist picture where the dots are the holes from the darts he had flung and rarely retracted.  He shared with his disgruntled former comrades the same ad-hominem approach that they later used to bell book and candle him out of the “movement,” for the perceived instances where he broke “the line.”  Sounding almost wounded, he writes in Hitch 22, “I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.”
What he says is quite true and perspicacious. But it describes exactly his own style and that of the old left from Lenin and possibly before.  He shared with his detractors on the American Left the Manichaean tendency to  divide the world into black and white, cowboys and Indians, goodies and bad and a consequent proclivity to hate more well than wisely. Along with Saul Alinsky’s organizational schemata it has certainly been adopted enthusiastically by the new right, with far more devastating effect. More people see this type of bile on Fox News in one program than have read Socialist Worker from its inception!
However, one reason Hitchens wrote with a renewed animosity, even at a time when his politics were aligning to reality – he began to support the Labour Party in the UK – was the bile on the left that had begun after NATO’s belated intervention in Balkans – events which eventually led both Hitchens and myself to terminal breaks with the Nation, for example.  Even if there was a certain sense of taking ones own medicine, one needs a refined sense of irony when assaulted by groups whose cardinal principles simultaneously encompassed the absolute innocence of Mumia and the wrongness of the death penalty with the infallibility of Milosevic and an apologia for the mass murder of Bosnian and Kosovar civilians.
However, after he supported the war on Iraq, the steady drip of bile became a tsunami. Above all it was the Comintern view that once someone had been outlawed, their past and future were equally excoriated. Sadly, that was a pattern he followed himself. One manifestation perhaps of his atheism is that he rarely shows signs of believing in redemption and indeed shows few signs of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian. Orwell made O’Brien in 1984, almost likable, and we almost feel for the apparatchiks who do Big Brother’s work.
In his biography of Orwell he shows that his subject went out of his way to defend and maintain friendly relations with people he disagreed with, sometimes profoundly.  However, Hitchens range of enemies was wide, and his atheism took a Calvinist tilt, in which those not of the elect, his personal friends, had no chance of redemption for a perceived deviation.  He did antipathy and rarely empathy or sympathy. He retained the Leninist binary politics that eschewed any in-betweens and fuzzy logic. In fact, he never really got social democracy even when he joined the British Labour Party in the USA!
If he could write hagiographies of Thomas Jefferson, the slave-owner and raper, why did he preserve a life long animus against his overtly Trotskyite student-era foe Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister who kept Britain out the Vietnam War in the face of relentless political and economic pressure from LBJ? Or indeed Michael Foot, a cultured and principled radical who led the Labour Party – and incidentally eloquently supported the same principles as Hitchens in the Kosovo and Falklands War?
Above all, I shared his revulsion for Bill Clinton and remember fondly when Murray Kempton shouted across a crowded UN cafeteria that he had enrolled Hitchens and myself as charter members of “Revolutionary Socialists for Bob Dole.”  But Hitchens churlishly refrains from giving the rubber-spined President any credit at all, even though, belatedly he was dragged into supporting intervention on behalf of the Kosovars.
Indeed, later at the time of Iraq, he even achieved the rare feat of making Clinton seem hard done to. His newly adopted friends around the White House,  the “tougher thinkers in defense department “ and the “Pentagon Intellectuals,” as he called them, had harried Clinton into military ineffectiveness in Kosovo and Rwanda because he had opposed the war in Vietnam but was not called up. In contrast, many of the most sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the Vietnam war – but dodged the draft and then went on to wage war in Iraq. Hitchens’ response was to attack those who used the well-deserved epithet “Chicken Hawk”  against the Bush coterie since the “Pentagon intellectuals” were not of age or health to qualify in the new volunteer army. Heredity triumphs. Few if any of their offspring ran to the colors.
Once can only put down these jejune excuses to a relapse into the polemical mode of the sects, in which once the enemy has been identified, you throw everything you can at him while fiercely defending your own side. The problem is, of course, that someone of his genuine intellectual acuity should have been able to weigh the relatives masses of beams and motes in the eyes on either side.
Even so, re-reading Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory and reflective person than the author’s occasionally intemperate outbursts would suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability and insecurity for which he was overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as his own “most marked characteristic,” “insecurity,” which as I said earlier reflects his British upbringing.
He compensated for this with strong relationships with friends – sometimes enough to evoke scabrous rumors from observers. His account of his disagreements with, for example Edward Said, has more than a hint of a feeling of personal betrayal.  In this, I too argued with Said about the Balkan Wars and his Chomskyite view of the US as the only permitted target, but certainly agreed with him about most of the targets he did pick!
