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Month November 2008

Entries 10 Total

Noam Chomsky: What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World

Nov 26, ’08 9:17 AM

Noam Chom­sky dis­cusses the mean­ing of President-Elect Barack Obama’s vic­tory and the pos­sib­il­it­ies ahead for real demo­cratic change at a speech last week in Boston.

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Britain: not so much 1984 as Minority Report

Nov 24, ’08 2:07 PM

Kiwi Tom Chap­man writes for Pub­lic Address about the author­it­arian bur­eau­cracy that has been tak­ing root under New Labour’s watch in Britain.

The UK police, who have my DNA, have already sold DNA data to private com­pan­ies and, accord­ing to Jenny Wil­lott MP, this includes “sin­is­ter explor­a­tions into eth­nic profiling.”

I’ve pen­cilled in the advent of a National ID card and/or bio­met­ric pass­ports as points at which I might leave Bri­tain. I just don’t want to be a part of a soci­ety that has a cent­ral­ised infra­struc­ture whereby the gov­ern­ment or some numb­skull at the Post Office/Police can have access to all this inform­a­tion and use it against people they don’t like.

I don’t how many times I’ve heard the cliché “if you don’t have some­thing to hide you’ve got noth­ing to worry about” so in some ways a lot of people here deserve such a government.

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Dick Cheney indicted by Texas Grand Jury

Nov 19, ’08 1:56 PM

U.S. Vice Pres­id­ent Dick Cheney and former Attor­ney Gen­eral Alberto Gonzales, among oth­ers, have been indicted (form­ally accused) by a Texa Grand Jury for “organ­ised crim­inal activ­ity” related to alleged abuse of private prison inmates.

The 3-page long indict­ment involves Cheney’s USD 85 M invest­ment in the Van­guard Group — an invest­ment man­age­ment com­pany that reportedly has interests in the prison com­pan­ies in charge of the deten­tion cen­ters. (via novinite.com)

Let’s hope this is just the start of a chain of indict­ments against these crim­in­als. I don’t believe in the death pen­alty but if the let­ter of law were fol­lowed in the U.S. that’s what some of these guys would get in the end for their war crimes.

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George Monbiot on the financial reform that should be taking place

Nov 19, ’08 12:28 AM

Keynes is inno­cent: the toxic spawn of Bretton Woods was no plan of his:

Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week black­en­ing his name. Not inten­tion­ally: most of the dun­der­heads report­ing the G20 sum­mit that took place over the week­end really do believe that he pro­posed and foun­ded the Inter­na­tional Mon­et­ary Fund. It’s one of those stor­ies that passes unchecked from one journ­al­ist to another.

The truth is more interesting …

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A word of thanks to National and ACT voters

Nov 17, ’08 10:45 PM

Just a quick word of thanks to all those National and ACT voters out there in NZ, espe­cially those who were in a “mood for change,” because now you’ve got it. A gov­ern­ment of rad­ical right-wingers, many proven untrust­worthy in the 80s and 90s, ready to turn New Zea­l­and upside down and shake.

Almost everything I said New Zea­l­and can expect is right there in National and ACT’s sup­ply and con­fid­ence agree­ment:

A huge increase in pris­ons and prison pop­u­la­tion, under “three strikes” law, where some­body con­victed three times goes to jail for life. You only need com­pare the U.S. or even New Zea­l­and to some­where like Nor­way or Fin­land, where crime and incar­cer­a­tion rates are well below ours, to know that this is about appeas­ing the sad­ists and the hang ‘em high bri­gade rather than actu­ally redu­cing crime and mak­ing NZ a bet­ter place.

You get Rod­ney Hide as Min­is­ter of Local Gov­ern­ment, which means local coun­cils are going to have Hide’s dis­cred­ited ideo­logy — that all is bet­ter if it’s privately owned — shoved down their throats (think privat­ised water and roads).

You get Heather Roy as Min­is­ter of Con­sumer Affairs, which means in prac­tice that you’ll have a min­is­ter look­ing after the affairs of busi­ness at the expense of consumers.

