Sunny on Iran

Agreed.

But…

The election was a fraud. ~ Sunny Hundal

I can’t help but wince when people claim that the result was fraudulent. We don’t know that. We suspect it, but we don’t know it.

The western press, as we know, polled the urban young. Many warned, prior to the election, that non-urban areas are far more conservative and that there Ahmedinijad is very well liked.

It’s apparent that some intimidation occurred, and the election result is questionable, but we should be careful about being so certain that any foreign election we don’t like is rigged.

And - this folks is the huge elephant in the room - it’s highly unlikely that the installation of Moussavi would lead to the rapid liberalisation of Iranian society.

That said… Sunny is dead-right. Conservatives demanding action are dead-wrong.

Know-nothing Republican senators and vacuous Tory blowhards should keep their traps shut. What would a “strong statement” actually achieve, apart from justifying the Iranian establishment’s claims of foreign chicanery?

If we can help the Iranian progressives logistically, we should. But help should come from western citizens, not moronic conservative politicians trying to score political points.

Iran is at a crossroads. We should allow the people of Iran to determine their own destiny.

*Yeah, I know I’m on hiatus, but I needed a rant*

Yay! The Story of Stuff makes The NYT

I just received an email alerting me that Annie Leonard’s wonderful 20-minute animation, The Story of Stuff, made The New York Times’ front page. I first mentioned Annie’s work, briefly, in 2007.

It appears that the video has become a hit in America’s classrooms, where teachers are using it to convey the basic law of economics: that finite resources are just that, finite. And that our rabid consumerism is accelerating the use of our planets limited resources.

Watch it here. Really, you should. It’s excellent.

How to survive the Aporkalypse

Obviously the swine flu is very worrying. I mean, who really wants trotters, a snout, and wiry hair on their neck? Anyway, rather than spending your life in terror and looking suspiciously at sausage rolls, why not use the epidemic to your advantage?

Below are a few ideas. Feel free to add your own in the comments. The best one gets a bag of pork scratchings.

Craig Murray: I will accuse Jack Straw on Torture

From Craig’s blog ::

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has agreed to hear my evidence on torture on Tuesday 28 April at 1.45pm. Many thanks to everyone who helped lobby for this.

I am delighted, as I have been trying for over four years to lay the truth about British torture policy before Parliament. I will testify that as British Ambassador I was told there is a very definite policy to accept intelligence from torture abroad, and that the policy was instituted and approved by Jack Straw when Foreign Secretary. I will tell them that as Ambassador I protested formally three times in writing to Jack Straw, and that the Foreign Office told me in reply to my protests that this was perfectly legal.

I will prove my evidence with documentation….

Read more…

Hat-tip Jennie (email), who wonders whether the MSM will run with this significant story? We’ll see. If the blogosphere makes a big deal, then I would imagine The Guardian will pick it up.

Our managers must look beyond America…

Stefan Stern at the FT ::

“[The American Business Model] remains the working hypothesis of most business people and consultants,” [John] Kay writes. But, he argues, it is mistaken in its core belief that greed can be a benign and sustainable force. He cites the economists Ken Arrow and Frank Hahn, who asked in 1971: “What will an economy motivated by greed and controlled by a very large number of different agents look like?” The economists answered their own question: “There will be chaos.”

Read on…

The good times are over. Glutton is gone. Lean is back in vogue.

If there is one thing that will be our ultimate undoing, it will be our ignorance and our arrogance. Our business leaders love nothing more than criticising our governments, yet in reality, many of them are unaware of their own inadequacies and shortcomings (even if they do work incredibly hard).

We do have professional bodies that work to propagate best-practice, but they also enforce age-old Anglo-Saxon business techniques that in many cases have become outdated. If we are to return to a level of effectiveness that will equip us to compete in a tight global market, we have to open our eyes to techniques from other cultures.