Hitchens made the Iraq War his own equivalent of the Leftist loyalty oath, and preemptively put the mark of Cain on all  who disagreed. In the shrill and un-nuanced “A Long Short War,” about the war he tried to maintain all the old positions he held on the Left, while uncritically embracing his new friends “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougher thinkers in the Defense Department.”  For a time he had become a free floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accepted as such his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration.
It is also true that many Leftists, whoring after strange gods as is their wont, were putting Saddam Hussein along with Slobodan Milosevic and later Gaddafi and Assad in the Pantheon of progressive heroes. However, contrary to the customized windmill he had built to tilt at, many others were not, but were disturbed by a militarist lynch mob that disregarded international law, manufactured evidence and carried out the intervention so clumsily that more Iraqis died than at the hands of the tyrant’s forces.
“First do no harm,” was the old Hippocratic advice to surgeons, and the coterie around Bush might indeed have removed a malignant tumor when they excised the Ba’athist regime, but they also eviscerated and lobotomized Iraqi society in the process. On a national scale, “it was destroying the village to save it,” which was an entirely predictable consequence of a war fought by the ignorant, malignant and ideologically driven, who before the first shot had cast aside the lamentably few people in the State Department who knew anything about the country and the region.
It was pleasant to see that before he died, even if he had no doubts about godlessness, he did have those second thoughts about the conduct of the war.  Uncharacteristically he had, if not withdrawn from his positions, at least, shall we say, ceased to state them so emphatically. He admits “I probably now know more about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left Iraq in the hands of Saddam,” and adds in possibly the nearest thing to admission that “even though they don’t alter the case against Ba’athism, (they) have permanently disfigured the record of those of us who made that case.”
It is typical Hitchens to claim that he is better informed about the arguments against cheering the White House to war than many on the Left he reviled had pointed out at the time that he was cheering on a mad-axeman to carry out brain surgery. I drank with him shortly after his meetings with Paul Wolfowitz, which clearly flattered and intrigued him. Without succumbing to Hitchens’ unfettered admiration, it is indeed possible that if Wolfowitz had had more influence on the conduct of the war many of its more disastrous outcomes would have been avoided. It is true, for example, that Wolfowitz had the chutzpah and foresight to tell AIPAC that the Palestinians had genuine issues that needed resolution. But once it was clear that the tenuous rational element in the administration had been sidelines, why did he not at least scale down to merely two cheers for the war effort? Why act as a champion of Bush while casting Clinton into outer darkness? Was it because as Kissinger said of the latter “he does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal?” Or was he just as “loyal,” in his own way, to his enemies as he was to his friends?  On the loyalty front, while Britishers are rarely “loyal” to their native land in the American sense of tub thumping, one wonders what the quietly patriotic Orwell would have made of Hitchen’s un-British enthusiastic professions of loyalty to his new American home when he took his oath?
Hitchens left the left by means of redefining it, to exclude a humanitarian and democratic socialist view to which he was hewing by the end. However, he was right (and Left) far more than he was wrong, because he derived his positions from opposition to all forms of tyranny and barbaric governments without making expedient tribal or geopolitical exceptions.
Now that he is dead, proving if it needed it that there are indeed atheists in hospices,  it seems almost churlish to consider tone and attitude so important. After all, most of his targets deserved some, at least, of the winged arrows of outraged morality. However, one cannot help feeling that such unbalanced denunciation can lead philosophically to the totalitarianism that he otherwise fought against strenuously and sincerely.
In the end, that is why, much as I enjoyed talking and drinking with him, like a bar chat, his works are stimulating  and enjoyable, but on a longer scale ephemeral. Like the plaster casts from Pompeii, future readers would have to fill in the centre to determine what he was for by reference to those whom he was so clearly against. And they are hardly great turning reference points. Hitchens is cursed with an age where even bad guys are eminently forgettable.  In future years Mother Theresa will be one of those minor saints in the RC calendar and  Bill Clinton will be down there with Millard Filmore as an historical footnote, the blow-job forgotten as the DNA sample on Monica’s frock breaks down.  There are probably more people know Dr Strangelove from TV re-runs than know Henry Kissinger.
But aberrations of intemperance aside, the sins of totalitarianism, hypocrisy and complaisance in the face of evil against which he railed are still rampant. It is sad to see his voice silenced, now.