There’s ACT’s “Tax­payer Bill of Rights Bill,” a rad­ical Liber­tarian policy that would cap gov­ern­ment spend­ing to what it is now and tie it to infla­tion plus pop­u­la­tion growth. This is designed to make any­thing fun­ded col­lect­ively by the tax­payer inad­equate, so that people lose faith in demo­cratic pub­licly fun­ded ser­vices and turn to the private sec­tor. The ulti­mate aim being to trans­fer wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, by way of profits.

The private sec­tor will now get to review gov­ern­ment policy with a mind, no doubt, to privat­isa­tion, luc­rat­ive con­tracts for cronies and the cut­ting of social pro­grammes (edu­ca­tion, health, etc.). Again, all ulti­mately aimed at trans­fer­ring wealth from the pub­lic realm into private hands, by way of profits. You won’t see the pub­lic being able to review the way the private sec­tor spend profits of course.

And, poten­tially the most dev­ast­at­ing, going with ACT’s anti-science pos­i­tion: the killing off the Emis­sions Trad­ing Scheme. As No Right Turn writes:

Look­ing at the terms of ref­er­ence, they’re going right back to the start, includ­ing “hear[ing] com­pet­ing views on the sci­entific aspects of cli­mate change” and look­ing at whether we should do any­thing about it any­way (and of course float the idea of a car­bon tax to fur­ther delay things). In other words, repeat the entire policy pro­cess of the past fif­teen years (which has included sev­eral select com­mit­tee invest­ig­a­tions, as well as a national interest ana­lysis [PDF]), only in a more politi­cised con­text, with a politically-dictated out­come on the sci­ence. After fif­teen years, we’re right back to square one.

Mean­while, energy and indus­trial emis­sions — which were going to be covered by the ETS from Janu­ary 1 2010 — will be free to rise, and pol­luters will con­tinue to be allowed to exter­n­al­ise the cost of their pol­lu­tion. And we will be pick­ing up the tab for all of it.

The only thing left for them to do is to declare that they’d like to send more of our sol­diers off to Afgh­anistan to be killed in another futile immoral war led by the only nation in the world to have attacked another coun­try with nuc­lear bombs.

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So you think Obama’s going to change things?

Nov 16, ’08 1:02 AM

Think again (think Tony Blair):

Tim Bald­win:

I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.

Mat­thew Par­ris:

Here we have a hand­some, dash­ing and intel­li­gent man, a man with gen­er­ous instincts and a sil­ver tongue; but a man with no dis­tinct­ive plan for gov­ern­ment that he has seen fit to share with us; a dar­ing oppor­tun­ist; some­body we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.

Jon Snow:

Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the con­crete changes that may now ensue and in par­tic­u­lar, there are some big for­eign policy areas where Obama is not prom­ising a hugely dif­fer­ent tack from Bush …

Tariq Ali:

As for what the policies are going to be, the situ­ation is pretty depress­ing. I mean, Obama, dur­ing his cam­paign, didn’t prom­ise very much, basic­ally talked in cliches and syn­thetic slo­gans like “change we can believe in.” No one knows what that change is. In for­eign policy terms, dur­ing the debates, his — what he said was basic­ally a con­tinu­ation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in rela­tion to Afgh­anistan, what he said was worse than McCain …

Ralph Nader:

He doesn’t like to take on power … I think his record in the state sen­ate in Illinois and in the US Sen­ate is that he doesn’t like to take on power. And if you don’t take on power, you know, the cor­por­ate power that dom­in­ates every depart­ment in our gov­ern­ment, you’re going nowhere, because they con­trol the budget, they con­trol the pri­or­it­ies, they have heavy con­trol on the media.

Jonathan Steele:

… his pos­i­tion con­tains massive incon­sist­en­cies … he has not repu­di­ated the war on ter­ror. Rather, he insists that by focus­ing excess­ively on Iraq, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion “took its eye off the ball”. The real tar­get must be Afgh­anistan and if Osama bin Laden is spot­ted in Pakistan, bomb­ing must be used there too.

John Pil­ger (who was right about Blair back in 1997):

Like all ser­i­ous pres­id­en­tial can­did­ates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expan­sion­ist. He comes from an unbroken Demo­cratic tra­di­tion, as the war-making of pres­id­ents Tru­man, Kennedy, John­son, Carter and Clin­ton demon­strates. Obama’s dif­fer­ence may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.

