Manic Net Preacher

How We Rob Africa

2005-12-06T10:42:00.000+01:00

African poverty is the West's fault - say even committed capitalists now.

In recent years, it became a popular tome among our economic, political and media elites that Africa should stop blaming colonialism for their woes, as that was decades ago, now the problem is local: massive corruption.

This is disingenuous at face value already: direct exploitation wasn't the only effect of colonisation, its economic and social and local political distortions are effects lasting for decades - even without considering post-colonial secret service messing-around, corporate corruption and diplomatic gangsterism. However, an even worse picture emerges when we look at the money flows - no, the net flow is not US/European aid money flowing into African sand/mud, it's the other way around, writes The Guardian:

Five trillion dollars has been corruptly removed from the world's poorest countries and lodged permanently in the world's richest countries. That is the "conservative estimate" not of a leftwing anti-globalisation activist but of a leading American businessman and enthusiast for capitalism who has just completed a major study of how multinational corporations, wealthy individuals and unscrupulous governments are using the world's banking systems in ways that spread poverty.

When aid or debt relief are discussed, attention often focuses on corrupt leaders and governments in Africa and other parts of the developing world. But they are amateurs compared with the rich companies and individuals who use the world's tax havens and banking systems to hide sums of money that could address almost all of the continent's financial needs.

The Guardian has this to say about the author of the study:

Raymond Baker is a committed capitalist whose new book, Capitalism's Achilles Heel, has already made waves in the US. In Britain he has been working with the Tax Justice Network, a London-based organisation that seeks to expose the abuse of tax havens and loopholes.

Baker describes capitalism as "the greatest economic arrangement ever devised", but he believes that western governments and banks are failing catastrophically in their duty to police the system. "Falsified pricing, haven and secrecy structures and the illicit movement of trillions of dollars out of developing and transitional economies break the social contract ... that Adam Smith incorporated into the core of the free-market system," he writes.

I more think it's just natural for capitalism to function like that. On one hand, classic capitalism doesn't work without 'new frontiers', without some resource to exploit - without something put beyond the reach of that 'social contract'. On the other hand, tricksery of companies and capital owners is the nature of enterprise - banks are part of this, Western governments are only 'responsible' to their own voters, so are they really failing?...

Personal

2005-11-28T09:54:00.000+01:00

Dear neglected readers, I have some rather turbulent months behind me, especially up until a French language exam I had to take recently - hence the silence. And I probably won't be back to once a week frequency until the beginning of next year.

However, on the progressive community blog European Tribune (where you'll find some toned-down-for-a-wider-audience versions of what I posted here), I have been made a frontpager - as that goes with some obligations, I haven't fallen silent there; you can separately read my 'diary' posts and frontpage stories (for example I wrote the October Revolution anniversary entry). All my readers would be welcome there (in particular I would be happy to see more, and better arguing, hard left voices there).

Venezuelan Boom

2005-11-28T09:27:00.000+01:00

The Venezuelan political conflict of recent years was something remarqable, not the least for the fact that both sides preferred to fight it out with mostly (but not always) the weapons of 'soft power'.

The opposition tried mass protests, strikes, capital flight, polls and media manipulation (especially before and during the failed US-supported coup attempt), litigation, elections, and a recall vote (ironically using a law introduced by President Chávez). The Chávezistas took over all instances of power, Chávez has his own TV show (tough the opposition owns most of the private media), his supporters had their own mass protests, recall petition signers' names
were publicised.

But Chávez's most effective use of 'soft power' were social programs for the people who became the committed base that saved him, the poor. Chávez may or may not have been a committed social revolutionary before, but either way, his political fortune now firmly depends on delivering to Venezuela's poor. So let's look at some numbers - numbers reported with as much spin as any used by neoliberals.

In a preemptive strike, let me state what Venezuela's 'socialism' is not: it is not a state-run economy like, say, Cuba: the public sector is less than 30% of the economy, the oil sector reform still foresees joint ventures, land reform mostly goes with compensation (all of these earn criticism for Chávez from the local and parts of the international hard left).

Now first let's have a look at what neoliberals focus on instead of general well-being: GDP growth. During the Chávez years, including this year's until the third quartal compared to Q1-Q3 last year (all graphs mine based on data I collected):

Last year and this year, that's quite some rebound, ain't it? And that's with a budget surplus¹, and foreign debt reduced (from 46% to 38% of GDP)! Next year may make the Chávez presidency the first longer period in 30 years with per capita growth².

No wonder Chávez's approval rating climbed to 77%, and that members of the opposition became critical of their own (a good starting point is this assessment of "Ni-Nis", then further posts on that blog).

Two criticisms have usually been levelled at this growth: (a) it is based on increased government spending, (b) it is based on windfall from rising oil prices.

However, on the spending front, government expenditure is still below 40% of GDP; while on the production front, for example in the third quartal this year, the whole of the public sector only grew 5.4% overall, but the private sector soared 11.1%. We get the same picture when comparing the oil and non-oil sectors: +4.2% vs. +10.4%. The current rebound is also very different from what happened in Venezuela during previous oil price hikes (see second footnote).

On the low side, while the new JODI data [Read Jérôme's discussion at EuroTrib] show that the post-strike 2004 oil production was much closer to Chávez's claims than sceptical analysts' estimates (see f.e. MEES's), in the first half of this year the surmised maintenance problems seem to have had their effect (more here). Also, with oil income giving some 50% of the government budget, those social programs seem in danger if oil prices fall.

However, even disregarding Peak Oil doubts about falling oil prices, production problems may be solved next year or after, and some of the social programs (like the adult literacy campaign) are one-off things that'll run out. And another thing critics fail to note is that non-oil tax receipts increased too, in fact more than government oil income (see discussion of next year's plan).

Meanwhile, even without taking social benefits into account³, the poverty rate (more here) is now 38.5% and falling (see chart below), while other human development figures like literacy and health also improved (the latter is set for further improvement). Tough more slowly, unemployment (11.4% in October), informal employment (c. 47%), and percentage of homes without basic services are also falling.

Before making a connection to Europe and elsewhere, I shall mention that I am less interested in Chávez the person than what the 'Bolivarian Revolution' brought. And I won't even posit Venezuela as a coherent positive model - for example, it had so far no solution to the problems with police and military⁴, and only little effect on corruption (for the latter see point 2 in Gregory Wilpert's part in this web-based debate and this article on some recent discussion), and there is the controversy of authoritarian laws (where it must be noted that the supposedly Chávez-controlled Parliament seems to be more authoritarian than the President, and the also supposedly also Chávez-controlled Attorney General wants to remove these laws). But some aspects of this class war⁵ may be contemplated even here in Europe.

In Europe, any left-wing government is under the threat of "capital flights" and "capital strikes", when in effect business "votes" on the markets instead of the people. And the standard response has indeed been appeasement or complete submission (helped by a media that doesn't even wince at reporting business demands and spin as unquestionable wisdom). But what Venezuela shows to me is that by reliance on the people, and steadfastness to ride it out over years, such a conflict can be won.

Some foreign analysts doubt official numbers, and - maybe based on foreign debt still increasing on market value (tough less so on nominal value) - still expect a budget deficit. However, given that even their figures are relatively low, and how wrong they were before, and signs like that this year's non-oil tax revenue exceeded plan already in October, I'm not convinced.↑
As far as I could piece together Venezuela's economic history, the previous 'best' was the turbulent Carlos Andres Pérez presidency (early 1989 to 1993), with the IMF-recipe shock therapy followed by the Gulf War oil boom, that ended at about zero net per capita GDP growth - but with increased poverty.↑
The Venezuelan statistics office does plan to change poverty statistics so that social expenditures are taken into account. Opposition spinmeisters however 'reported' this as if such new methods were already in use, to be able to dismiss the improvements.↑
Do you remember when Columbia kidnapped ex-FARC-leader Rodrigo Granda in Venezuela? The part the US media liked to gloss over was that Interpol didn't accept Colombia's arrest warrant - hence Venezuela was not 'hiding a terrorist' and was under no obligation to hand him over. The part Chávez didn't want to hear much about was that the 'kidnapping' was executed by bribed Venezuelan army officials.↑
Another parallel to Europe: in European welfare states, large chunks of the worker class moved up to middle class, and now defend themselves against newcomers (this is one aspect of the problem of the French banlieues) - in Venezuela, the anti-Chávez opposition included trade unions, but those representing the best paid: oil workers, public workers.↑

Leftist Victory In Styria

2005-10-04T14:06:00.000+02:00

...and the end of the Haider era.