Ian Williams was born in Liverpool about the same time as Christopher Hitchens to an upper lower working class family, was expelled from Liverpool University, worked on the railroad and in the union before becoming a writer and journalist in the USA. He was always surprised at how often a teenage Maoist like him and a teenage Trotskyist like Hitchens agreed on things. He drinks but does not smoke. His collected works tend to appear in deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.

Britain's Sepoy Relationship with US

Toadying sidekick is UK speciality in relationship

by Ian Williams

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

The David Cameron-Barack Obama show last week was puzzling. The President got no brownie points from conservative leaning voters because hardly anyone in the United States, and certainly not the isolationist right, knows who Cameron is. Outside the specialist foreign policy community, which is aware of the eccentric and unrequited British affectation of a “special relationship”, no American office bearers would ever refer to it – except, perhaps, when stuck for words for ritual greetings to visiting British politicians. The real special relationship for American legislators is with Israel, which results in reflexive and pretty much unconditional support for whatever the government of Israel wants.
In contrast, since 1945, the British special relationship with the US has consisted of Britain doing what the US wanted. While Israel gets billions of dollars a year in kind and cash, it was only a few years ago that Britain paid off the last tranches of the money it borrowed to fight the Second World War – to buy weapons from the US. And, with the noted exception of Harold Wilson’s under-appreciated success in keeping British forces out of Vietnam, the reliable British role has been to provide modern-day sepoys to give “internationalist” cover to Washington’s adventures. So we could almost applaud Cameron in calling for restraint on Iran. Tony Blair would probably have been accusing Obama of going wobbly by not joining Benjamin Netanyahu in smiting the Persians.
Presumably, Obama overcame his previous indifference to Britain precisely because he knew what Cameron would say and wanted support from a more reliable public ally to set against the tetchy paranoia of the guest who came just before – Netanyahu. Indeed, in terms of sending messages, the bonhomie and picnic element that Obama put into his get-togethers with Cameron contrasted starkly with the cryogenic chill of his forced encounters with the Israeli leader. By trying to head off the drumbeats for war with more sanctions on Iran, Obama has helped to engineer a rise in petrol prices. When your two worst enemies urge a particular course of action upon you, it is probably wiser to go in the opposite direction.
Obama offered more sanctions to head off demands for military support for Netanyahu’s adventurism. Republicans, predictably, are blaming increasing pump prices on the President while Netanyahu, despite his professed atheism, probably prays daily for Obama’s defeat in November. So Cameron’s visit (and gratitude for the table tennis table, no doubt) was expediently welcome. However, Britain has neither an electorally powerful lobby, nor much in the way of public sentiment for any reflexive sympathy. In fact, there would probably be more active antipathy if it were not for the customary American historical amnesia, which means that most people have forgotten who burned down the White House and against whom the War of Independence was fought. (But then startlingly large proportions have forgotten who was an ally and who was an enemy in the Second World War.)
In realpolitik, a British government has to pay for anything it wants from the US, but in the fuzzy self-delusion of the “special relationship”, Prime Ministers tend to pre-emptively give Washington what it wants, fondly imagining reciprocation. On this occasion, in return for his support for Obama’s position on Iran, Cameron has seemingly achieved a promise to consider, at least, amending the one-sided servile extradition treaty that currently sends British residents to politically influenced US courts and savage and inhumane prison sentences. Big deal. If Britain is to sell its international reputation, it should demand a higher price.
The Russians and Germans are no longer a threat. The US no longer wants an unsinkable aircraft carrier off the shores of a continent in which it has lost interest. On the British side, the American idols after whom New Labour and Tories alike whored have given us the most overpopulated prisons and the worst social services and wealth inequality in Europe, along with the most intense legislative hostility to workers’ rights and trade unions. It also makes us globally the sidekick of a bullying superpower whose strength is failing.  It is long past time to wake up from the dream of a special relationship.