Michael Albert:

My guess is, sadly, that within one week, lit­er­ally one week, Obama’s staff and cab­inet choices will make decis­ively evid­ent that without mass act­iv­ism for­cing new out­comes, change will stop at the sur­face. I fer­vently hope I am wrong.

Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zion­ist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq. 

Alex­an­der Cock­burn on Rahm Emanuel:

He’s a former Israeli cit­izen, who volun­teered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk mil­lions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fas­cist Irgun in the late Forties, respons­ible for cold-blooded mas­sacres of Palestinians.

Nader on Obama’s record:

Far more than Sen­ator McCain, you have received enorm­ous, unpre­ced­en­ted con­tri­bu­tions from cor­por­ate interests, Wall Street interests and, most inter­est­ingly, big cor­por­ate law firm attor­neys… Why, apart from your uncon­di­tional vote for the $700 bil­lion Wall Street bail­out, are these large cor­por­ate interests invest­ing so much in Sen­ator Obama? Could it be that in your state Sen­ate record, your U.S. Sen­ate record and your pres­id­en­tial cam­paign record (favor­ing nuc­lear power, coal plants, off­shore oil drilling, cor­por­ate sub­sidies includ­ing the 1872 Min­ing Act and avoid­ing any com­pre­hens­ive pro­gram to crack down on the cor­por­ate crime wave and the bloated, waste­ful mil­it­ary budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

Obama: bought and paid for.

(thanks to Media Lens for this post)

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Despisers of Democracy: Jenni McManus

Nov 13, ’08 11:25 PM

This is the first in a new series track­ing people who find the whole demo­cracy thing incon­veni­ent1 and would rather those pesky cit­izens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with trans­fer­ring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actu­ally entitled to it, the few.2

Jenni McManus is editor for the The Inde­pend­ent, a New Zealand-based busi­ness weekly, and here she is expound­ing her idea of demo­cracy and how the incom­ing Prime Min­is­ter of New Zea­l­and should inter­pret his mandate:

If forced to choose between break­ing elec­tion prom­ises and the country’s eco­nomic sur­vival, voters’ inten­tions are clear. Key wasn’t elec­ted simply to imple­ment his mani­festo but to man­age and lead the eco­nomy out of the crisis.

Trans­la­tion:

We have our Pearl Har­bour Mr Prime Min­is­ter so the choice between a small attack on New Zealand’s wealth and a full out assault to trans­fer every ounce we can into the hands of few is clear. Don’t worry about those pesky voters and their silly ideas about demo­cracy, my psychic abil­it­ies tell me that their “mood for change” is that they actu­ally want to be fucked up the ass.

jenni_mcmanus

She fills out her cre­den­tials by offer­ing this piece of advice to the incom­ing Prime Min­is­ter from one of the ulti­mate des­pisers of demo­cracy, Roger Douglas, writ­ing in his 1993 book omin­ously titled Unfin­ished Busi­ness:

Do not try to advance a step at a time. Define your object­ives clearly and move towards them in quantum leaps. Oth­er­wise the interest groups will have time to mobil­ise and drag you down.

Notes:
  1. Well, in actual fact, these people love demo­cracy, at least by their defin­i­tion of the word. They see demo­cracy as James Madison wanted it to be, speak­ing at the secret debates of U.S. con­sti­tu­tional con­ven­tion in 1787, as a means to pro­duce gov­ern­ments that will “pro­tect the minor­ity of the opu­lent against the major­ity,” i.e. to pro­tect those with prop­erty from those without. For the pur­poses of this series I am using a more pop­u­lar defin­i­tion: that the cent­ral insti­tu­tions of soci­ety have to be under pop­u­lar con­trol. [↩]
  2. They don’t actu­ally say this is their object­ive but even those of them with good inten­tions are so blinded by their ideo­logy that they just don’t care if this is the out­come. [↩]
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Obama on revamping the way America uses energy

Nov 12, ’08 1:41 PM

Green polit­ics has come along way in the past ten years.

