The Decline of the American Mugging.

Muggers took my Wall Street Journal

A read of the paper would suggest easier and less risky ways to steal, reflects Ian Williams

It had been years since any armed mugging in my part of Manhattan. That must be why local mugging skills are as attenuated as I discovered. After all, people lose their job habits and aptitudes if kept from practicing them for too long.

Such were my thoughts, albeit a little fuzzily focused, when I regained consciousness flat on my back in the wet, squinting up into the muzzle of a pistol that a young chap was pointing waveringly between my eyes while demanding: ‘Yo man! Gimme the money!’

Moments before I had been striding briskly down 155th Street, next to the old Trinity graveyard, whose signs claim it to be a ‘working cemetery’, a description that has always seemed quasi-oxymoronic to me. (No longer toiling there was Ed Koch, the mayor under whom New York reached its zenith of muggings, and who was recently entombed at Trinity.) Then these two knaves had jumped me from behind and conked me on the head with the pistol they were now waving in my face.

My primary emotion was indignation. ‘Yo!’? Whatever happened to ‘Excuse me’? Not to mention ‘Stand and deliver’ and similar formulations. You do not knock someone out from behind and then seek their co-operation in handing over valuables. Even when non-concussed I can never find which pocket I put my wallet in.

And so, wallowing on the ground thrashing like an upended turtle as I tried to get up, I started yelling, ‘Help! Police! Help!’ I was pleased to discover that even without proper use of my arms and legs, my diaphragm was in full working order. Instead of frisking me, the perp was too scared to get within grabbing distance, so he snatched my attaché case and ran off with his accomplice.

I did a quick inventory of my possessions. Mont Blanc fountain pen: check. New BlackBerry: check. Raymond Weil wristwatch: check. Wallet, with cash for once as well as the plastic credit cards on which I usually rely: check. Key fob, including the transponder for the car parked, ironically, 20 yards from where the incompetents pounced: check.

Missing was the case which held the Wall Street Journal and a copy of the New Scientist. The police later retrieved the discarded New Scientist, but the perps had walked with the WSJ. I could not help thinking there was some sort of parable here. The miscreants had discarded real science for the WSJ’s dismal version of it.

My agent was quite taken with the idea of Harlem muggers making off with the WSJ, and pitched the story to an editor there – but maybe they suspected I had not taken the appropriate blood oath to Murdoch and Mammon. The word came that it would indeed be publishable, but only if I rewrote it as a hymn of praise for the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which a week later a judge ruled unconstitutional.

I was unconvinced by the rhetoric from the police chief. If his policy was so successful, where had the pistol I felt and saw come from? In reality, crime tends to follow economic cycles more closely than police policy posturing.

On the bright side, if they had read the paper, my muggers might have realized that risking a life sentence for armed robbery is a mug’s game. The stories of SEC ‘agreed’ settlements might have persuaded them that there were easier – and much less risky – ways to loot the citizenry.

Having said that, if they had read on to the op-ed pages they might well have felt philosophically justified in mugging people on sound Randian principles, and in resisting any government attempts to interfere in the free market by regulating the practice.

US's Diplomatic Disarmament

United Nations Report

Decades of Knee-Jerk Vetos for Israel Limit U.S. Options on Syria at the U.N.

By Ian Williams

Members of the United Nations Commission on Inquiry on Syria (l-r) Carla del Ponte of Switzerland, American Karen Konig Abuzayd, chairman Paulo Sergio Pinheiro of Brazil, and Thailand’s Vitit Muntarbhorn arrive at a Sept. 16, 2013 press conference following the presentation of the commission’s report to Human Rights Council members in Geneva. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
Syrians are the victims of a smorgasbord of global double dealing and hypocrisy that exceeds the sad standards we have become used to in this century. The arguments have seen some unlikely alliances in the West. In support of intervention are people who are genuinely concerned at the plight of Syria’s suffering people, along with those who are happy to cheer Israeli bombings of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese people. The presence of these latter ghouls in the pro-intervention camp should give anyone pause, along with their like-minded neocon friends who want the Pentagon to use all that smart and lethal military technology.
On the other hand, we have conservative isolationists who really do not see it is as our business if foreigners are killing each other in faraway places of which they know little, and they are arm in arm with radical leftists. Once upon a time, the left preached proletarian internationalism, workers in unity across national boundaries, sending volunteers to Spain, calling for the opening of a Second Front in Europe and applauding foreign aid to the Viet Cong. In this new era of what we should puckishly call socialist nationalism, a country’s sovereignty is sacred and unimpeachable—at least if threatened by any Western power. So they come to the same conclusion as the right: let them rot.
The United Nations is used as a tool by both sides. It has been honorable but ineffective. Ban Ki-moon has actually repeatedly emphasized the horror of what has happened while eschewing Washington’s unilateralism.
Indeed, some of those who oppose intervention will piously point to the need for Security Council authorization before any action is taken against Syria, or Serbia, or Sudan. But if the U.N. does authorize action, those people will oppose it just as fervently! For the dying Syrians, the U.N. must seem thoroughly irrelevant, but it is the cockpit in which their case is being fought. Russia, a weaker power with a Security Council veto, cites the organization continuously as the necessary legitimation for action against Syria, clinging to the literal legality of U.N. obligations while being insouciant of the spirit.
President Barack Obama has been puzzlingly imprecise about U.S. attitudes to the world body, perhaps reflecting a battle inside his team with the neocons who see the U.N. as an instrument to be used when it suits them but cast aside when inconvenient. Obama’s reputation will take considerable time to recover from his initial gaffe of suggesting that the U.S. would not wait for the U.N. inspectors’ report on chemical weapons use in Damascus. After the brief post-Bush honeymoon, it is obvious that Washington’s lucid moment about the U.N. and international law has come to an end.
One would like to think that the British House of Commons vote against intervention—from the parliament that declared war on Hitler because he had invaded Poland—was not simply an expression of isolationism, but also a comment on legality. Both Cameron and Obama had signaled their willingness to attack without the U.N. report, let alone a U.N. mandate.
The members of parliament also voted in a context in which it is universally admitted that Tony Blair and Bush lied to secure support for their disastrous attack on Iraq, and in which maladroit and insincere leadership turned a bad dream into a nightmare, and turned the intervention in Afghanistan—which was legal—into a total disaster.
The framers of the concept of Responsibility to Protect—R2P, as it became known in diplomatic shorthand in the age of text and Twitter—were well aware of the pitfalls, and their document anticipated most of the perils that face its honest application. Few countries are unalloyed emulators of the Good Samaritan: they do not like risking their own citizens’ lives and taxpayers’ finances in a good cause. One might remember that the U.S. sent the bill for Desert Storm to the Gulf states, who sent on their claims to be paid with Iraqi reparations.
But the palpable disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan raise the question of who can be entrusted to run such operations? Under R2P, the time to intervene in Syria was two years ago, when the Assad regime began to massacre demonstrators. The U.S. dithered, militarily and diplomatically, emulating former Secretary of State James Baker when he said of the Balkans that the U.S. “has no dog in this fight.” Some decision makers were weighing on varying scales whether it was good for Israel or bad for Iran, and the really cynical concluded that an endless civil war eviscerating an Arab neighbor to Israel just had to be good thing.
In the end, of course, the precipitating event was the chemical weapons attack which crossed the red line that Obama probably now wishes he had not drawn in the sand. This horrific attack diverted attention from R2P to the chemical weapons issue, and allowed unusually adroit Russian diplomacy to switch the issue from the regime’s killing with mere physical impact weaponry to the chemical weapons. Before, the issue was whether to use military force under R2P to protect civilians, with or without a U.N. mandate. Now it has become simply chemical disarmament.
To the dead, it might count as irrelevant whether they were charred with napalm, burnt alive with white phosphorus, shelled in a marketplace or disintegrated by drones dropping bombs from on high.
Syria had not hitherto signed the conventions banning chemical and biological weapons, one reason being that it had neighbors—notably Iraq and Israel—who also had not. Interestingly, the Israeli government is happy that Syria might be disarmed, but less ecstatic about Damascus ratifying the convention, since that raises the question of why poor little Israel has not—not to mention the nuclear issue! Indeed, the U.S. itself was a relatively late signatory to the convention.
Even then, there was something very Israeli in tone about the idea of massive air-strikes to “punish” the regime. Its sole purpose was to insulate Obama from the charges that he was doing nothing. Bombing the chemical and biological weapons stocks carries fairly obvious risks. The chances of massive casualties for the civilians who are being “protected” are very high, while the denial of any intention of regime change misses the point. How else does one stop the regime massacring its citizenry without changing it? Apart from warming the cold hearts of those who always applaud bombings of Arabs and Muslims, it is difficult to see any point in the threatened exercise.
In an ideal world, a surgical military strike to take out the regime might have stopped the killing, but that is far too late, and the only country with the wherewithal to do it, the U.S., is manifestly unsuited for the role after recent experiences, even in the unlikely event that it could persuade its fellow U.N. members to entrust it with a mandate.