The top-down, greed is always good ethos has been vanquished. Markets have not failed, we have failed them. And the fallout - the toxicity of American economic calamity - is poisoning global industry. We need to become more than what we have been.

It’s time for British managers to visit the world. Not as travelling titans, but as humble students. To share and learn.

We have some excellent companies and some brilliant managers, no doubt. But in the main, we suffer institutional stagnation in many of our businesses, a culture of unjustified remuneration for executives, and a chronic lack of appreciation for investing in training.

I have worked in industry for over a decade, within the much-derided manufacturing sector in fact. Contemporary management theory, in many cases, is non-existant and formal training is viewed as a waste of time and money (not only by senior managers, but by the junior-level managers themselves).

In a new post-crash global economy, skills and education will become more and more necessary as fat is trimmed - only the smartest businesses will survive. We need to start with our children, but we must not forget education when people leave formal education.

Blair once made a commitment to “Education. Education. Education.” Yet, despite over a decade in power, and “improving” exam results, our economy is still strangled by a lack of basic numeracy, literacy and the capacity of our young people to adapt to industry.

The reinvention of Labour - if it is to reinvent itself in this parliament - must be a commitment to lead the country in a national project to reform education and skills. We need not only investment, but a leadership with the charisma to inspire change.

If not, we must be prepared to rot on the vine, and say good-bye to any ideas of global economic leadership.

The problem when ideology is ill-informed

From Dizzy “Thinks” ::

From former Spanish PM José María Aznar López on whether the current economic crisis signifies a failure of the free market.

It is certainly not a failure of the free market, but a failure of the current mechanism of state regulation and intervention in a sector which is already highly regulated, the banking system. It is the same with politics - democracy is not discredited merely because a bad government has been elected.

Spot on.

Spot on? You sure?

A lack of regulations in the CDS market, meant that when one institution collapsed (Lehman Brothers - or taking it further back and looking at another unstable financial instrument, Bear Sterns), the others lost confidence in each other as they had no idea as to each other’s level of exposure to the crisis.

The day-to-day borrowings between financial institutions seized up, and businesses in the real economy couldn’t secure short-term lending to continue operating (I used to arrange this borrowing myself when I worked in finance). This sparked the inevitable market correction that many of us had been predicting for years.

It was absolutely a lack of regulation of the these complicated financial markets that meant there was no transparency, and credit traders couldn’t calculate risk with any level of confidence. Fear spread quickly, and governments - rightly or wrongly - decided they had no option but to step in and try to grease the system, to prevent many companies having to cease trading because capital they relied on had dried up.

(History: The Republican legislature and Clinton White House took a pass on regulating this emerging economy, who along with our own European governments, share responsibility for the initial collapse.)

I don’t like regulations per se, but they’re often a necessary evil to ensure the stability of a system we all rely on. Good governments write good laws and set sensible, lean and robust rules.

Maybe some of the existing regulations in the banking system are crap, but you’d be a fool to suggest that it was regulation that caused the initial collapse, when it’s the exact opposite that’s true (in the specific cases of CDSs, CDOs, and short-selling).

It’s no use taking an ideological laissez-faire attitude, if you don’t understand the fundamentals of the system, and how a lack of transparency (see rules) can lead to massive ’systematic risk’.

Craig Murray’s new book

A few sites are hosting Craig Murray’s latest book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known, and tygerland is one of them (we’re published in Utah, doncha know?).

Anyway… the controversial back-story, as to why the book was pulled by Craig’s publishers, can be found here. It’s seems those pesky buggers at Schillings are at it again. Craig is keen for his story to be told, and is releasing the book FOC.

The book is in three parts.

*** Front_Cover *** Intro_pages *** main_body ***

Craig has self-published a few copies, and if you want a hard copy, go here.

Update: John Hirst has posted the document using iPaper (good idea). I have reproduced it after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Gaza mess

I wasn’t going to comment on this, but at the same time it’s foolish to just pretend it’s not happening.

Both sides, as ever, are in the wrong.