In the Southeastern Austrian province of Styria (Austria has a federal system very much like Germany), conservatives lost the election for the first time in 50 years. The results, in percentages and regional assembly seats:

SPÖ (Social Democrats): 41.72% (+9.40), 25 seats (+6)
ÖVP (conservatives): 38.66% (-8.63%), 24 seats (-3)
KPÖ (communists): 6.32% (+5.29%), 4 seats (+4)
Grüne (Greens): 4.68% (-0.93%), 3 seats (+/-0)
FPÖ (ex liberal, populist far-right): 4.59% (-7.82%), 0 seats (-4/-7 before spit, see BZÖ)
LH (list of breakaway ÖVP member): 2.04% (LH+ÖVP: -6.59%)
BZÖ (FPÖ breakaways): 1.72% (BZÖ+FPÖ: -6.10%)

Just as in Germany, the hard left managed to take away the votes of the desperates - but it is more notewrothy, because the communists weren't in the Styrian regional assembly since 1970. The Austrian Communists have troubles in the federal party, a tainted recent history (guarding the black money of the East German SED), some extreme anti-EU members, and some undying Stalinists, but the Styrian communists are a separate breed. They have a strong base in Graz (20.75% in the last city assembly elections) and a popular leader in the person of one Ernest Kaltenegger, who made it custom for party officials to publish their personal finances every year and donate most (yes, over 50%) of their income.

These elections also signal the final end of that ever-self-reinventing far-right demagogue, Jörg Haider. Earlier this year, his big stunt was to abadon and decapitate his party, found a new one (the BZÖ) with loyal members, and take over the FPÖ's place in the federal government. But apparently, this was too obviously brazen for the faithful - indeed the fact that only in his home province Carinthia did the majority of party members follow him was an indication. Also, Haider's attempt to spin the change as the abadonment of the hard far-right was quickly ruined by one BZÖ guy who called WWII deserters murderers and called for fairness for 'the victims of the post-war Nazi witch hunt', and then another who denied the existence of gas chambers...

Leftist parties won, but given the seat distribution and the tepid centrism of the SPÖ, it looks likely that Styria will continue to have a Grand Coalition, only with 5 SPÖ and 4 ÖVP ministers instead of 3:5 (+1 FPÖ) and an SPÖ head.

Finally, I wonder how this will influence the issue of the Semmering-Basistunnel, a rail tunnel under a much-frequented pass (Vienna's gateway to the South) at the border with Lower Austria province. That one was blocked by the SPÖ member head of Lower Austria for a decade, who claimed environmental damage. However, for that he repeatedly changed the province's laws, fudged laws that the constitutional court repeatedly quashed; and in the meantime, he allowed the construction of a highway along the same route, with magnitudes higher environmental damage both during and after construction - I leave it to the dear leader to guess his real motives...

Directive From Hell Resurrected

2005-10-04T11:48:00.000+02:00

The Bolkestein Directive (I wrote about it) is not dead.

As the StopBolkestein organizers just emailed, an amended version is about to hit the European Parliament later this month. So it's worth to rephrase my rejection (which I think is a bit more in-depth than the petition). Below is a slightly modified and translated version of what I wrote to two of my MEPs.

First: on education.
Private schools, especially if they are given the freedom to make their own curriculum [worst-case example from Britain] get into the scope of the directive. But this is inspired by the economics view of education, that is, education as only the training of future skilled workers. With appropiate protections for poorer regions or communities, a supply-demand solution for this may appear sensible. The education of culture (global, European, national, minority) may not need comprehensive standards.

However, in a democracy, it would be important for voters, all voters to know the world and society in general to a sufficiently high level to make qualified decisions. Be them referendums, parliamentary votes - or daily decisions as consumers buying something. For this, education needs to be comprehensive and curriculum needs to have standards, if not at EU or global level, at least at country or state level. Individual countries' marketisation of education would erode that, creating an EU-wide single market between such countries would make the destruction permanent.

Second: healthcare.
The fear of opponents in the West (here too) is social dumping. However, hiring of doctors and nurses in the West in large numbers would be a problem for the poorer new EU members, too: a shortage of medical staff - and, one can suspect, a decrease of the average competency of staff.

This problem, doctors moving where they are better paid and some regions having worse healthcare, already exists at country level. Even the national healthcare privatisation plans I'm aware of [and reject] call for some State role in mitigating it. However, the problem would be of much higher magnitude at EU level, and completely without instruments to compensate it.

Third and last: labor rights and oversight.
Bolkestein proponents can counter more superficial (= unfortunately most) critics by pointing out that for foreign workers too, the Draft Directive grants the workers' rights of the host country; and that its scope is only services and countries already liberalised nationally. But, if you think about it more, these defenses are worth little:

As far as I know, there is no word about renationalisation - marketisation is a one-way street.
The employer can always exert indirect pressure on the employee - if residing in a different country, thus he can undermine labor rights.
Hence the most alarming point in the Draft Directive, the one nebulously entrusting the authorities of the employer's country of registration with oversight, remains very much on-topic: since conducting checks in another country has its practical problems, this prescription leads at least to lapses, at most a complete loss of overseeing the activities of service companies.
A common market and different national labor rights means a competition between countries - a competition leading to the lowest common denominator.
Hence my most general argument: no common market before common, and high-level, labor rights.

In the last two you find neoliberalism described in a nutshell.

Like its father, modern US libertarianism, it focuses on advancing a narrowly defined version of economic freedom, achieving which only means the extensive freedom of a few, and the replacement of opressive laws with economic duress as the means of coercion of the many. What's new about neoliberalism is, instead of just hating the State, it prefers to use every possible authoritarian power to achieve its goals. Use the State to dismantle the (social) State. (And its difference from neoconservativism is not in any details, just the focus on economic isssues rather than military-police powers.)

Cars And Welfare Cuts

2005-09-27T08:22:00.000+02:00

I was recently at a family reunion. I have two lovely aunts who were present, whom I and my cousins always chided for stubbornly insisting on their car as their sole mode of transport.

The only exception is holiday trips far away, and this summer they were in Morocco together. As they showed pictures and told stories, they spoke of deep poverty, of a country that doesn't know pensions - and the shock of seeing old women who spend all day sitting on the street, with one hand opened for bypassers' money.

Unto which I replied: would they travel by mass transit, they'd see similar old women (and men) at stations and in underpassages.

The thought this anecdote leads me to is that part of middle-class Europe doesn't support welfare cuts just out of cold-hearted class interest (or the for most illusoric expectations of future upper-class interest) or hypocrisy, but because with their 'modern' lifestyle they just don't see the results.

Transalpine Madness

2005-09-26T22:35:00.000+02:00

The above graphs show the development of freight transports in and across the French, Swiss and Austrian Alps, with rail traffic in black and road traffic in grey. It is quite striking that Switzerland does something right the two EU members don't at all. All three countries are in the process of building giant railway base tunnels, but present trends indicate they'll only suffice to maintain rail's already low share in the EU-member two...

Actually, what's not too apparent on the Swiss graph is that while road's share grew after the opening of the Gotthard Road Tunnel in 1980, this slowed in the nineties, and turned around after 2000. This was achieved by restrictions for heavy trucks, quotas and passage charges on one side, and fairly high-quality railfreight and trucks-on-railcars transport on the other side.

This is not for the wisdom of Swiss leaders - the group think of the political class is active there, too. Instead, it's direct democracy: Swiss voters have repeatedly, and consistently voted for expensive transalpine and local rail network projects, financed by taxes and road charges, and against more road construction in a number of referendums. Just a year ago, when another right-populist/industry proposal of re-starting major road construction was tabled, and the government's constitutionally-demanded 'opposite' proposal was for even more construction, both were voted down.

And what happened in the other two? For Austria, you can see a blip around 1990: that's when they too tried to restrict road traffic, with road charges and later quotas. But, border-crossing rail transport wasn't well developed - and, even at the time Austria was only applying for membership, the EU exerted persistent pressure to reduce and abolish the charges/quotas, citing internal market rules of 'fair competition'. No matter that the road charges only added (part of) the external costs (pollution, noise etc.) to trucker's prices.

(A more general rant on current EU rail policy in the previous post.)

A Sound Transport Policy (Not in The EU)

2005-09-26T22:04:00.000+02:00

(This is a general rant, see post above for what triggered it.)