Past Humiliations

Moscow’s cooperation over the chemical issue might raise other possibilities. Rus­sian attitudes need to be put into historical and diplomatic context. Yes, there is the basic immorality of support for Assad (as for Qaddafi and Milosevic before). But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was Russia’s man at the U.N. after the first Iraq war, in which Moscow cooperated in the spirit of the New World Order. It was regularly humiliated by seeing its views set aside and resolutions with which it had originally colluded being stretched to justify actions, bombings, embargos and the economic destruction of a nation and people, well beyond any reasonable reading of the resolutions. Lying Western leaders bypassed Russia for the second Iraq war, and again in Libya, when reluctantly conceding a principle on R2P Moscow once again was ignored in the operation’s execution. Western behavior has indeed been such as to justify some degree of paranoia! Bush and Blair’s precedents of taking such phrases beyond the limits certainly explains Moscow’s reluctance to see any mention of forcible intervention, even in a chemical disarmament resolution.
The fact remains, however, that Lavrov has effectively thwarted the U.S. push—which entailed, one suspects, some heavy pressure by Moscow on its ally in Damascus, including a threat of withdrawal of support. Sadly this shows what President Vladimir Putin could have achieved earlier but chose not to, so there are no haloes on offer.
And then we come to continuing hypocrisy. U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power in September was defending the possibility of intervening without the approval of the U.N. Security Council. However, Washington can try to get a resolution at an Emergency Special General Assembly, under the “Uniting for Peace” resolution designed precisely to bypass a vetoed Council. The two reasons for not doing so illustrate the lamentable cumulative effects of American undiplomacy over the decades. Ironically, to assemble the alleged “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq, the isolationists of the Bush administration carefully courted, albeit via a somewhat rough wooing, many small nations, as did then-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton in his quasi-theological crusade to thwart the International Criminal Court.
Since the Obama administration is much less single-minded on Syria, it has not devoted similar resources. A Coalition of the Dithering somehow lacks focus. Most perniciously of all, however, the canker of reflexive support for Israel has led the U.S., under both Republican and Democrat administrations, to deny the legal validity of the very process it had pioneered to fight the Korean War despite the Soviet veto. The reason for that denial, of course, is that the Palestinians had rediscovered the technique to combat the automatic U.S. veto on behalf of Israel. Washington has therefore sacrificed a valuable legal and diplomatic lever—which, by contagion, tempts it to illegal action.
A General Assembly resolution calling for an arms embargo might not have “legal” effect, but it certainly would have a profound diplomatic and moral effect on Moscow. It could also signal exasperation with Washington’s Gulf allies and their support for the Salafist wing of the opposition, whose sanguinary and shameless efforts have given Damascus such a propaganda coup. But Washington shows no signs of sacrificing its other interests for a bunch of dying and dispossessed Syrians by threatening sanctions against Russia or the Gulf.
Sadly, however, while the U.N. can now offer hospice care to Syria and help it to survive, there is no miracle cure in sight. Through its agencies it can help the refugees and the internally displaced, and it can provide inspectors and mechanisms to implement a cease-fire if Kerry and Lavrov can pull one off. It will certainly be part of any solution—but there are no unmitigatedly happy endings in view.

Good Wars and Bad Anti-War?

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 2013, Pages 29, 34Special ReportDueling Principles: National Sovereignty Vs. Responsibility to ProtectBy Ian Williams