Hamas was moronic to continue to fire rockets at Israel. You don’t poke a government in the ribs prior to an election - especially when it’s vulnerable to its right flank.

The ambitious Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, failed to put together a coalition that would have made her the Prime Minister of the Jewish State. As de facto head of the majority party, she called for elections to legitimise her position.

That Livni and Kadima have responded to Hamas rocket attacks with overwhelming force is unsurprising. They have effectively created a tempest that many among the electorate will see, not only as justice, but as an unresolved situation that needs to be sorted.

Wars are often the last refuge of a spent administration.*

Israel is torn between its hard-right Zionist founders (and its indoctrinated progeny) and a more moderate and modern urban population - who know that only engaging and compromising with its neighbours will seed peace.

The far-right of Israel’s political spectrum represents a fanatical band of racist imperialists, who no-more respect the territorial integrity of their neighbours than they do the international organisation that censure them.

For decades Tel Aviv refused to co-operate with Fatah (a political, largely secular organisation), only to be rewarded with increasing violence and the eventual electoral success of Hamas.

American coalescence to the status-quo in the region (meaning the continued apartheid and imperial suppression of the Palestinians) has helped ferment this situation. Only America, with its tentacles reaching throughout the region - and its unwavering financial and political support for Israel, could possibly hope to broker a new solution.

President Bush’s approach to Israel - which amounted to little more than playing its slavish apologist, has emboldened Israel and led to even greater international outrage over the Israeli response.

The predictable rightwing response has been to excuse civilian bloodshed by lumping all responsibility on Hamas’ shoulders. Yet when you read about a family of seven killed (inc. at least 4 children) by an Israeli bomb, you can safely assume that Israel’s retaliation is hardly that of a responsible and compassionate government.

The whole region is a complete clusterfuck.

Hamas offers the Palestinian people no real future if it’s going to continue to act with religiously-spiked aggression towards Israel. And unless the Israeli people can elect a genuinely progressive government, committed to compromise and peace with its neighbours and a workable and self- determining Palestinian state, then they too have no future beyond hostility and mutual bloodshed.

It’s a fitting conclusion to the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, that Palestine should implode as he boxes up his belongings and prepares to leave Pennsylvania Avenue.

That the greatest and most powerful nation on the planet could twice elect a lifelong loser and known fuckwit, proves two things: the first is that the wisdom of crowds is loony pseudo-intellectual claptrap, and the second is that dynastical monarchy is alive and well in the American Republic.

Early signs suggest that Barack Obama will not be vastly different from previous American presidents, but at least he’s not a complete incompetent.

*Apologies to Samuel Johnson

Those wonderful Saudis

Those Saudis are a lovely friendly bunch, aren’t they?

They’re the ones with all that oil and money who are so lovely that they’re apparently above the law. And so friendly that we often have them around for tea and nibbles, just so we can tell them how great they are. Yeah, we know that they finance those Wahabbist madrassahs that indoctrinate so many angry little jihads, but what’s a few civilian casualties between friends?

The Saudis are so great. I love the Saudis.

From The Guardian ::

An eight-year old Saudi Arabian girl who was married off by her father to a 58-year-old man has been told she cannot divorce her husband until she reaches puberty.

Lawyer Abdu Jtili said the divorce petition was filed by the unnamed girl’s divorced mother in August after the marriage contract was signed by her father and the groom. “The judge has dismissed the plea because she [the mother] does not have the right to file, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty,” lawyer Abdullah Jtili told the AFP news agency.

You gotta love’em too, huh?

Some of which, is probably true…

John Hodgman on hobos.

Cameron the “lightweight”, and *that* lingering problem

I must admit that I had to suppress a giggle when I read that Slippery Dave’s much-vaunted July meeting with the then presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, wasn’t quite as rosy as the Tory spin-merchants painted it.