Being a hard-left blogger, I'm expected to rail against any privatisation, yeah right. However, unlike many of my Western counterparts, I didn't arrive here due to some general ideological argument on exploitation, or a broad distaste for capitalism, it was just the opposite: thinking privatisation/deregulation was a silly idea in specific fields led me there. Such as healthcare, the electricity network - and railways.

The philosophy of the current EU rail policy is to create competing private railways with free access to railway lines across Europe - and it is dead wrong.

The problem of European railways is not lack of competition: competition is already there, with road (and riverboats and air). The problem is a four-decades shortage of network investment, while at the same time, the rival modes were (and are) made more competitive with massive investment.

"But it'll bring in private capital", the market optimists would say. However, not in this system, where private capital primarily floods to buying rolling stock, price wars reduce reinvestable profit margins, and ultimately the State is called in to prop up the infrastructure (see British example, and also to some extent Sweden). Worse - I wrote network in the previous paragraph for a reason.

A result of privatisation is a further sucking-away of profits on mainlines, and thus a starving of side lines. But the "unprofitable line: close it!" mindset blindly ignores customer's needs: if less destinations can be reached by rail, even if only a smaller part of your transports are affected, won't it be simpler to transport with one mode of transport - and that's not rail? (This is even more true for passengers - indeed a forgotten reason why railways were public service.)

This is my main problem, there are some more. One is unstable service, as companies go bankrupt (examples in Germany) or the effect of safety neglect kicks in (examples in Britain). Also, the heirs of the old national railways try to maintain their positions with all kinds of tricks - which usually only hurt the position of the rail sector as a whole (say, selling old locomotives to scrap metal handlers rather than rival upstart railways). While in the EU documents I sometimes have to translate as part of my work, I see that the 'reformers' are well aware of the many tricks already applied, I doubt they'll find a working remedy even for these - not to mention foreseeing further tricks to be applied.

So what do I think should have been done instead (but won1t due to the neoliberal indoctrination of the whole European political class)? Strangely enough, to a good part stuff the EU also promotes, as part of this general rail liberalisation programme. Rail freight is most competitive over longer distances, but in the EU, borders hamper that: for rail, borders are system changes. Changeovers in electrification systems, technological standards, operating philosophies and organisation.

Unifying standards, operating international trains with multi-system locomotives, and a common safety system should work with more interwinded and cooperating national railways too, especially if the EU and the states (and regions etc.) care about maintaining the whole network.

Addition: I could add a lot of details, but let's look at Switzerland (see next post), an apparent counterpoint: it has a lot of private railways. However:

these do not compete: they cooperate;
most of them are majority-public-owned (by cities, cantons and the federal state);
in the last few years, there was a consolidation process: the state railway ate up some 'privates', and most of the rest coalesced into three larger regional networks.

More German Bits

2005-09-25T18:01:00.000+02:00

Roland Koch (see previous post) really tries hard to prevent a Grand Coalition and trigger new elections: after the idea of shared (2 years one party leader, 2 years the other) chancellorship was floated, he declared that the CDU/CSU should insist on the SPD dropping Schröder as a precondition.

One thing I forgot to insert into the previous post was that Koch, not Merkel, enjoys the US neocon's support. This they made painfully clear after Iraq's invasion. Merkel licked neocon arse with her foreign policy statements ever since summer 2002, and she long sought public contact with US counterparts, yet in May 2003, Merkel was only granted a meeting with Powell when the latter visited Berlin - while Koch was received for an unscheduled 15-minute meeting at the White House...

I also forgot to express Schadenfreude at how that utter idiot leading the FDP, Guido Westerwelle, fared: the guy who shares much of the blame for turning the FDP an unserious no-holds-barred-neoliberal 'fun' party is a direct candidate in Bonn, and this time got only 8.7% - that's 5.5% less than in 2002, and 5% less than list votes for his party in Bonn!...

German Elections: What Now?

2005-09-19T18:26:00.000+02:00

The result

With one election district (of 299) voting two weeks from now, the list vote for parties (in linked table: "Zweitstimmen"; those above 5% get into parliament, below all above 0.5%):

CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats/Socialists[Bavaria]) 35.2% (27.8%+7.4%; 2002-3.3%)
SPD (Social Democrats) 34.3% (-4.2%)
FDP (Free Democrats, [market-]liberals) 9.8% (+2.4%)
Die Linke (Left Party, hard left) 8.7% (forerunner PDS +4.7%)
Grüne (Greens) 8.1% (-0.5%)
NPD (National Democrats, far right) 1.6% (+1.2%)
Republikaner (Republicans, far right) 0.6% (+/-0)

The Left

I think we have another shining proof to counter the centrist argument, another proof that leftist parties can gain votes by campaigning for leftist issues. After the SPD lost the state of North Rhine-Westphalia four months ago and went for early elections on the federal level, it fell to 26% in the polls – since then, being forced to campaign on the left by the new hard-left competition, it gained 8%, even tough the Greens ended up with the same and the hard left also increased, almost doubling its votes from poll numbers back then!

The Centre-Right

While the FDP outdid poll predictions by some 3%, the CDU was short of expectations by a spectacular 7%. For the first part, the explanation is supplied by opinion polls’ question about coalition preference: in the last few weeks, the popularity of a CDU/CSU+SPD ‘Grand Coalition’ fell dramatically, while that of a right-wing coalition rose – hence, a lot of CDU voters expressed their desire by voting for FDP. As for the other half of the loss, I‘m not sure. The CDU’s numbers fell before due to their own goal of being too open about neoliberal economic plans (naming flat-tax proponent Paul Kirchhof as economy minister candidate). However, its Bavarian sister party CSU lost even stronger (almost 10% over 2002 numbers, twice as much as FDP gained there), for no apparent reason.

The Far Right

Their non-story is a big story. Although they polled higher than in 2002, consider what happened in the meantime. Until lately, the far-right in Germany couldn’t achieve much because of strong voter traditions and because they were splintered (too many would-be-Führers). But no such traditions exist in East Germany – and one (DVU) in two states, another (NPD) in one state passed the 5% limit over the last few years. The second was most shocking, with NPD getting 13% in Saxony – and even more shocking was that NPD and DVU managed to forge a union for federal elections. That they failed to capitalise is largely a success of the Left Party, which drew away disaffected voters from the rat catchers – now even in Saxony, NPD polled just 4.9%.

By the way, the local creationists, PBC (Party of the Bible-faithful Christians) polled at 0.23%. That's not that much percentage-wise, but in absolute numbers, having over a hundred thousand complete nutters (and growing) is not a comfortable feeling.

Grand Coalition Scenario

The most likely outcome of the elections is a CDU/CSU+SPD government, with either CDU leader Merkel or current incumbent Schröder as chancellor. This will prevent some of the worse the Right had in mind, but also significant reforms. Except for more stealth neoliberal reforms. Also, in the energy question, this will be a union of the coal and nuclear lobbies, further picking away at the only successes of the Schröder government, which were thanks to policies pursued by the Greens. The big question is, who would profit until the next elections? It is reasonable to hope that the Left Party and the Greens will, as for the big parties, it depends on who gets the blame for failure/the credit for lack of disaster.

Repeated Elections Scenario

Or the Nightmare Scenario. Let me explain.

As things stand, both Merkel and Schröder want to become chancellor. But presently, it is possible that neither will have the backing of the majority of parliament or a governing majority. In that case, the parliament has to be dissolved – then its elections again.

Now, most people observing Germany assume that Bavarian PM and CSU head Edmund Stoiber (who was the Right’s candidate for chancellor in 2002) is the most dangerous right-populist in Germany. I disagree: Stoiber is in truth a boring technocrat, who only tries to compensate his distance from the people with boorish attempts at talking folksy. The real menance is called Roland Koch, and currently heads Hessen state.

Power-hungry, ruthless and reckless, he won in his state with a virulently xenophobic campaign, has a very macho aggressive style, wants radical social cuts and police state measures bordering on far-right demands, survived lying openly about his knowledge of the local CDU’s party finance scandal, some corruption scandals, and staging a theatre of fake outrage in the German parliament’s second chamber. He also has a history of bucking the party line when talking to the press and shaping policy on his own.

This guy is a loose cannon, but not a lone gun. He is not the most popular (that’s presently Christian Wulff, head of Lower Saxony state), but the strongest member of the so-called Andenpakt, a power alliance forged by Pinochet-admiring CDU then-yuppies on an airplane to Chile three decades ago… This group tried to undercut Merkel several times, it was their success that Stoiber was named chancellor candidate in her stead for 2002, and they tried a coup two years ago (that one backfired).