Accurate history is messy, because reality is messy—and that is no more apparent than over Syria. The lines between good and bad are never as clear and bold as we would like. Take the example of the Second World War, which most of us accept as about as clear-cut a battle between good and evil as one could conjure up—and so it was, in very broad brush strokes.
But that war was won with the aid of a brutal Soviet Union, which from 1939 was an effective ally of its later enemy, Nazi Germany, and which had, by 1941, far more blood on its hands than did Hitler’s regime. After the war, both sides overlooked collaborators and propped up regimes that left little to choice. In East Germany, first the KGB and then the Stasis took over Gestapo establishments and persecuted opponents with equal fervor—and on occasion the same opponents!
However, as Orwell said, in most wars one side stands more or less for progress, and in the case of the Second World War, that was the Allied side. While the United Nations that emerged from the war has many resemblances to the former League of Nations, there were fundamental differences in its approach. Following the First World War Europe’s former nation states were dissolving, so under the influence of Woodrow Wilson, the League oversaw plebiscites and referenda that dismembered sovereign nation states, with some respect for self-determination of the peoples. One could argue that the multinational Ottoman and Hapsburg realms had more to offer the future of humanity than their squabbling sanguinary successor states, but that is for another time.
There were major exclusions to the application of the principle of self-determination: Wilson was, after all, a racist Southern Dixiecrat, albeit more cerebral than most. In Europe, German speakers discovered that the rules did not apply to them, and in the rest of the world Arabs, Kurds and others soon discovered that the Great Powers were “only kidding.”
It was this period that saw the invention of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Jewish nationality as opposed to confessionality. When dealing with concepts so subjective and fuzzy it is hardly surprising that logic was lacking, however. Greek-speaking Muslims became Turks, Turkish-speaking Orthodox became Greeks, and Catholic Lebanese/Syrians tried to become French, while other Christian Arabs helped invent Arab nationalism.
The Second World War showed little respect for national self-determination, as peoples from the Baltics southward discovered, and of course the Germans paid all over again. But once the mayhem was done and the boundaries adjusted, the foundational principle of the United Nations was the sanctity of state sovereignty and boundaries—no matter how illogical.
This amounted to restoration of an old principle, enshrined in the messy pragmatic details of the Treaty of Wesphalia that ended Europe’s Thirty-Year War—that of national sovereignty. In the context of the time, it meant that if a monarch was Catholic and persecuting his Protestant subjects, or vice versa, it was nobody else’s business.
Generalized and refined, that principle is now enshrined in the U.N. Charter as “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” and of course emphasized in Security Council Resolution 242 as  “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.”
That is why, since the arbitrary redrawings of boundaries at the end of World War II, aggressors like Indonesia in East Timor, Morocco in Western Sahara, Iraq in Kuwait, and of course Israel in  Palestine have never been able to gain legal recognition of their conquests. It is why, only recently, a federal court ruled that the State Department could refuse to put “Jerusalem, Israel,” as the place of birth on U.S. passports for Americans who want to have their Aliyah and eat it, too.
Ironically, however, while under old style international law Palestinians living in Gaza can claim protection under the Geneva Conventions—even if it does not help them much—Syrians being shelled and strafed by their own regime cannot.
However, since then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan steered the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) concept through the 2005 General Assembly, international law has changed, building on the International Criminal Court and its jurisdiction. The international community can now hold governments responsible for their failure to protect their own populations and indeed hold them to account for persecuting their “own” citizens.
The big problem with humanitarian intervention, even when called “Responsibility to Protect,” is that it is susceptible to expedient abuse. Hitler justified intervention in Czechoslovakia on the grounds of mistreatment of the Sudeten Germans, who had indeed been denied their right to self-determination in the Versailles settlement. Tony Blair invoked the plight of Iraqi civilians to justify his and George Bush’s crusade against Iraq.
Russia, while it voted with the rest of the world on the general principle of R2P, invokes national sovereignty to ensure that it cannot be effectively implemented, at least against its allies. As in Libya, Moscow can draw support from the ineptitude of American diplomacy, which stands self-evidently guilty of egregious hypocrisy in its dealings with, above all, the Middle East.
Syria, but not Palestine
So, while Washington has been instrumental in preventing effective action to stop Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, American politicians are wringing their hands and saying “something must be done” about Syria. Perhaps the sole concession to rationality is that, apart from the lunatic neocons who gave us Iraq,  there seems to be a general concession that U.S. forces cannot play a prominent role in intervention. On the other hand, U.S. diplomacy for decades seems to have specialized in rubbing the wrong way all the other major players, like Iran and Russia.
Washington’s inaction is made easier because of public confusion about who the good guys are, and Russian media in particular highlight the barbarisms committed by the fundamentalists in the Syrian opposition. There is, sadly, much to highlight. However, that does not negate the reality that the Assad regime began by attacking unarmed protesters and since then has sought to win hearts and minds by bombing and shelling its own cities. Certainly some of the opposition have carried out atrocities, but the regime as a whole has pursued a policy of violent wholesale repression.
The reason so many oppose Assad’s regime is because it is ruthless and murderous—so there is absolutely no excuse not to denounce such behavior when committed by some of “our” side. Indeed, there is even more reason to do so, since to be silent implies complicity.
One other, almost unrecognized act of non-partisan balance has come from the U.N., in its reports on Syria, which suggest that people on both sides have used chemical weapons and violated human rights. It has resisted attempts to provide the smoking chemical canisters that neocon hawks pine for, even though it has indeed made plain that the balance of crimes weighs heavily down on the regime side. Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay has called for an investigation into credible allegations of murders by fundamentalist elements of the opposition.
The human rights bodies of the U.N. have often made for strange bedmates. Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq, when they were each embroiled in bitter conflicts between them, always seemed to unite to ensure that human rights pariahs were represented on the Human Rights Committee and its successor Council. However, their active conspiracy could not survive without the tacit connivance of other members. This year only seven countries—China, Iran, Jordan, Maldives, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam—were candidates for the four Asian seats on the Human Rights Council.
Pro-Israel activists harp on about Iran and Syria, because they are more actively anti-Israel than the others. But none of them really pass muster. The Maldives is the only one that has any serious pretensions to democracy, and even there a semi-coup recently took place.
If countries with pretensions to human rights and democracy cannot bring themselves to stand for such positions, one can see the difficulties in corralling together an effective bloc that could intervene in Syria. Sadly, short of spillover into neighboring countries, it is difficult to see what motivation could inspire such a coalition, diplomatic or military.
And the one “indispensable country” that could at least inspire, if not lead, such a move is hopelessly compromised by its record of partisanship in the region. But at the very least, armed with Pillay’s demonstrable non-partisan commitment to human rights, the Security Council should mandate International Criminal Court investigations into crimes by both sides in Syria.


Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations who blogs at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.

Roads to Damascus

/http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2013/09/ian-williams-20/