The New Statesman reports, that in fact, Mr. Cameron played a poorly chosen hand, concentrating on his pro-Americanism while launching into an “anti-European diatribe”. This was only 48-hours after Obama’s famous Berlin speech that called for more multilateralism from world powers and a stronger, more united Europe.

Indeed, if Cameron had taken the time to study Obama’s foreign policy speeches, he would understand that the now President elect considers a robust and focused EU, as a natural partner to a reborn American internationalism.

Slippery Dave’s rabid Europhobia didn’t go down well at all, with the former Illinois senator being left “distinctly unimpressed” with the Tory leader (far from the instant “bond” that Tory PR-goons gushed about).

Back in March The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson asked if DC was The British Obama, and DC has sought to align himself with the President-elect at every opportunity - declaring Obama “the first of a new generation of leaders”.

This admiration is clearly not shared over the Atlantic, with Obama declaring Cameron (and this is glorious) a “lightweight” - something I’ve long argued.

However, schadenfreude aside, I think this raises a significant problem for Cameron and the Tories. In fact it’s an old problem - a festering boil of a problem: Europe.

Cameron won the leadership campaign promising a more hostile approach to the continent, promising to leave the EPP and battle any further integration with fellow European States. So just as Obama is looking to create a coalition of democratic states - with The US and The EU at its centre - Cameron is pulling in the opposite direction.

It seems that Europe, that old cancer within the Tories, is no longer malignant.

More “Joe the Plumber” BS

The Guardian has news that Sam “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher (who has become a byword for every hard-working American in John McCain’s lexicon) is being courted by a record company, keen to turn him into a country music star.

Jim Della Croce, his PR spokesperson (seriously), has claimed ::

“He is a dynamic speaker and an everyman who has become an overnight celebrity…”

Substitute “everyman” for “Republican plant”, and “overnight celebrity” for “liar”, and he’s just about right.

Powell 4 Obama?

Chris Cillizza explains on WashPo’s The Fix blog, how Colin Powell’s endorsement of his opponent may be the final nail in John McCain’s presidential hopes.

It is widely rumoured that the retired General will offer his backing to Senator Obama on NBC talk show Meet The Press today. Cillizza points out that Powell’s support will shore up Obama’s foreign policy credentials - the one area where McCain still gets traction.

UPDATE ::

The Beltway rumour mill was right, Colin Powell today announced his endorsement of the Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama.

As a former Army General and Secretary of State in the Bush administration, Powell’s support will be seen as important in bolstering Obama’s foreign policy proposals, which include a “phased withdrawal” from Iraq.

Powell used the endorsement, made on NBC’s Meet the Press, to stress his long friendship with Obama’s rival, John McCain, but added that his vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, isn’t ready to be President of the United States.

UPDATE 2 ::

I’ve just listened to the audio from the Meet the Press interview, and Powell stressed the GOP’s lurch to the right as an important factor in his decision. Powell’s ‘defection’ may prove to be decisive in cementing the support of centre-right Republicans - the much-discussed ‘Obamacans’ - who feel alienated by the appointment of Palin and McCain’s reliance on divisive political tactics.

Powell rejected the culture-war that McCain has embraced.

Commentators also mentioned the importance of Powell as a retired veteran, with regard to the ageing populations of Florida. Many former members of the military live in the crucial state of Florida and would be considered natural McCain voters.

Socialising risk

I’m pretty sure that the bail-outs of AIG*, Freddie Mac, and Frannie Mae were indeed necessary to protect the US financial system (whether a system so fundamentally vacuous deserved saving, is another matter), but you can bet that an American, who played by the rules and borrowed modestly, is pretty hacked off by the massive transfer of debt from private hands to the tax-payer. In effect socialising debt (do you know it’s the biggest transfer or debt in history?).

As WashPo reports ::

And they say they don’t like it. They didn’t break it, but now they’ve bought it. Political leaders and financial titans say the bailout is necessary to save the economy, but on the ground, in such places as Manassas Park, people think that the bailout will reward the wrong people. There’s a sense that too many folks bought houses they couldn’t really afford, banks urged them on, common sense went on vacation, and now the grown-ups have to clean up the mess.