Off With Their Heads!

Comment: Punish managers, not shareholders, for corporate crimes

Speculator by Ian Williams Jan 2012 IR magazine

Ian Williams says it can’t be right that managers who defraud investors keep their jobs (and bonuses), while regulators confiscate shareholder funds to punish the company

Two years ago, a divided US Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and that their ‘personal’ First Amendment right to free speech invalidates laws designed to achieve a measure of financial fairness in elections.

Ironically, the key text invoked – the post-Civil War Equal Rights Amendment – was for decades used to justify segregation and disenfranchisement of former slaves and their dependants, so such perversion of its use is hardly novel.

But no one, not even the most fervid intelligent designer, has suggested that the Supreme Being has breathed a soul into these ‘persons’ to make them real people.

In effect, that means a corporate person is more equal than the rest of us. As the bumper sticker would have it: ‘I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.’

How should they pay?

So how do you punish a corporation that has committed mayhem, killed miners, polluted the oceans or bankrupted a country? If corporations did have souls, they might burn in Hell. But they don’t, so instead we have fines and ‘settlements’.

Perhaps fired up by the Occupy Wall Street protestors, New York Judge Jed Rakoff lifted the stone of the SEC settlement in the latest Citi case and found underneath many solemn pledges not to repeat past sins.

As he noted, they always do, which is contempt of the court that authorized the settlements. Yet no one has been brought back to the dock.

The $700 mn settlement between the SEC and Citi for its dodgy mortgage portfolio was supposed to be punishment for defrauding shareholders. Legally, however, the shareholders own the company. Talk about moral hazard!

Senior management members defraud investors, keep their jobs and award themselves big bonuses for it; meanwhile, the SEC confiscates shareholder funds to ‘punish’ the company.

The computation is as dodgy as subprime loan evaluation. Punishing the victims, employees and investors while rewarding the malefactors is a bit like a court finding Lizzie Borden guilty but then ordering her father’s estate to buy her a new axe because the thickness of his skull blunted her previous one.

Fire the managers

‘Off with their heads!’ must be the answer. Not literally; rather the removal of the head honchos at offending companies, given that they are the real offenders, setting their companies on a life of crime and mayhem.

At the very least, we should see the dismissal of senior executives, corporate counsel, CFOs, presidents and chief executives. And perhaps also the dissolution of entire boards that failed in their elementary task of supervising management.

I would suggest bringing back the pillory for the offenders, but shaming the shameless would be futile. Impoverishing the greedy, on the other hand, offers both justice and deterrence, so let’s roll with confiscation instead.

Instead of company treasuries’ paying those settlements, senior management should stand proxy, serving prison time and having their personal fortunes confiscated.

We will let them keep their BlackBerrys and a bicycle to look for another job, and give them a paper cup to stand collecting loose change near Wall Street.