Last night, Koch appeared all too bent on showing himself before the media. He must be thinking that if no government can be formed, Merkel will get the blame within the CDU – and he will be the new candidate. Then Germany (and the rest of Europe) should beware – we would see the nastiest campaign ever, most probably fanning the flames of xenophobia with the issue of Turkey’s EU accession as excuse. If Koch will be the candidate, all Left parties should give their last to defeat the “we need a stable government, whatever its colour” meme, and prevent a right-wing majority.

US Polls

2005-09-16T12:28:00.000+02:00

Bush's overall approval rating slipped to around 40% in most polls, and now even his favorability rating slipped for the first time to an equal or lower level than his disapproval rating. But it seems mismanaging (yeah, severe understatement) the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina is only part of the expanation - Bush's Katrina ratings, while negative, are still depressingly close to even. His support is still not down to the rock-solid 35-40% fundie base.

But more interesting is a poll on Iraq, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted September 8-11. While on Bush's handling of the Iraq war (40% approve 58% disapprove) and on whether invasion was a bad idea (53% yes 46% no) numbers didn't change, on the question of pullout, now we have:

Date	Stay as long as 'needed'	Withdraw if too many killed	Withdraw now	Unsure
9/8-11/05	35%	19%	41%	5%
7/25-27/03	37%	33%	26%	4%

Maybe this is the Cindy Sheehan effect.

(This is an update to my expression of polls scepticism three months ago and my premature optimism two weeks later.)

Electricity Market Liberalisation Doesn't Work

2005-09-15T11:58:00.000+02:00

Claim: electricity market deregulation will drive down electricity prices, it'll be good for us all.

Theory: free competition between producers with grid access means the cheapest offer wins, which means unfair overpricing by monopolists will be eliminated.

Counter-theory: Prices will go down first, but that at a cost: producers will spare by drawing down investments, which will lead to long-term problems and a price rise. But even before, large producers will use their financial reserves to drive prices down so much that upstarts go bankrupt, and then cooperate in raising the prices again, while blaming everything and everyone else. On an even shorter term, the general instability of markets will mean large oscillations. Meanwhile, all this focus on lowering prices forgets about sustainability and global warming.

Practice: My counter-theory exactly describes what happened in Germany after price liberalisation and market opening. The up-starts, except those defended by the feed-in law for regenerative energies, went bust in a few years, and indeed prices began to climb.

I created the above graph (the 2005 data is for the first quartal, it rose since another 5-10%) using the numbers calculated every year by the German Association of the Electricity Industry (VDEW), which represents the traditional producers and grid-owners - and pushes their agenda. Their reports since 2001 claim that prices rise due to the state, which added environmental tax and the feed-in law as price pushers. But, the netto price also increased significantly (even more since Q1) - and was calculated dishonestly.

The trick is with the feed-in law. The extra price for the consumer would be their share of the money paid out to regenerative energy producers at fixed prices minus the average production cost of the traditional industry for the same amount of electricity. But the VDEW tricksters simply calculate with the money paid out, without substracting the cost of the replaced traditionally produced electricity. (Correcting this would move up the right side of the Netto lines by about € 0.50.)

To get a bit closer to the truth, let's look at how the pre-tax price of electricity sold to medium-size industrial customers (who can connect directly to the intermediate-voltage network) developed since deregulation:

I created the above graph combining the VIK electricity price index (pdf!) and its predecessor, the Dow Jones/VIK price tracker (Excel!), using January 2002 as junction.

Finally, I note another 'effect', which can be seen to some extent on the first graph: the large locally monopolistic private companies that ruled the regulated market before the March 1998 deregulation significantly raised the prices leading up to that date. That is, the initial decrease in prices was to a significant part the elimination of windfall profit margins...

UPDATE: some more on the above, with a longer version of the first graph.

First a note on the VIK price index for electricity to the industry. It is based on wholesale prices at an electricity stock market (a combination of baseload and peakload averaged over a month), but the pricing for many customers is determined by long-term contracts - hence lower; it's new customers who are fucked with most. But, the March 1998 starting point is still pushed up by a previous windfall profit price hike, let me expose that below.

I created another graph for the typical private home (the metric used is 3500 kWh/year with the usage patterns of a three-person home throughout), this time extending back to 1980 (yearly to 1990). But I will note some other strong effects that shroud what I want to show.

You will first note the giant jump in 1991, which is the effect of German reunification: in the former East, production was less efficient, and upgrading them to Western standards or replacing them costed time and money. However, that process was essentially over by 1998. Second you'll note that in 1996, brutto prices moved down while netto prices moved up: then the regional monopolists used the elimination of a tax as cover, hence the bumpy rather than straight three-year rise for extra profits before deregulation.

Finally, note that that 1998 peak is actually the average of a late 1997-early 1998 spike and subsequent steep fall - so when you look again at the graph of VIK monthly data, the starting point is even more skewed than you'd guess from the above. (I also emphasize again that since the first quartal, prices rose another 5-10%.)

The last issue is gas prices. While most of the German production is not gas, it is significant in the short-term peakload production - and as Jérôme explained us, producers use marginals to determine the prices. So much so that at the above mentioned electricity stock market, baseload prices moved in lockstep with peakload ones (being lower by a constant ratio).

However, unlike in Britain or the USA, in Germany there is no apparent supply-side justification for the gas price hikes in the last year. Indeed a consumer group sued one of the main suppliers, E.ON, for the release of its price calculations - and yesterday a court gave them right. But E.ON still refuses to comply. I think that is proof enough that the big private suppliers are hitching a ride on top of the global oil and other regions' gas price rises.

Barroso's Trojan Horses

2005-09-15T10:41:00.000+02:00

In line with the general neoliberal trend sweeping Europe (which will only get worse after the German elections), which also meant a wide majority in the most powerful institution of the EU, the European Council (the national governments' club), we now have a Commission president (it's British PM Bliar's fault) who is a self-styled neoliberal revolutionary. (Never mind that his economic policies ended in total failure at home - he even cooked the books -, and to a leftist election victory I discussed.)

Undeterred by the reasons behind the French and Dutch NO on the EU Constitution, after all he only does what most national governments want, he goes on - only clandestinely.

First, the EU Commission can now go after companies breaking environmental law. Or, that's how it is sold: for, the Commission's new powers also include "criminal sanctions for breaches of EU internal market, data protection laws and intellectual property rights". Without doubt music companies and Micro$oft will be happy about the last two - while the first can also be applied against environmental legislation, neutralising the positive in the headline part (there have already been such attempts against German laws like the regenerative energies feed-in law, the drink bottles recycling law and the lorry road tax law).

Second, Barroso suggested the scrapping of unnecessary EU legislation, bringing up the law on workers' protection from excessive exposure to sunlight as example, which made stirrings in the German yellow press as something absurd (i.e., 'barmaids at the Oktoberfest won't be allowed to hand out beer in traditional clothes [which expose some flesh]'). Now, even that ruling may look much less absurd if we look at the details in the final version and don't rely on the yellow press, but consider what else Barroso proposes to scrap: "EU-wide rules in areas such as food labelling, presentation and advertising, the regulation of sales promotions and weekend lorry-bans". I.e., he'd like to convert the EU just into what British anti-EU leftists erroneously believe it to be already...

Political Courage: Italian Example

2005-09-15T10:02:00.000+02:00

There is eternal debate on the left between centrists and 'radicals' about whether compromising and appeasing the centre or standing firm and offering a coherent vision wins more votes.

In my opinion it's sometimes this sometimes that, while I think it's more often the latter (and even when it isn't I think it makes more sense to stay in opposition with ideas intact than be in power executing someone else's ideas). In the previous post, I indicated how centrism was a losing strategy for the German centre-left, and that it could boost poll numbers both times it was forced by events to campaign in a leftist way.

Now, recently, Romano Prodi stirred up some waters in Italy. The present leader of the opposition leftist L'Unione coalition was Italian PM from 1995 to 1998, during which time he was a centrist who didn't dare to push through laws that would have prevented the return of Berlusconi with his media monopoly and criminal past, nor to defy the business lobby - which led to 'reforms', which led to the rebellion of the communists and the fall of his government. He was also criticised for being a weak EU Commission President, tough he can hardly be blamed for much given that it is the EU Council - i.e. the national governments' club - that calls the shots.