Intervention intentions and a credible Syrian course

by Ian Williams

Tribyne Friday, September 6th, 2013

Defenders of dictators throughout the world have made non-intervention a point of alleged principle. It camouflages their record of callous disregard of the suffering of people at the hands of thugs who invoke “anti-imperialist” rhetoric to cover their murders. On the other hand, some proponents of intervention are clearly not motivated by the suffering of Syrian civilians. That should not detract from the overwhelming moral and legal justification for international action to stop the murderous activities of the Syrian regime. However, while is there plenty of scope for uneasy consciences as the world has stood by and watched the regime’s depredations, we must beware of would-be brain surgeons carrying sledgehammers, whose motives and methods are equally dubious.
Even the better-intentioned often seem to be in the “something must be done” school of politics, sending a message to domestic constituencies. Barack Obama has put himself in that camp, committing himself to “punish” Bashar al-Assad, with no clear outcome to the action except defiance of the United Nations and the rule of the international law invoked against Damascus, as well as risking the sort of devastation caused by the Iraq war and its aftermath.
Obama has implicitly joined the neo-conservative ideologues who want “action” and punitive bombing because they want to send a “signal” to Iran and a message of support to Israel.
There have been comparisons with Kosovo, but the key intervention there was not the bombing campaign, which was conducted from high altitude to allow Bill Clinton to show that he was “doing something” while not risking the domestic fallout of shot-down American pilots. It was the threat of ground forces moving in caused Slobodan Milosevic to run up the white flag.
There are, of course, international conventions against chemical weapons, but killing so many innocent people, whether with cluster munitions, as still issued to the United States military, phosphorus (as used in Gaza), or napalm, is equally reprehensible and such actions are surely covered by the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. And, as Tony Blair and George W Bush graphically demonstrated, the principle of humanitarian intervention is susceptible to partisan interpretation, which is why it has to be applied so cautiously.
The Syrian people are victims, not only of Assad’s ruthless reluctance to cede power, but also of disastrous diplomatic decisions by the West. Russia’s stance is not excusable but understandable in the context of constant American snubs. But Russian support for Assad is as indefensible as unqualified American support for Israel, which poisons every diplomatic initiative in the region. The US now disdains the UN’s Uniting For Peace procedure under which the Korean War was fought, because the Palestinians have used it to bypass the automatic American veto in support of Israel.
The Israel connection also stops Washington dealing rationally with Teheran. As victims of (Western-backed) chemical attacks, even the Iranians might be open to discussion. The Israeli connection should give pause to any American involvement in military intervention. The US might have the military resources, but its record shows that it is not ideologically or politically equipped to meddle directly in Arab and Muslim affairs.
It is not enough to shout “No to intervention”. Nor is it enough to bleat about diplomacy – only a credible military threat might bring Assad to reasonable negotiations. A regime implicated in chemical warfare might amount to a diplomatic weapon for use by any UN members genuinely concerned. Members of the Security Council should and tell both Moscow and Washington that, Israeli concerns notwithstanding, they will take the issue to the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace procedure if Russia uses its veto.
Since Vladimir Putin’s stance is as much about face as love for Assad, the prospect of defeat in the court of world opinion might make him more amenable to joint action.
The British Parliament’s declaration of independence, backed by other countries, could give Obama the cover he needs to face off the neo-cons and the Israel lobby over ill-considered intervention and yet win some agreement from traditionally isolationist Americans that some considered investment in Syria is necessary.

More CEO Mayhem

Comment: pushing back against buybacks

Investor Relations magazine | 29 Jul 2013 | Rating | Print by Ian Williams

The buy backs argument isn’t self-evident

Particularly in the US, boards boast of ‘returning money’ to shareholders by buying back their own stock. Many regard the good sense of this tactic as being self-evident – but then, many also accepted that egregiously inflated CEO pay and adjustment of their underwater options was self-evidently to their benefit. Indeed, one suspects it is the same class of Panglossian investor that enthusiastically embraces M&A one year, divestment the next as winning strategies, and thinks refusal to pay dividends on ‘growth stocks’ is obviously in their interest.

When those growth stocks entered a catastrophic negative growth phase, many disillusioned investors wished they had dividends to invest elsewhere rather than leaving large sums to evaporate. Commentators on buybacks nod sagely as they explain the fiscal efficiency of stock repurchase over dividends because there is less tax on capital appreciation than on dividends. But what John Maynard Keynes said about economic prognostication applies to much investment analysis: its purpose is to make astrology look good.

Firstly, many investors – indeed, possibly most stockholders – are tax-exempt pension funds, endowments and not-for-profits of various kinds, which are not going to pay tax on their income. Even for those that might, however, the difference in the tax rates is so marginal as to be hardly worth worrying about, even if buybacks actually translated into visible cash for investors.

None of this is not self-evident. Theoretically, the reduction in the amount of tradable stock and the upward pressure from the purchases raise the stock price in the market, which then offers added value if and when the holder sells. Well, perhaps – but it seems a long shot, and even the paid coterie of compliant apologist analysts cannot compute a clear empirical correlation. Burning a pinch of incense on the altar of Mammon probably has as demonstrable a practical effect.

I used to think the real purpose of buybacks was to disguise the dilutive depredations on the outstanding stock of options issued to insiders. There is indeed a remarkable correlation between options and buybacks. This way the directors got a multiple halo effect: they avoid dilution, disguise the amount they are costing shareholders, and pretend to enrich the latter even as they pick their pockets.

If most of the stock bought with company money is then given away free to management, the financial effect on the market price is neutral. That does not stop people believing in the buyback effect, however. Certainly a public revelation that stock options for executives were costing the firm billions might not have been good for a company’s image or share price, as we can deduce from the hundreds of millions spent combating legislation and regulation to force firms to ‘expense’ such arrangements in the company statements. Lest we forget, ‘expensing’ was the euphemism for showing, transparently, how much executives took from shareholders.

But now there are extra reasons, and it goes deeper than even I suspected. There is indeed a quantifiable effect: reducing the number of shares increases the EPS, which might have some downstream effect on stock prices. But it definitely – and rather rapidly – clicks up progress in another part of the spreadsheet: executive options calculated on that number.

Now, call me a grouchy old cynic, but could this be a consequence of the 2006 rules mandating expensing and say-on-pay results? Needy executives then had to show they had earned the extra options they were raking in, and EPS is a plausibly solid metric to show restless shareholders, who might not notice that the S&P 500 spent $400 bn on share buybacks last year, boosting EPS to more than 6 percent, while the companies’ actual net income only grew 5 percent – and CEO options rose to record heights. I can’t help but suspect a closer statistical relationship here than between stock buybacks and rising share prices.