They could shout out warnings to budding future executives that there are snakes as well as ladders in the boardroom.

Rocky Road to Damascus

Ian Williams

Tribune 

Security Council must sort out Syria

by Ian Williams

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

One thing sure about the parlous situation in Syria is that in their religious obtusity none of the Republican candidates have anything coherent or useful to say about it. But to be fair, Pharisaical hypocrisy is the dominant global mode for Syria. While we can, and indeed we should, deplore the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria that they had already negotiated down to platitudinous inefficacy, the United States condemnation of Russia comes strangely from the record holder for UN vetoes, most recently of a resolution expressing the President’s own declared position on Palestine.
And if President Bashar al-Assad’s half-life is as short as it looks at the moment, Moscow committed not just a crime, but a spectacular long-term financial and diplomatic blunder.
Among the few to emerge with ­redibility have been the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay who were prepared to condemn the Ba’athist violence against their own ­people, just as they have condemned ­sraeli behaviour against Palestinians. In that context, after the veto in the Security Council, and Pillay’s Human Rights ­Council report, the Americans supported a procedural innovation: an immediate UN General Assembly resolution reiterating the points in the vetoed Security Council attempt. However, the support was undercut with constant ­references to the “non-binding” nature of General Assembly resolutions.
This is an oblique homage to the Palestinian habit of taking Security ­Council resolutions vetoed by Washington to the General Assembly under the ­“Uniting for Peace” procedure that the US had pioneered during the Korean War in order to by-pass Moscow’s veto. Hypocrisy often disappears up its rectum like that.
Similarly pushing for the Assembly resolution are Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, each with their own culturally specific ways of dealing with unarmed protestors, not to forget Morocco, 40 years into its illegal occupation of Western Sahara. Perhaps most outstandingly Sudan, whose president is under indictment by the International Criminal Court over Darfur, still voted for the resolution.
It is Assad’s proximity to Iran that ­impels the sundry oil-kings into common ground with the pro-Israel neo-conservatives and, almost mind-bogglingly, al Qaida. Such a rogues’ gallery lined up against him is almost enough to make you suspect Assad of hidden virtues until you look at the admirers of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi lionising him.
Taking their cue from Moscow, opponents of international action against Assad also complain that insurgents are now fighting back, as if there were some moral equivalence between heavily-armed professional forces and a handful of deserters and rebels who only took up arms after year of one-sided repression.
George Orwell famously said: “There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly ­always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for ­reaction.” In the complex web of parties ­involved in and around Syria, Assad clearly represents reaction. However, it could be hard to unequivocally categorise all the insurgents as on the side of progress.
But for progress, Assad surely has to go – and soon. The longer he lingers, the more danger there is that Syria slides into a sectarian mess. So far, no one has suggested a referral to the International Criminal Court, which would have sent a message to the regime and its supporters. On the other hand, that offers an escape route. One could almost foresee a palace in the Gulf in the Assad family future.
In any case, the international community needs to offer protection to the Alawites and other minorities against the risk of pogroms and to supervise a transition to an elected government. At least the US and the West realise that it can’t be them, but Moscow and Beijing still have an opportunity to become part of the solution instead of perpetuating the problem. A public withdrawal of support might persuade the regime that it was time to stop the shooting.
In the end, the UN Security Council, for all its faults, is the only body that could legitimately direct whatever belated ­peacekeeping process comes together.

The UN Before it was Founded

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With Dan Plesch on Catskill Review of Books 1900 EST http:\\wjffradio.org  on US and UN-3 yrs before 1945!  And see AP report http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/02/25/international/i072312S59.DTL

My interview with Mike Mayo

http://www.insideinvestorrelations.com/articles/sell-side/18636/mike-mayo-bringing-high-finance-book/?utm_source=ir_5top_270112&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mikemayo&utm_source=IR+Insider&utm_campaign=98ef170924-ir_5top_270112&utm_medium=email