Now back in Italy, Prodi pursues a more leftist line: he advocated and promised withdrawal from Iraq, bucked the European trend by boldly promising to change immigration policy from the extremely unfair and restrictive laws of the current centre-to-far-right government to an immigration-firendly one, and he advocated the introducion of French-style civil unions. For the last, he was attacked by politicians on the right and centre, and the Vatican-allied media, who compared him to the current Antichrist of the Catholic Curch (for introducing gay marriage in Spain), Spanish PM Zapatero. Centrists (Christian and non-Christian alike) are already crying that he is blowing the chances of victory.

Now, I don't think most Catholic really care that much about the Church's sword-waving, nor that polls indicate any danger: the Christian Democrat centrists in L'Unione, UDEUR, poll only at 1.3% (even their counterparts on the right, UDC, poll just at 5.7%), while L'Unione leads Berlusconi's bunch by 5.5%. But Prodi should be fearing the pro-Vatican mafia in politics and media even less if he considers the success of Nichi Vendola.

Regional elections were held in 14 provinces in April this year. People voted for party lists for the regional assemblies, and separately voted for a regional president. In Puglia province, (the 'heel' of the Italian 'boot'), a certain Nichi Vendola won the presidency, against these odds:

Vendola was selected in a US-style primaries vote by the base rather than chosen by party leaders as the one seen most electable,
he is a communist (and attacked for it),
he is openly gay (and rather strongly atacked for it),
he won in a Southern province (where people are more conservative),
he won with 6% more than the last centre-left candidate,
he won by more than the supporting L'Unione coalition on list votes (0.1% more - that must have come from the right!),
he won while the L'Unione vote included 3.28% vote for the Christian Democrat UDEUR and its centrist allies!

This should be the example to put up against any defeatist talk on the left.

Thoughts On The German Elections

2005-09-15T09:10:00.000+02:00

After the victory of party macho extraordinaire Gerhard Schröder over party enfant terrible Oskar Lafontaine (nicknamed "Red Oskar") shortly after the 1998 Social Democrat/Greens election victory, all mainstream parties in Germany fell in line behind the neoliberal economic mindset.

For the Left, this proved disastrous: the repeated appeasing of the business lobby and anti-welfare-state 'reforms' only alienated own voters, while the private economy didn't "thank" with either creating more jobs or at least electoral support: these moves not only didn't solve economic problems, but worsened the situation, which led to demands for even more 'reforms' from the business community. All the while, only the Green junior coalition party pursued progressive policies, only to be undercut by SPD politicians serving some lobby (most notably current economy minister Wolfgang Clement, a persistent and extremely dishonest propagandist against wind power for the coal industry).

Disproving the centrist mantra that campaigning for a progressive policy too clearly loses votes, Schröder narrowly won re-election in 2002 with his stand against the Iraq war. But he didn't learn anything, blew it again over the next three years with more of the same. Then he called early elections. Then the unthinkable happened: the rise of a serious contender to the left. The SPD was forced to campaign again as a leftist party - and its numbers rose from the low twenties to 35% again. (Not that I'd expect its leaders from learning this time either, should they enter some government.)

That contender to the left came by due to extraordinary circumstances. Some West German SPD members fed up with Schröder left the party and formed the WASG political group (not a party). Meanwhile, in the East, there was the PDS, the heir of the onetime ruling party of the communist dictature, but one that unlike fellow post-communists in the region developed towards something progressive in the Western sense, due to its marginalisation: they had to fight for votes with the SPD, they are dominated by the onetime reform wing, they are cleared of anti-democratic tendencies or criminal networks given that they were monitored for a decade by the local equivalent of the FBI, and they assimilated a lot of progressive youth groups not affiliated with the ancien regime.

Now, separated, WASG and PDS wouldn't have stood a chance - and there were various animosities between the two. But then "Red Oskar" Lafontaine declared that he leaves the SPD, and will run for election only if WASG and PDS ally themselves on a single list. Even more than British counterpart Galloway, Lafontaine suffers from an oversized ego - but that alliance proved a powerful idea all in itself. What followed was an unprecedented pressure from the leftist public opinion on the foot-dragging parties, who in the end managed to agree, and now run under the name "Die Linke" (Left Party). (See a very illuminating interview with a WASG activist in English at Lenin's Tomb.) In the first enthusiasm they even polled at 15%, now back to 7-8%, the campaign of all parties and the potentials for after the election were completely changed.

From the last polls before election (this Sunday), and the last mandates projection (see "Sitzverteilung" table to the right), it looks like a conservative-(market)-liberal coalition (i.e. CDU/CSU+FDP) will just fall short of majority. A centre-left-hard-left coalition is presently considered a practical impossibility, so it will likely be a grand coalition - on the positive side, both Greens and Left Party can argue against its policies in Parliament and could benefit in opposition.

I hope the Left Party can develop into something serious, as the only strong voice against neoliberalism, and not end up relying on the contentious stardom of Lafontaine. While most attacks against Lafontaine from the mainstream press are unfair (his much thematised speech about "Fremdarbeiter" was taken entirely out of context, but read on this the above linked interview at Lenin's Tomb), his last book includes some rather questionable culturalist passages - a departure from his demand years ago for a changed sense of "German-ness". Meanwhile, I also hope the Greens can reinvigorate themselves, as the only strong voice for seriously tackling the problems of global warming, Peak Oil and industrial farming, and not end up relying on the contentious stardom of current foreign minister Joschka Fischer.

Speaking of Regenerative Energies

2005-09-15T08:27:00.000+02:00

Three stories, a bit dated:

First: Solar power in Germany:

In June this year, Germany became the second country with total photovoltaic power generating capacity in excess of 1 gigawatt (1000 MW) - the average power of a modern nuclear power plant block.

For some comparison: at the end of 2004, Japan had solar cells with 1137 MW installed, Germany had 794 MW, third-placed USA 358 MW - with respective 2004 additions of 277 MW, 363 MW and 83 MW.

Even tough the capacity factor (average power per maximum power over a full year) of solar cells in Germany is about 11%, that is this 1 GW of solar cells produces a ninth to eighth of the electricity a nuclear power plant block would, this is now really something. Also note: while less than half (165 MW) of US solar cells are connected to the grid (and still just 60% of the newly installed), almost all of the German and Japanese photovoltaic power is grid-connected.

(File under "European success stories ignored even by local economic elites".)

Second - Geothermal power in Germany:

In the first half of August in Landau/Rhineland-Pfalz state, drilling started for (if I counted them all) the seventh commercial-scale deep geothermal power plant in Germany. When the 3 km bore and the machinery upon it starts service in 2007, 150°C water will power a turbine at 2-2.5 MW, and (through a secondary circuit) supply heat to local homes at 8 MW.

Geothermal energy is technically available at a lot more places than commonly assumed*.

Among alternative energies, the advantages of geothermal are constant power for electricity production (3500 plants with 10 MW each would suffice to give all of the constant part of the German baseload), and the ability to replace gas & heating oil in building heating (wind or photovoltaic [PV] solar cells can't)#. Its disadvantage is that, disregarding 'external costs' (pollution etc.) as our current economies do, it is still rather expensive, about 3-5 times the market price (but less than PV)+.

I note that at Landau, drilling is done by Oil & Gas Exploration Company Jaslo Ltd., a Polish company.

These two German stories indicate what will be lost after the expected government change in Germany next week - all the successes of the Social Democrat-Greens coalition were connected to the latter, now we'll only see chancellor Schröder's neoliberal line replaced by an even more neoliberal line of an SPD/Christian Democrat 'grand coalition', or a still more neoliberal line by a Christian Democrat/Free Democrat coalition.

Third - China raises targets:

China recently passed its own feed-in law for regenerative energies, complete with a target for raising their share from 7% to 10% by 2010 (while overall use expands rapidly too). Wind power alone was slated to grow to 20 GW.

Significant, but far from enough. Dirty coal, which now gives 75%, would give most of the growth (along with dangerous and lethal waste producing nuclear energy, and dams that won't be a net benefit due to CO2/mehane producing rot in sediment/sewage-rich reservoirs).

Now the government considers raising the target by 50% (still just to 15%...).

Notes:
*: The potential just along the Upper Rhine fault line in Germany is currently estimated at 28,000 TWh/year electricity - 50 times the entire German demand, transmission losses included. (This older study (pdf!) puts the potential in all of Germany at ten times of that.)
#: Indeed in Germany, there are also about a dozen geothermal plants that produce only heat.
+: The German feed-in tariff for geothermal is (depending on size: less for bigger ones) 7.16-15 c/kWh. My 3500 plants would cost €250 billion to build.