Primary Blues

Tribune

Wrong in principle and pernicious in practice

by Ian Williams

Friday, July 12th, 2013

The New York Labour Party International branch has just reconstituted itself. In the old days, many of its members saw their task as greeting visiting New Labour dignitaries, seizing their rose-tinted glasses  and  holding onto them until
they left. Senior MPs came to study (heaven help us) the American prison and healthcare systems, for example. In their happier moments together, we
even greeted Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, come to study Bill Clinton’s electoral successes.
Now we hear that Ed Miliband has imported a minor Chicago ward-heeler, Arnie Graf, to emulate Barrack Obama – and that he advocates “open primaries”. There is something inherently slavish in this deferential abasement before American ideas – not least when one sees the results of those ideas: the only country apart from Somalia with no paid maternity leave, no sick pay, no entitlement to holiday pay and poverty levels unsurpassed in the industrialised world. It is true that Obamacare has dragged the health system in the United States kicking and screaming to about the same place Bismarck brought Germany at the end of the 19th century, but the compromises to the powerful health insurance lobby have almost crippled it at birth. The power of those lobbies derives very much from primary elections, not least the latest fashion for open primaries which Graf is recommending. They constitute the major route by which money exercises its pernicious influence in American politics. It is the need of a presidential candidate to raise a billion dollars that forces Obama to give the banks, insurance companies and others so much sway in decision making.
If Americans register to vote,  they can declare whether they are registered Democrats or Republicans, or one of the lesser parties. Some register as independents. Originally the idea was to take selections of candidates out of the smoke-filled rooms of Tammany Hall-style corrupt cabals. Registration does not involve any payment of dues, or commitment to ideologies, nor give any say in framing policies, but it does allow voting in the primary elections to select the parties’ candidates.
The candidates run in their own right, without party support. That means that the individuals who run have to raise their own cash. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, previously registered as a Democrat, decided to run on as a Republican because there were so few registered Republican voters in New
York – it was easier for him to buy the nomination.
Primary elections swallow cash: they involve television and radio adverts, paying campaign workers and all the costs of a general election – which the candidate have to raise themselves. Unsurprisingly, they usually raise it from people who have money. In other parts of the US, they moved to open primaries as pushed by Graf on a receptive Labour leadership. In the British context, this means that Tory and Liberal Democrat supporters can vote in the selection of the Labour candidate. As in all primaries, it means that monied interests can swamp a contest to stop anyone they see as a threat – which one hopes would include almost any Labour candidate most of us would like to see elected. The examples in the US are so egregious that the idea should be dismissed almost immediately.
But then, we have our own examples. Lord Levy allegedly bankrolled Tony Blair’s leadership campaign, in which all party members voted, because it was “good for Israel”. John Prescott had to pay his own expenses. Imagine the costs of running public campaigns. Wrong in principle and pernicious in practice, the Labour Party needs primaries like it needs Silvio Berlusconi as a consultant. ”
Labour does need to reconsider its organisation, and Graf has some useful ideas about grassroots campaigns. But there are many in the United Kingdom who have equal and more relevant expertise – whose independence of mind would make them unwelcome to the Progress infiltrators in the party organisation. Above all, primaries would open the last barrier to self-indulgent affluent individuals and groups with chequebooks, and ideas that do not necessarily harmonise with what we would like to think of as the traditional Labour ideas. There is no more sense in emulating the dysfunctional US political system than in copying its disastrous healthcare and prison complexes.

Charles Glass interview on CRoB

PLAY The Deserters
Broadcast on WJFF  3:30 July 5 2013

http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=catskillrev00-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1594204284&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
Charles Glass, The Deserters

Stating the Case.

Speculator Column, IR magazine

  4 Jun 2013 Ian Williams

Finding chinks in the armor of the Iron Lady’s legacy 

Margaret Thatcher’s death in April revived discussion of state ownership of industries. The New York Times always described Mrs T as ‘the prime minister who privatized the loss-making state industries’. In reality, she was careful to sell only those that were very profitable, otherwise her friends in the City would not have been so eager to snap them up.

That well-known Bolshevik Winston Churchill nationalized BP, which was making untold millions for the Treasury by the time Mrs T sold it. The utilities that were privatized were no more efficient after the event than before, and usually inflicted much higher charges on their captive customers.

The same management teams that had led the state enterprises kept their desks but tended to pay themselves much more, despite mediocre results. In the modern version of shareholder capitalism, they escaped the political scrutiny of both parliament and citizenry and swapped it for the benign insouciance of money managers.

It’s true that in some countries state industries were channels of patronage and corruption, but the industries Thatcher sold were not among them. They did have strong unions, but for most of the post-war period those unions co-operated in productivity measures and closures, as well as huge reductions in employees. Industries like British Rail lost three quarters of their workers under state control, and these workers tended to be low paid anyway, as governments used them to hold down pay rates and allegedly control inflation.

If the British state industries had a fault, it was not inherent in their form of ownership, but rather that the permanent government of Treasury civil servants starved them of investment, and thus productivity, in order to reduce the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR). The PSBR was, and is, an irrelevant shibboleth, as if there were no difference between borrowing to finance investment and selling bonds to finance day-to-day government operations. Indeed, that was one of the stated reasons for privatizing British Telecom: bringing the antiquated telephone network up to date would have needed huge amounts of public investment.

Thanks to Mrs T, in the 1980s, competing parallel universes to the left and the right called for the nationalization of strategic industries, or liberating business from the ‘tyranny of the state’. Both were, and are, utterly detached from reality, as indeed is much of the discussion now.

In the real world, the governments of countries like Singapore, Norway or other oil states now hold huge stakes in British and American industry, without any diminution of business efficiency. Wall Street travels to work on the public-owned MTA and PATH trains and, in between glasses of Champagne, drinks water supplied by New York City. The Street lacked enthusiasm to invest in a 50-year water tunnel building program, but it is not reticent in its acceptance of Uncle Sam’s cash in times of crisis, as long as it comes untrammeled by ownership and control.

Back in Britain, one of Mrs T’s successes was the privatization of the Trustee Savings Bank, until the courts ruled it was owned by its clients, not the government. The proceeds of the sale to Lloyds had to be returned to those clients.

But these models can be Procrustean. If a state enterprise makes money it is either sold or milked to make it fit the privatizers’ paradigm. Now that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are making money for the US Treasury, we can be sure calls to sell them will follow – and soon. The US Postal Service (USPS) made money until ideological Congressmen forced it to prefund its employee health plans for 75 years, to pave the way for privatization.

One potential beneficiary of USPS dismemberment would be DHL – owned by the state-owned German Postal Service! There may be a rationale here, but it got lost in the mail somewhere.

Looking back to Spain, and sideways to Syria

 Tribune 14 June 2013

 Ian Williams

George Orwell understood that ignoring obvious horrors for expediency’s sake is a roadblock to justice.

The New Statesman recently reminisced about its former editor Kingsley Martin’s feud with Tribune’s former literary editor George Orwell about the latter’s attempt to tell the whole truth about the Spanish War. Martin preferred the commodity doled out sparingly, for which Orwell never forgave him.

Like many people who would otherwise swear by the truth as an abstract principle, Martin made it a partisan issue for the “cause.” Orwell, of course, often defied such criticism: that to tell the truth would harm the war effort, or harm unity with the part of the so-called left that had tried to kill him in Spain and was busily executing Socialists across Eastern Europe. Interestingly, twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, its ghosts haunt Orwell’s reputation yet, with vitriolic detractors whose ad-hominem hatred has almost forgotten its original roots in the purges and now uncontested mass murders of the era.

Veracity as a sacred principle has lots of small-print exceptions for so many people. It would be “bad for Israel,” or bad for the Palestinians. Over years of writing, I’ve been told I couldn’t say “that” about Militant in Liverpool, New Labour, UN corruption, and many other causes. In an eerie echo of Martin in the Statesman, I was told that the Nation in the US had a line, so we could not write anything about intervention in Kosovo that was not outright condemnation. It would “aid imperialism” to say that Slobodan Milosevic built his power on unleashing genocidal impulses.

The Hapsburg lip allegedly led generations of sycophantic dons into emulatory lisps -- which is a minor lapse -- the compared to all those who joined committees to “defend” Rwandan and Balkan mass murderers against “imperialist” justice.