Barack Obama on revamp­ing America’s energy use:

I was just read­ing an art­icle in the New York Times by Michael Pol­len about food and the fact that our entire agri­cul­tural sys­tem is built on cheap oil. As a con­sequence, our agri­cul­ture sec­tor actu­ally is con­trib­ut­ing more green­house gases than our trans­port­a­tion sec­tor. And in the mean time, it’s cre­at­ing mono­cul­tures that are vul­ner­able to national secur­ity threats, are now vul­ner­able to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in com­mod­ity prices, and are partly respons­ible for the explo­sion in our health­care costs because they’re con­trib­ut­ing to type 2 dia­betes, stroke and heart dis­ease, obesity, all the things that are driv­ing our huge explo­sion in health­care costs. That’s just one sec­tor of the eco­nomy. You think about the same thing is true on trans­port­a­tion. The same thing is true on how we con­struct our build­ings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to com­pletely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with cli­mate change, deals with national secur­ity and drives our eco­nomy, that’s going to be my num­ber one pri­or­ity when I get into office …

(via Fro­gb­log)

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‘There’s going to be a lot of hurt for a lot of people’

Nov 10, ’08 12:14 AM

Oh New Zea­l­and, what have you done? Roger Douglas on elec­tion night fan­tas­ising about the man­date he thinks he has:

We have to make some changes and there’s going to be a lot of hurt for a lot of people.

What a cheek, com­ing from the scoun­drel who lied his way into gov­ern­ment in the eighties, unleash­ing an eco­nomic revolu­tion without a demo­cratic man­date, selling off New Zealand’s resources and dev­ast­at­ing our demo­cracy by strip­ping away gov­ern­ment con­trol over the flow of cap­ital, effect­ively hand­ing over the keys of demo­cracy to private investors who can choose at any time to sink the country’s eco­nomy by mov­ing cap­ital out of the coun­try if gov­ern­ment policy is not con­du­cive to their “busi­ness needs.”

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2008 NZ election: garbage in, garbage out

Nov 9, ’08 4:57 PM

In a rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy it’s not democracy’s pur­pose to pro­duce good gov­ern­ment but to pro­duce rep­res­ent­at­ive gov­ern­ment. While I don’t expect much in the way of demo­cracy from rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy1 enough New Zeal­anders voted against their interests on Sat­urday to elect into gov­ern­ment a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire mer­chant banker Prime Min­is­ter and his self-interested fat cat accom­plices, includ­ing some of those who wreaked havoc on the New Zea­l­and eco­nomy in the eighties and nineties. As a res­ult New Zeal­anders can expect, amongst other things, a nas­tier soci­ety, a less fair soci­ety, more crime, more pris­ons, lower wages, more involve­ment in futile and immoral wars, a decline in the envir­on­ment and less demo­cracy. Garbage in, garbage out.2

As you can tell, I’m over the moon that enough New Zeal­anders had, shall we say, the con­fid­ence to vote National (and ACT!) on Sat­urday. They must have missed my memo.

Notes:
  1. New Zealand’s cur­rent vot­ing sys­tem requires the form­a­tion of a coali­tion rep­res­ent­ing a major­ity of voters to form a gov­ern­ment. While this is some­thing to be rel­at­ively proud of com­pared to the more com­mon sys­tem of plur­al­ity vot­ing, which requires only that a group receive the largest bloc of votes to form a gov­ern­ment, we still end up with an extremely lim­ited form of democracy.

    While there are things we could do to improve our vot­ing sys­tem, such as mov­ing away from hav­ing two large parties and get­ting rid of the absurd 5% threshold which can dis­en­frachise hun­dreds of thou­sands of voters, there’s no get­ting away from the inher­ent prob­lems of rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy, such as the tyranny of simple major­ity rules (let alone plur­al­ity rules) and the fact that vot­ing for people to rep­res­ent your interests is the least effect­ive means of apply­ing polit­ical power and argu­ably a con­tra­dic­tion; no one can truly rep­res­ent your power and interests for you. You can only have power by exer­cising it and you can only truly know what your interests are by involving your­self in the attend­ance of them.

    In any case, I don’t think it’s any coin­cid­ence that the self-described demo­cra­cies of the world using plur­al­ity vot­ing sys­tems are some of the least equit­able, the largest arms deal­ers and the largest pol­luters. [↩]

  2. A fam­ous com­puter axiom mean­ing that if invalid data is entered into a sys­tem, the res­ult­ing out­put will also be invalid. [↩]
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