Green Cities

2005-09-15T08:23:00.000+02:00

I was a speaker at a Sustainable Communities Conference in Vermont. The organizers took two busloads of participants to admire a ... factory that produces towers for wind electric generators. Hard to get greener that that.

But there was a problem: it took us 20 minutes on the highway to get there. And, when we arrived, there was no other building in sight on the rolling landscape of broad agricultural fields.

“Wouldn’t it be more fun,” I asked the company tour guide, “if instead of driving way out to this splendid isolation and back every day, you could just walk out the factory door and bike over to a class or back to your residence?” Here was a beautifully designed solar building with state-of-the-art natural lighting and insulation, constructed so the residents would consume almost no energy — except for the hundreds of gallons of gasoline they burned in their cars every day to get there!

The quote is from Richard Register's article "Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil" in the CommonGround US green magazine. It argues forcefully that regenerative energies are just one half of what is needed, another is public transportation and changing settlement structure.

Reminder

2005-09-13T09:22:00.000+02:00

The destruction of Tel Afar seems to have come to a premature end, with the armed resistance disappearing from sight. the Coalition success claim:

...troops killed 141 insurgents and captured 197 on Friday and Saturday in Tal Afar...

For a long time only we lefty (and anti-war libertarian) bloggers ranted on a lot about what's really behind such propaganda lines. But, apparently, the mess before/after Hurricane Katrina changed something in the mainstream US press, for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote stuff like:

Nearly 75 percent of all detainees arrested are freed because there is not enough evidence that they pose a threat, the Army says.

...thousands ... are sent to prisons, like the notorious Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad, where they wait an average of six months before their release...

From the launch of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 through early last month, 42,228 Iraqi detainees had been sent into the system, and most had been released. As of Friday, there were 12,184 in detention.

...U.S. troops arrested an Iraqi because he had a poster, with Arabic lettering, showing a beheaded man. The soldiers thought it was the propaganda of terrorists and hauled him away to Abu Ghraib. Months later, the Iraqis reviewing the case quickly recognized that the poster was a benign tribute to Imam Hussein, beheaded in the 7th century and deeply revered by all Shiites... Many more Iraqis are wrongly detained based on the lies of manipulative informants, false positives in explosives tests or because they were simply passers-by swept up for being in the vicinity of an attack on U.S. troops....

Nearly every day, the U.S. military in Iraq announces the capture of "suspected terrorists" snatched during house raids, in markets and after firefights. Yet most of those arrested get released, and the insurgency persists.

"Insurgency after insurgency has shown that if you mismanage detentions you create more insurgents than you get rid of," said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

My notes:

Don't expect the ratio of non-combattants among the 'killed insurgents' to be much lower.
It's even worse than 75% of detainees, because obviously the current 12,184 also include a lot who will be released without charges, and - more gravely -
people who have been tortured for a 'confession' (recall the three British Gitmo detainees who 'confessed' being the terrorists in the background on a Bin Laden video, only to be cleared by MI5 who proved they were in Manchester at the time...).
I snipped parts where the sources are named: surprisingly, the US Army, and lawyers named by the Iraqi government to look into cases. But this still gives a positive spin to the story - whereas if you're Sunni, your chances of getting free after being arrested with ridiculous charges by the new Shi'a-dominated US-aligned Iraqi police are much smaller (recall what famous Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar's brother Khaled wrote about his fellow detainees).
Let me put that expert's point more bluntly: considering the treatment, more 'insurgents' will leave the prison than were put in. This war can only be lost, this war can only make civil war worse.

Off The Radar

2005-09-05T20:49:00.000+02:00

While everyone focuses on the Katrina disaster (both natural and man-made), the Bush government moves on with its real priorities.

At least the US liberal blogosphere has written a lot about Bill Frist moving up the vote on the permanent repeal of the estate tax. But, on the other side of the globe, they also moved on with the project to destroy entire cities from which there comes any resistance. (Fundamentalism and free-wheeling militias isn't their problem, as showcased by the free reign of the peshmergas and the Badr Brigades and lesser puppet government-aligned militias.)

This time, it's Sunni Turkoman city Tell Afar's turn. Altough commanders available for spin-feeding interview to the press say they'll do everything differently and don't want to kill this city, their very first moves speak a different language - the exact same as early November last year:

The American and Iraqi forces called on the civilians in the outskirts ... to leave their houses in precaution to a major military operation in the city, at a time when fighting continued and the number of victims was not known.

Sorry guys, we need your homes for target practice!... Now imagine that at your own home. (And no, New Orleans residents aren't moved out because the government needs room to shoot up marauding gangs.)

Clinton's First Bombing

2005-08-22T20:24:00.000+02:00

``There is no published evidence known to me of any effort by the Times to verify independently the Administration's specific claims against Iraq. No reporter, for example, has written of getting in touch with any of the many independent experts in electrical engineering and bomb forensics to ask what they thought of the photographs released by the White House.

When I asked seven such experts about those photographs last summer, they all told me essentially the same thing: the remote-control devices shown in the White House photographs were mass-produced items, commonly used for walkie-talkies and model airplanes and cars, and had not been modified in any significant way. The experts, who included former police and government contract employees and also professors of electrical engineering, agreed, too, that the two devices had no "signatures."´´

The date is not 2003. It's 1993. As an addledum to the analysis of the National Security Democrats, at long last, I just found Seymour Hersch's 1993 article on Saddam's alleged assassination attempt on Papa Bush (he "tried to kill my dad!"...).

Hersch not only dismantles the allegations, but exposes the bureaucratic forces in the background (and the punditocracy in the foreground) pushing for a retaliation, which Clinton finally ordered on 26 June 1993 - lobbing a couple of Tomahawks at Iraq, eight civilians killed for nothing.

If Clinton's 1998 Desert Fox attack was the prototype of Bush's 2003 Iraq war, this attack was the prototype of Desert Fox - preceded by claims from an enemy of Saddam taken at face value, a jury-rigged intel process, a media campaign of lies and spin, and domestic political calculation; executed in violation of US and international law (even had the allegations been true), followed by a complete lack of critical evaluation by the press; and hurting mostly Iraqi civilians.

It's a long article, but worth to read in full.

Theocracy In Iraq

2005-08-22T11:01:00.000+02:00

Item 1: an article in the Guardian soj recommended, about the Sunni Arab town of Haditha - US soldiers look by once every few weeks, it is controlled by bloody talibanesque rebels, and that still with local support - and the reporter sensed a radicalisation of the locals, with past US and Iraqi government actions behind it. I note it's not much different in cities abadoned by the British in the South, ruled by Shi'a religious militias, and only slightly different in Kurdish-controlled areas. (BTW, also note speculations regarding the rebels' waiting for a Sunni/Shi'a civil war in the article - not based on actual facts. A bit of seeing what you want to see at work here.)

Item 2: Juan Cole and others kept convincing themselves that über-Ayatollah Sistani and parties allied to him are 'moderates', clinging to some press statements tailored for Western ears, and Sistani's statement that he doesn't want Khomeini's "guardianship of the jurisprudent" in Iraq.

My opinion was always that this is a self-delusion. Sistani's constitutional idea of a parliament whose members must be deferential to the rulings of their respective religious leaders, given Shi'a absolute majority, gives the clerics the same power in practice, even if they don't have an official title from the state and don't officially act as an instance above parliament, like the Guardian Council in Iran. But, now the Shi'a coalition goes for it all (via Billmon):

An agreement was reached that Islam is the religion of state, and that no law shall be enacted that contradicts the agreed-upon essential verities of Islam. Likewise, the inviolability of the highest [Shiite] religious authorities in the land is safeguarded, without any allusion to a detailed description . . . A Higher Council will be formed to review new legislation to ensure it does not contravene the essential verities of the Islamic religion.

Also, while I on this blog wrote about this a few times already, I see Billmon details how the situation is exactly the same in Afghanistan.

Support Your Troops (and pull out only in stages...)

2005-08-22T09:50:00.000+02:00

"When you go back to Camp Lejeune (in North Carolina), these will be the good old days, when you brought ... death and destruction to - what is this place called?"

A Marine answered in the darkness: "Haqlaniyah."

Estrada continued: "Haqlaniyah, yeah, that. And then we will take death and destruction to Haditha. Hopefully, we'll stay until December so we can bring death and destruction to half of Iraq."