The question is where do we go from here? The Bush administration has massively increased the country’s already enormous national debt in its last few weeks in office. The man who was framed as the first CEO President (a joke when you look at his actual business acumen), will hand over one of the worst economic situations in history. Even if Obama is elected, what chance does he have of presiding over a stable and flourishing economy? He’s on a hiding to nothing.

*AIG secures many investors who hedged their stocks, and its collapse would have ricocheted through the economy

More insight on Russia’s aggression in Georgia

A comment on Buchanan’s piece in the conservative site, Human Events ::

Buchanan is right (as usual).

I am a Russian linguist (or should I say ‘linguist of Russian’, being of British ancestry) and a student of Georgian. I know many on both sides of the conflict and read a wide variety of news sources. The fighting started on AUGUST SEVENTH, you can verify this EASILY by reading world media or at this point just google news searching by date. It began with a vicious Georgian encirclement of Tskhinvali with tanks and heavy air raids. This was disproportionate force against a small local militia (supported, nonetheless by the MAJORITY ethnic group). Russia invaded with tanks the next day, welcomed by the MAJORITY ethnic group.

The bombing of Gori and Poti and of airbases OUTSIDE OF Tbilisi were all aimed at military targets. Some missed and a number of civilians were killed. However deplorable this is, about 100 Georgian civilians is probably 10 times (Russia claims 20 times) fewer than Ossetian civilian casualties, about 22 times fewer than Serb civilian casualties to NATO bombing in 1999, and God only knows how many times fewer than civilian casualties of US armed forces (ahem, ‘coalition forces’) in Iraq.

Any slamming of Russia being an aggressor by those of you who support the far less justifiable acts of the USA in Iraq is laughable. The whole world is laughing, in fact…or crying, maybe.

Also, the US policy is hypocritical insofar as it lied about Serb ‘genocide’ while secretly funding and supplying the KLA in Albania to launch a virtual war on serbia, force it to sign a document agreeing to an occupation force in part of its country, and then, against all previous agreements, support its secession. Apparently, this is only alright when it is a NATO client state. This only supports the Russian view that NATO is not a defensive, but rather an AGGRESSIVE alliance, aimed only to create/support EU/US client states!!!!

Lastly, Georgia is not a democracy, not that that matters to most of you except for propagandistic purposes (since you oppose democracy in USA but support overthrowing people because they are ‘dictators’ if the president has an R next to his name). Have you heard of television company Imedi? It showed pictures of Georgian police brutally suppressing an opposition rally in late November. Saakashvili immediately sent riot police thugs without a warrant or anything to ransack the studio and destroy it. You can see youtube video of this, some translated into English. The director of the studio even ran up when the police arrived and took over the microphone to explain what was happening before the police turned off the camera. Right after this, Saakashvili declared martial law, then called a snap election, when only STATE media were operational. All the same, oppositionist exit polls showed a 20-something point discrepancy between the official results and their data, less than the discrepancy between US funded NGO exit polls and Shevardnadze’s data in 2003.

Stop fooling yourselves! America doesn’t want ‘democracies’, it wants client states. Perhaps Russia wants the same, but it is not but a fraction as capable of establishing this.

Some of you really want war, you love war, you don’t want peace. You don’t know about world politics, you just watch one channel and look at two or three websites over and over. You don’t know foreign languages, you don’t read or trust any world press. You are ready for any reason someone can give you to waive the flag and go fight and call everyone with a brain a traitor or a liberal. Buchanan is more conservative than most all of you, all he is spouting in foreign policy is Catholic just war doctrine! Is that too liberal for you?

No direct link, but the comment was by Thomas, Bergen, NORWAY@ Aug 15, 2008 @ 01:07 PM

Obviously it was derided by the mob…