All of us practice a partial vision some extent. Someone might indeed be very ugly, but it behooves us not to point that out. But like the emperor with his new clothes, if such a political figure poses publicly, then it is indeed a writer’s duty to mention their absence of raiment.

Recent weeks have seen some outstanding examples of reckless candour that deserve applause and support. Bradley Manning revealed clear examples of crimes by the Pentagon, notably the murder of a Reuters camera team in Baghdad and the gunning down of innocent civilians coming to help the wounded. It is worth recalling that the Pentagon lied to Reuter’s legal Freedom of Information request by claiming the video was lost.

He deserves all-out support from journalists, not the mumbling diffidence of the New York Times that published his revelations while abandoning their source. Similarly, one hopes that revelations that Edward Snowden supported deranged libertarian right-winger Ron Paul will not detract from support for his deed revealing, dare one say, Orwellian, government surveillance that would have Big Brother green with envy!

One other, almost unrecognised act of non-partisan balance, has come from the UN, in its reports on Syria, which suggest that people on both sides have used chemical weapons and violated human rights. It has resisted attempts to provide the smoking chemical canisters that neocon hawks would like, even though it has indeed made plain that the balance of crimes weighs heavily down on the regime side.

The parallels with Spain are painful. Most atrocities from the rebel side in Syria seem to be associated with their version of the International Brigades, which include fundamentalists coming in to “help.” This week, Russia Today quite correctly reported on their execution of a young Syrian for “heresy.” Somewhat less correctly, RT maintains complete silence on the regime’s mass killings of civilians and opponents.

Orwell’s commitment to the defeat of fascism was unimpeachable. And apart from being one of nature’s awkward squad, he appreciated that publicly ignoring obvious horrors for expediency’s sake does not help the cause of justice and progress in the slightest.

Orwell supported the Republicans in Spain, even though the KGB operating under their aegis tried to kill him -- and actually did execute many others. He certainly did not collectively condemn his comrades in arms who went to fight in the Brigades.

The reason that many of us oppose Assad’s regime is because it is ruthless and murderous, so there is absolutely no reason not to denounce such behaviour when committed by some of “our” side. Indeed, there is even more reason to do so, since to be silent implies complicity.

The truth is not only an effective principle, it is also an expedient weapon in the war of public opinion. We should pillory all who betray it.

East and West, meeting in twain?

Can Obama, Xi find common ground?
Special to The BRICS Post
June 7, 2013, 3:34 am

In 1907, US President Teddy Roosevelt signaled the arrival of the US as as world power by sending the “Great White Fleet” in  a grand gesture to the globe it circumnavigated. It was a little premature: the ships were obsolescent and relied on the kindness of strangers to refuel but it did mark Washington’s aspirations to put truth in the rumours about the Monroe Doctrine.
Similarly, Xi Jinping’s grand tour, which begins in California and a meeting with US President Barack Obama on June 7, is a debut rather than a consolidation.
It is, perhaps wisely, more economic in its theme, brandishing investments rather than waving big sticks.
While modern financial and trading networks need not follow the consolidated marine and land boundaries of previous rising empires, Xi’s triumphal progress through America’s backyard – the Caribbean and Mexico – demonstrates how much more effectively powerful China’s economic success is than the Soviet weaponry had been. “The China Dream,” is Xi’s rallying cry of a China with a seat at the top table.
It will be interesting to note the progress, with small indicators like the almost certain relaxation of Chinese regulations that restrict imports of Mexico’s Tequila because of methanol levels. A few extra Chinese hangovers is a small price to pay for an economic beachhead right on the Rio Grande.
It is fascinating to watch the interplay between the aspirant and receding superpowers and it is reassuring that both sides are obviously thinking seriously, and not necessarily reflexively about it.
When Richard Nixon went to China, apart from recognition of the previous pariah state’s future potential, at least part of  the White House motive was counterbalancing the Soviet Union. President Xi’s tour of the America epitomizes a renewed appreciation on both sides, but above all of China as a potential counterweight to the US itself. A less confident US is relinquishing the xenophobia, or more specifically Sinophobia, that previously greeted Chinese investment interests.
Across the US, job-hungry local governments yearn for the Yuan to come in and do what their own bankers are refusing to do – invest locally.
The times, they’re a-changing
Previous ups and downs of the great powers have been marked by major conflagrations, and we can be grateful that the demotion of the Soviet Union was relatively peaceful. Two decades ago, it would have been difficult to believe that the US of Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars and the New American Century fame would have been quite so polite to its most likely supplanter.
Two decades ago, even Japan was viewed with a jaundiced eye as it surged close to overtaking the US economically, even though militarily it was no threat, and indeed, was almost a US protectorate. The costs of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taxed US power even as it outspends the rest of the world militarily.
But the relationship between China and the US is unique. While there is very real rivalry as they both compete for the same space at the top of the table, it is like a Puerto Rican knife fight with the combatants tied by the wrists to each other. The US needs China, which, after all, has financed Washington’s wars with its purchase of US dollars. Conversely, China needs the US. Beijing can neither forgo those reserves deposited in its rivals’ Treasury vaults and needs its markets to fuel the growth of its economy.
Xi knows that the secret of continuing Communist Party of China (CPC) power in the face of potential domestic dissatisfaction is the growing prosperity that keeping US consumers happy brings.
However, China is developing military potential along with its economic success and the friction over disputed islands around the China Sea is worrying. The scenario of a rising uppity power confronting one that is relatively getting weaker, is all the more worrying when we consider that network of alliances and defence commitments that the US has across the region. China has interests and claims in an area where the US is far from home but has ties made in former days of glory.
Pulling treaty triggers

There has been rising tension over disputed islands in the China Sea [Xinhua]