The flatbed truck erupted in a storm of "Hoo-ahs."

Seen here. Support your troops, you support this. Want staged withdrawal, you want more of this.

Elsewhere, after the now familiar stuff about insufficient armour and a quagmire obvious to a soldier in Iraq:

As disturbing as those reports were, what Kulick had to say about the conduct of the war was even more troubling. He told his family that the Iraqi police "were corrupt and inept and there was no way they could ever train them to the degree where they could keep order." And when his unit went out after insurgents, far too many innocent iraqis were killed in the crossfire. And, Kulick reported home, "the more hate that created." When the Americans left an area, the insurgents came back the next day.

Eventually, when Kulick saw Iraqi citizens kneeling in the street in prayer, his interpreter would tell him they were praying for the Americans to leave. "They would rather live with evil they knew rather than live with us," Kulick said in his emails. "We were killing them as much as the insurgents were."

They were actually killing them more than the insurgents. John Kulick was one of the four Pennsylvania National Guards killed 9 August in an IED blast near Beiji, Iraq.

Best Comment On The Iraqi Constitution

2005-08-18T11:27:00.000+02:00

From Raed in the Middle:

Iraq already has a secular constitution that protects Iraq’s unity and human rights, and gives very important rights to minorities, but this didn’t prevent the Iraqi government before the fall of Baghdad from committing all the mistakes they did.

No comment.

Tanks For Iraq

2005-08-18T11:03:00.000+02:00

Some lackluster US vassals, unwilling to commit much in terms of troops, promised material help to the US client government of Iraq instead.

As I reported earlier, Hungary became one of these - promising 77 old T-72 tanks, if - if someone else pays the bill for their upgrade and transport... Unfortunately, now it seems this offer will be accepted - the US government apparently agreed to lend the money to the Iraqi semi-puppets.

However, meanwhile, Switzerland did something funny. The Swiss government's offer was of 180 old M-113 armoured personnel carriers to the United Arab Emirates, which would sell it further to Iraq. However:

Switzerland said Aug. 15 that it would freeze a deal to send armored personnel carriers to Iraq until Baghdad guaranteed that the vehicles would not be used in combat operations.

Heh, now that is a string attached...

Children Held Hostage to Extort the Handover of Other Children

2005-08-18T10:25:00.000+02:00

"The US forces surrounded the village of Mazraa near Baiji and detained five children under 10 years old, calling on the residents by loudspeakers to hand over several other children showed on TV channels celebrating the killing of US soldiers after roadside blast last week," a police source from Baiji told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Read the whole article. I note the following things:

It is again apparent that contrary to spin, the guerillas have widespread local support.
When even children are so happy to celebrate the grisly remains of dead Americans, as in Fallujah in March 2004, that should hint at the way the war is conducted by the most prolific killers of civilians in Iraq beyond the media blackout.
When you blackmail a town for the handover of children, by kidnapping children, it is obvious that the war is irrecoverably lost - the resistance won't cease, not even in a generation.
If you think "I don't believe this, what would they do to those children?", a reminder: that worse batch of Abu Ghraib images and videos, whose release is stonewalled by the Pentagon, includes a snuff video about Iraqi auxiliaries raping a young boy, to 'motivate' his father to speak.

By the way, the harrowing account of famous Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar's brother, Khalid, about his imprisonment paints the picture of a new police both brutal and inept (and doing its own part for pushing the sectarian divide). Khalid was arrested at his university because he visited internet sites suspected of being terrorist web pages - incidentally, the web page of his own brother Raed... Much worse than his own experience was what he wrote about the arrest background and treatment of his cellmates.

Ah, That Sunni Resistance!

2005-08-18T10:13:00.000+02:00

The US propaganda still insists that the resistance against them is Sunni-Arabs only, and anti-Shi'a completely (something I blasted here). Now, I caught this snippet in a propaganda piece about more advanced roadside bombs that pierce armor:

Now, the U.S. military believes Iraqi bomb makers are building these deadly weapons themselves. And they have set up workshops in poor, densely-populated neighborhoods, where they can easily hide their activities.

Last Thursday, VOA accompanied a unit from the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division to one such place in the gritty industrial area of Sadr City, east of downtown Baghdad.

Sadr City. Baghdad's largest Shi'a slum, remember?

Meanwhile, while there are forces for civil war (and not just among the Sunni Arab groups), I note that there are reports of fighting between nationalist guerillas and anti-Shi'a fanatics, the former being Sunni guerillas in Ramadi coming to the defense of their Shi'a neighbours.

Wild Speculation

2005-08-16T22:57:00.000+02:00

Remember the so-called California Energy Crisis? The one caused not by insufficient power capacity due to restrictive construction laws, not by incomplete deregulation, but by the firms conspiring to manipulate the network? Manipulate by synchronising the switch-on of large users, by scheduling the maintenance of power plants, by moving elkectricity across the state's borders, to produce blackouts. Blackouts that drove prices high, giving them large profits, while as an added benefit, putting presure on lawmakers to remove the remaining checks on them.

Now today, we have crude oil prices above $65 a barrel, and rising. Part of this is nearing peak oil, part of it speculation - and part of it oil refinery breakdowns in the USA.

Now, I don't think Texaco, Exxon et al are more ethical than PGE or Enron...

National Security Democrats

2005-08-16T19:55:00.000+02:00

During the run-up to the Iraq war, and the 2004 US elections, a lot of non-Americans deceived themselves about the Democrats. About the Democrat leadership, not so much the membership and voters: the majority of the former were just as pro-war and just as dead wrong as the Republicans, only used a different language, wanted the war to be fought differently; and their support network/echochamber was less well known than the neocons'.

The confusion existed in America too, as evidenced by the fatally wrong popular notion that Kerry was an 'anti-war candidate'. First taken along with the "support your troops" slogan (of which most still couldn't cut loose), the Democratic base began to take heed of the so-called national security Democrats only recently: when the latter vehemently attempted to undercut fellow Democrats, and gave support to some Bush policies on key issues (the origin of their new "Vichy Democrats" curse). Even on the progressive left (and anti-war libertarian right), those not hindered by allegiance to the Democratic party, this network wasn't known in the detail the neocons were.

Now, in The Nation, Ari Berman supplies a much-needed analysis of the structure and workings of the national security Democrat network, from the politicians through advisers and think tanks down to pundits. Below, some choice quotes, with focus on the essence - for most details (persons, groups, actual events), read the article!

...Sixty-three percent want US troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent National Journal "insiders poll" found that a similar margin of Democratic members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of "sophisticated" debate.

Very much so, and in the population too: Berman doesn't quote other poll numbers, like the just 33% in the August 5-7 Gallup poll who really want to withdraw all troops (and that's record!), and both misinterprets and misquotes that "sixty-three percent": he added up the 12% who voluntarily brought up the "bring them home now" slogan, the 38% who want to stay less than a year, and the 13% who want to stay one to two years in the August 2-4 Newsweek poll. That is: the realisation that the US is doing more harm than good (from which immediate withdrawal logically follows) is probably just barely majority opinion even on the US Left (='liberal' pro-democrat and left-to-Democrats voters).

The continued high standing of the hawks has been made possible by their enablers in the strategic class -- the foreign policy advisers, think-tank specialists and pundits. Their presumed expertise gives the strategic class a unique license to speak for the party on national security issues... It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right.

Sounds familiar? The ersatz neocons are the more powerful the more wrong they are, too.

...At the bottom of the pyramid are the liberal hawks in the punditocracy, figures like New Republic editor Peter Beinart, Time writer Joe Klein and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These pundits, along with purely partisan outfits... help to both set the agenda and frame the debate. The journalistic hawks churn out the agitprop that the more respectable think tanks turn into "serious" scholarship, some of which eventually becomes policy, or at least talking points, when adopted by the politicians.

The above quotes show that there is a feedback that is free of a real understanding of the issues, a groupthink if you like - or one of the allegedly nonexistent classes of US society showing its ugly face, if you like. Unfortunately, they are not evil, they live in ivory towers - and that may be worse, they may be closer to Tony Bliar's mentality.

...Central to the liberal hawks' mission is a challenge to other Democrats that they too must become "national security Democrats," to borrow a phrase coined by Holbrooke. To talk about national security a Democrat must be a national security Democrat... The liberal hawks caricature other Democrats just as Republicans long stereotyped them. The pundits magnify the perception that Democrats are soft on national security, and they influence how consultants view public opinion and develop the message for candidates... It matters little that people like Beinart have no national security experience -- as long as the hawks identify themselves as national security Democrats, they're free to play the game.