In 1914, we saw what happened as a result of those treaty triggers being pulled, and in the South China Sea, US commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines could drag the US into a local conflict with China where the latter has its forces concentrated. The US, of course, is still in imperial overstretch mode, with bases and commitments worldwide. At home, the American public has strictly limited enthusiasm for wars for far-away countries of which, after all, it knows amazingly little.
Conservatives have set up a shopping lists of what Obama should demand of Xi, on economic reforms, currency policy, government etc. Obama is more sophisticated than many of his predecessors – and of course economic circumstances have weakened his hand. He is, one hopes, not going to be crass in his demands of China.
One assumes that Obama would realize just how counterproductive it would be for the US, whose economic model has never looked so dodgy, to lecture China, for whom a growth rate four or five times the US’s, seems to be overstretched in its own right. He will also understand that Xi has his own domestic politics to worry about.
The Communist Party has pretty much abandoned the dialectic of the class struggle, and the glue that holds it together is the nationalism of an oft-humiliated civilization.
So the talks are an opportunity for quiet dialogue and a development of rapport between the two leaders. Beijing might offer magnanimous compromises or exit routes on many of the maritime border issues, for example, but would certainly bridle at any ultimata. But the US is hardly in a position to brandish ultimata.
Room for compromise
In the case of Taiwan, for example, the administration’s efforts are more about stopping Taipei tickling the dragon than building up a prickly defence. The long obfuscation of Congressional efforts to sell F-16s to Taipei shows successive presidents’ deference to Beijing’s sensibilities, which on the face of it is illogical appeasement. The planes are only of use if China attacks – no one seriously expects Taiwan to attack the mainland, after all. But Washington has to take account of the importance of the island in China’s inner party rivalries.
There is room for compromise. If we consider, for example, North Korea as China’s Israel, an embarrassing but ineradicable ally, it would frame the limits of what Washington could reasonably expect China to do in a low key way. Xi can no more disown Kim Jong-un publicly than Obama can repudiate Netanyahu, but there are important gestures available.
Obama could pledge, for example, that US forces would withdraw from the Korean Peninsula in the wake of any re-unification, thus avoiding the triumphalistic mistakes in Europe that still fuel Russian resentment.
In fact, there is another model the two might adopt. Britain and the US were similar rivals and partners, tied as much by financial chains as any alleged common bonds of culture and language.
The US facilitated the decline of its erstwhile rival, moving from debtor to creditor – and, it might be added, doing its best to stab its ally in the back financially even as they fought together. But it has not approached military tensions since the British burnt the White House in 1814.
Of course, unless the Tea Party triumphs and splits the US into autonomous fragments, the US is never going to decline as precipitately as Britain shorn of empire, but it is possible for a rising China to be partners with a still powerful, although relatively declining America.
It would appear that Xi and the Chinese are prepared for this.
In terms of domestic politics, Japan is the foreign scapegoat up front while the US is relatively benign in China’s image.
Similarly, China benefits in the US from not being the Soviet Union and also the  main trading partner, an object of admiration and emulation.
Xi and Obama might be the two right people in the right place to make the mutually respectful links needed – and these talks will demonstrate that, one way or another.

The Road To - And Fro- Damascus

Tribune  17 May 2013

The Road To - And Fro- Damascus
The old anecdote about the directions given to a lost traveller in Ireland often applies to international affairs, but with added force to Syria.  “If I was you, I wouldn’t be startin’ from here!”  There is almost no conceivable happy outcome to the inferno in Syria, and although there must be some happier conclusions than others, no one will ever be sure that the roads not taken might have been better.

In part, ordinary Syrians are paying the price for the maladroit handling of  the earlier intervention in Libya - and indeed in Iraq.  Blair and Bush’s great adventure in Iraq understandably soured the enthusiasm of much of the world for intervention in general. One does not have to subscribe to the crazed leftist defence of bourgeois sovereignty that would have led some people to picket the Normandy landings, nor even listen to the supporters and deniers of genocide in the Balkans, to see that the Iraq invasion was unjustified and its outcome was disastrous.

Russian evocation of Libya to justify inaction in Syria is expediently amoral. Russia agreed to NATO involvement in Libya, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian FM, with his long experience as Moscow’s man at the UN, must have been well aware of how far NATO would take it. The Russians abstained partly because the Arab League was behind the UN resolution, and also because the much unloved Qaddafi had threatened to wipe out the rebels in Benghazi. Those who point out that there was some ambiguity in the actual wording of the threat, should bear in mind that there had been plentiful evidence over the years of his willingness to eliminate enemies as his prison massacre of 1998.

While the UN Resolution on Libya did not specifically endorse regime change, in the real world, faced with a deranged and murderous dictator what other logical result was there?  However, the West clearly should have done much more to involve and thus implicate  Russia, and the failure to do so added heft and sharpness to the chip on Moscow’s shoulders that weighs so heavily on its foreign policy. After all, if the UK and France have still not got over their long-lost Superpower status, Russia certainly has a much more recent excuse for post-power peevishness.

Which brings us back to the Superpower itself. In Washington the Republican opposition could have been making hay with the administration’s failure to develop a coherent policy towards Syria.  Instead, however, they are beating a dead horse that has no interest from the electorate and little connection with the real world. In their incestuous universe, the big issue is not Damascus, but Benghazi and the killing of the US diplomat there last year.  It gives them an obsessive stick with which to beat Hillary Clinton.

To be fair, there is little that the Obama administration could do directly in Syria with the historical baggage the US has accumulated over the years. The interventions in the Muslim world, even when not malicious have tended to be maladroit and all too often counterproductive by any standards. But if not the US, who?

Enter the UN - once again as diplomatic cover. Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran Algerian diplomat who succeeded Kofi Annan as the UN representative has been considering quitting. His reasons are obvious and honorable: firstly the UN is not a negotiator, rather as Ban Ki Moon says, it is a facilitator. It can provide the ladder for the various parties to climb down from their trees. But as Annan once said, diplomacy is very effective, when backed by the threat of sufficient force.

Currently neither the US, nor the Europeans can muster enough persuasion to get the Russians to lean on their ally Al-Assad. The Russians are providing enough diplomatic and military coverage to keep him fighting even if doing so empowers the Islamists in the opposition and increasingly imperils the position of the Alawites and other minorities.  The US is unable to stop its Israeli tail wagging, and the UN, Bank Ki Moon and Lakhdar Brahimi, without a unified global community behind them are reduced to calling for a ceasefire but have no means to enforce one.

It comes down to US. With all its faults, financially enfeebled, morally tainted and militarily entangled as it is, only the White House has the power to browbeat and cajole an international consensus that could stop the fighting, even if that implies having the strength to say pretty please to Moscow, to guarantee security to the various factions.

It needs a UN resolution, it needs  a no fly zone and eventually, probably boots on the ground - from almost anywhere except Europe and the US. One almost has pipe dreams of a joint Russian-Turkish peacekeeping operation, but more likely the conflict will just drag on until it spills over into the rest of the region.

Recent Catskill Review of Books Radio!

Latest CRoB with Bee Ridgway, re her genre bending novel!
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=catskillrev00-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0525953868

Last week's CRoB, on the cycles of modern history in Amsterdam with Pete Jordan
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=catskillrev00-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0061995207&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr 

CRoB podcast on wjffradio  EST Helene Wecker on her book The Golem and The Jinni

Up the IRS - Down the Spout with Tea Party!

Suddenly, hundreds of millions of dollars flow to influence elections and the anonymous donors claim tax exemptions for the organizations they use to launder the money they use to subvert Congress's clearly laid out campaign finance limits. It is of course outrageous.
But you would never guess so from this week's howls of outrage at the Internal Revenue Service for exercising due diligence and investigating the torrent of laundered political donations that flowed after the Supreme Court gave free speech to the dollar.
Almost as outrageous is how politicians once again leave conscientious public servants hanging in the wind for simply doing their job.
Unlike in Britain, where the ancient Charity Commission administers the admittedly arcane rules on what is and isn't a charity, in the U.S. this task falls to the IRS, since, after all, the main point of being a charity (a 501(c)(3)) is not to bask in a warm moral glow of do-gooding but to get the various exemptions from taxes. And technically, they do not get involved in politics.
However 501(c)(4) organizations can be more overtly involved in campaigning, albeit not for particular parties. Following the controversial ruling by the conservatives on the Supreme Court, such straw bodies can spend unlimited amounts in elections, masquerading as socially concerned quasi-educational bodies.
They do not pay taxes themselves, although their donors can't claim tax relief on the money they give but, perhaps beyond price, they can claim anonymity. It would be nice to think they were following the old Talmudic rule that an anonymous mitzvah is worth 10 times one with a name attached. But anyone who thinks that is the motivation should buy the lots I have for sale on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
That anonymity effectively allows them to run riot through what is left of congressional attempts to ensure that people rather than money decide elections. It allows a few highly politically motivated individuals to infiltrate the political process like rats in the sewers of a city, out of sight.
It follows that the IRS should want to check that bodies claiming such fiscal privileges actually fit the bill. One can imagine the Right's outrage if the IRS let through the Trilateral Commission Fan Club without inquiry.
I have helped set up several 501 C 3 and 501 C 4 organizations, and the bureaucracy can be frustrating. But it is the IRS's job to check the credentials of organizations claiming tax privileges, and one could forgive a hapless civil servant who mistook the electoral circus round "the Tea Party" for political campaigns, since they clearly were. Some of them were actually for-profit organizations owned by individuals who were practicing the entrepreneurship they so fervently preached!
Indeed, after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, the number of applications for such status doubled to over 3,000. Faced with a flood of new applications from organizations which, amazingly, often had Tea Party or Patriot in their titles, assiduous civil servants in the IRS scrutinized them to see if they were what they purported to be -- and whether they met the legal definitions.
As part of the familiar brush fire in the undergrowth of American politics, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called the IRS tactics "political thuggery."
He follows in the great American tradition of a media lynching for people who do their jobs, whether it is regulators at the SEC or TV people like Dan Rather for exposing the truth of George W. Bush's absentee war record, or Florida electoral officials for trying to count votes properly. And the one thing that is common is the unwillingness of leading Democrats to call out these fine examples of invisible imperial raiment because they are implicated in similar tactics themselves.
The response in Washington should not be going after public servants trying to stop adventurers avoid taxes -- but at the very least to change the law so that donors' names are made public in any organization that involves itself in the political process. In a democracy, people should stand up for their beliefs, not skulk behind anonymity.

Mrs T's Flawed Legacy

 A Floored Economy

By Ian Williams
The mainstream media epithet machine used to describe Margaret Thatcher for American readers as “the prime minister who privatized the loss-making state industries.” Of course she did no such thing. The enterprises she sold off made huge profits for the Treasury. BP was, after all, the state-owned creation of Winston Churchill and kept a constant flow of petropounds going into the Treasury. Selling it off to her friends in the City of London benefited its executives and shareholders but hardly the British public, let alone the US citizenry around the Gulf of Mexico.
Mark Twain said that while he wished no man dead, he sometimes read obituaries with great pleasure. I rather suspect that I will be denied even that enjoyment with the oleaginous brown-nosing that will surround the demise of Margaret Thatcher.
The woman contrived the collapse of Britain as an industrial power, squandering the windfall find of North Sea oil in the process and perhaps most reprehensibly helped erode the ideology of common welfare and concern that was consummated by the Labour government after World War II, which was after all, for most British people, the most significant achievement of that titanic struggle.
Less of a self-made woman than most obituarists will admit, she married well, to a millionaire who could support her in her political ambitions. To give her her due, she carved her way into an all-male chauvinist milieu with scrotum-crushing tenacity. She was determined and resolute in her ambitions. I was going to say strong-minded, but that would inadvertently have given her more credit than she deserved. Although undoubtedly more clued in than Ronald Reagan, with whose name she will be linked in death, I suspect that much of what the right see as ideological correctness was no such thing. Her motivation was not to dismantle the state so much as to ensure her continuing control of it.
She sold off public housing and stopped the programs to build more, not because she had deeply neo-liberal feelings that were offended by this intrusion of the state into the housing market but because she believed that doing so would break open what she saw as a Labour Party vote bank of council tenants, and convert them into property owning conservatives. In this and other respects she displayed a materialism and crude economic determinism that resembled the diehard factions of the Leninist left!
It was similar reasoning that I suspect impelled her break up of the great state-owned enterprises.   Coal, steel, railways, electricity and gas, were the stronghold of unions who not only had their fingers on the jugular of the nation but were the financial and political base of the Labour Party.  From her point of view, one cannot help but suspect this was a double whammy perpetrated on her political opponents, since the sale of the shares, she hoped, like the sale of public housing to its tenants would create a huge new voting population of conservatives.
It is worth remembering that she also introduced a poll tax to replace the local government property taxes, almost certainly with the aim of driving poorer, and as she saw them, natural Labour voters off the electoral rolls.
To her credit, in the same astute political vein, she forbore to privatize the National Health, not because she was attached to socialized medicine, but because she knew who her own voters were, just as they liked British Rail, which was left for John Major to privatize with disastrous fiscal consequences.
Despite all these measures, and despite the florid encomia now covering her pall, Margaret Thatcher never won a majority of the popular vote. Her arrival and stay in Downing Street owed much to her opponents. The Labour Party was tied up in sterile political arguments with ambitious politicians defecting to found the Social Democrats who later merged with the Liberals. It was that bloc of popular votes which deprived opposition Labour of the votes necessary to win elections. In each election a clear majority voted against Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party.
On foreign policy, it was her penny-pinching, withdrawing niggardly sums from, for example, the British Antarctic Survey, which sent the wrong signals to the Junta in Argentina and led to the invasion of the Falklands. She did indeed display courage and resolution in repelling that invasion, but fixing something she broke herself should dull the glow of that triumph. Indeed her defense cuts would have made the same operation impossible a year later!
That obduracy could be ugly - as when she gloated that she had bullied the Commonwealth’s and other heads of state into accepting only the most rudimentary token sanctions against Apartheid. On the other hand, she deserves considerable credit for persuading Reagan that Gorbachev was serious about detente. There were few others with the conservative credibility to do that.
She was not nice, not popular and a person of narrow but tightly focused vision. But her flawed legacy lives on, mesmerizing, for example, Tony Blair.  Apart from the pious politicians, one suspects that sackcloth and ashes will he hard to discern on the streets of London, that in pubs across the former industrial heartland of Britain, many pint glasses will be raised in tasteful celebration.
                                                         *****
                                                         *****
Ian Williams is the founder of Deadlinepundit Ltd, a public affairs media consultancy.