This is the really infuriating part. Not entirely unlike the neocons, here is a group arrogantly cocksure of its own expertise, importance and responsibility, but in fact they don't have a clue - neither about whom they want to attack abroad, nor about the consequences of their actions, nor about the weak footing of the evidence and arguments they based their opinion upon. (Friedman, Pollack: just LOL...) Enabled by a total lack of critical thinking. It was great that the US and not just US Left seized upon Suskind's "reality-based community" quote, but it's not earned when you don't realise that the national security Democrats aren't part of it - even if they themselves think they are.

...Even at their darkest hour, the strategic class found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq. The hawks decided it was acceptable to criticize the execution of the war, but not the war itself...

As for a view of the future:

Pollack continues to thrive at Brookings and, despite never visiting the country, has a new book out about Iran. Shortly after the election, Beinart penned a 5,683-word essay calling on hawkish Democrats to repudiate "softs" like MoveOn.org and Michael Moore; the essay won Beinart -- already a fellow at Brookings -- a $650,000 book deal and high-profile visibility on the Washington ideas circuit. Subsequently a statement of leading policy apparatchiks on the PPI publication Blueprint challenged fellow Democrats to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party.... A number of leading specialists signed a letter by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century asking Congress to boost the defense budget and increase the size of the military by 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

It would have been a real catastrophe would Europe, the European (Centre-)Left have given automatic support to these guys - or would do it in 2008, if they win. (Well, Europe with the future Merkel government in Germany and the present tossers aren't that far from a catastrophe either.)

...why does so much of the Democratic strategic class march in lockstep? There's no simple answer. The insularity of Washington, pressures of careerism, fear of appearing soft and the absence of institutional alternatives all contribute to a limiting of the debate.

...Those insiders who doubt the wisdom of a hawkish course often get the cold shoulder if they stray too far from the strategic line. After criticizing the rush to war, Ivo Daalder of Brookings became the foreign policy point man for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign... Today Daalder blames the antiwar movement for Dean's defeat and calls for more troops in Iraq.

Now this could also be the case of an apostate who wasn't fully committed to apostasy and fell back, but more examples of such mobbing follow. The conclusion:

...A few small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes.

Note to readers: This is a reproduction of a diary entry of mine at European Tribune, the DailyKos-style community blog set off by a French reader of Billmon, but with stingier comments added. I'm presently more active there, but as I temper my tone there to have effect on a wider audience (and hope it will end up significantly to the left of its US model), I will keep up this blog too. (And promise more activity from the autumn.)

Niger vs. Center-Left Western Preoccupations

2005-07-21T21:23:00.000+02:00

While the Bliar government is praising itself for having done such a good job for Africa with the G8 debt relief and blasts the CAP as hurting Africa, and the US pro-Democrat blogosphere is a-buzz with every aspect of minute details of 'Plamegate', the agent identity leak case that sprung from the scandal of the Niger yellowcakes story, there is a real disaster building in - yeah, Niger, Africa.

In Southern Niger, some 2.5 million people are hit by famine after their food supplies ran out. But generosity isn't forthcoming - altough the money needed is relatively small:

With some 2.5 million people living on less than one meal a day, the UN has raised its emergency appeal from $16 million to $30 million, but so far, only $10 million has been pledged by donors.

First help came from the French - but only a French NGO:

The airlift from the French non-governmental organization (NGO) Réunir to Maradi consisted of 16 tons of oil, sugar and plumpy'nut (a highly nutritious paste for young children). A further airlift will take place over the weekend with 40 tons of millet and 28 tons of oil.

With this backdrop, the 'debate' over the CAP (the EU common agricultural policy that includes subsidies) is truly sickening. On one hand, as explained here at EuroTrib, arguing for free trade in food with Africa is disingenious, as African states currently have special agreements with Europe that ensure preferential access for their products to the European market, while those who would stand to benefit from abolishing the CAP would be second-tier states with advanced industrial agricultures (in the hands of the local elite) like Brazil and Argentina, with Africa losing out.

On the other hand, even if the former wouldn't be true, isn't something terribly wrong with the idea of Africa selling more food to Europe while millions of Africans starve?

Of course, most of those starving probably couldn't afford to buy even food produced by other Africans. But if Europe (or the US or Japan etc.) wants to help that, subsidizing food redistribution within Africa would be the best idea, not transporting some food 10,000 kilometres from there to here and some other (as aid) 10,000 kilometres back.

In the meantime, you can help out the UN in place of your governments, and donate.

UPDATE: As Disillusioned Kid writes in the comments, my speculations proved more than right: see his link, or Lenin's Tomb's take, this food crisis was caused by sharply rising food prices after Western-induced free-market reforms, prices a lot of people couldn't afford...

Who Killed Most Iraqi Civilians?

2005-07-20T09:52:00.000+02:00

If you believe the US propaganda, the 'insurgents' (collective). If you read the several posts on the issue on my blog, you could have gotten a clue that it's the occupation forces and criminals.

Now, for the first time, a major news outlet reports the above truth too - the BBC:

Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says... The survey was carried out by the UK-based Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group...

37% of all non-combatant deaths were caused by the US-led coalition... Insurgents are said to have caused 9% of the deaths, while post-invasion criminal violence was responsible for another 36%.

I note: the latter is also the occupiers' (ir)responsibility. I also note: the IBC is based on (Western) media reports, which represents a significant undercount, while health-related excess deaths (which were included in the Lancet study) are ignored.

(You find the original Iraqi Body Count report here, but I thought the mainstream media reporting is a major part of the story.)

Is the Euro Area Really Worse On Jobs Than the US?

2005-07-17T23:39:00.000+02:00

Below, I will first make an argument for treating the ratio of those with jobs to the total population, rather than to working-age population or to workforce, as the ratio that really matters.

After that, I'll calculate that ratio for the USA and Germany - with surprising results.

I already argued the first on this blog, but let's recap. We are often treated to projections of an exploding number of retirees, who will all live off of ever less working people's taxes/retiree fund contributions.

However, I think that picture ignores two important things: possible changes to retirement age, and real existing joblessness. If ever more retirees would be a root problem, the former would be a solution. But if we do that, we just increase the numbers of the jobless. In fact, even today, there is a practice of virtually reducing retirement age: when companies 'rationalise' by sending workers to early retirement.

Now, jobless people also 'live off' the taxes and contributions of those with jobs. So I think it would make more sense to measure the weight of society on the shoulders of workers by treating retired people and the jobless together.

But, once that thought has sunk in, one can go one step further. Children, while mostly not paid for by the state, are still a weight on the shoulders of those who work in financial terms: they too represent money not paid on themselves. If there are less old people and more children, the overall picture is the same. And there I am: the ratio that matters from a socio-economic perspective is that of people with jobs to that of the total population, whatever the demographics or the statistical tricks involved in counting the jobless.

Now, let's make the comparison across the pond.

In the USA, using the payroll survey that is said to be more reliable on overall numbers, there were a seasonally adjusted 133.537 million Americans in non-farm jobs in June. In the household survey, which is more reliable on relative changes (and has to be adjusted regularly), there were 141.638 million total with jobs. According to the population clock on the US Census Bureau, right now, there are 296,642,102 US residents. That gives a ratio of 45.02% for non-farm jobs in the payroll survey and 47.75% for jobs in the household survey.

For a European comparison, I take "economic basket-case" Germany. For people with jobs, I use the German Statistical Institute's May number, 38.84 million. For population, I'll take the latest number [pdf], the 82.501 million at the end of last year. The ratio is 47.08%.

So, in the end, there is barely a difference in the ratio of people who earn money and people who live from what others earn. In fact, if the US household survey errs upward in the absolute number of people with jobs, Germany may be ahead!

[Repost of my latest diary entry at EuroTrib]

In related matters, Scott Martens @ Fistful Of Euros takes on the meme that no French company in the top 25 was founded in the last 40 years, while 19 of the Top 25 American firms were...

Juan Cole Countered

2005-06-30T14:45:00.000+02:00

...and hat tips for his posting of these. (Well, that only means he is an honest academic; but I dream of journalists and bloggers with the same standard.)

Item #1: I blogged about an account of the first open rebellion against the Americans in the Northwestern Iraqi town of Teal Afar, last September. (The author also predicted that "Mosul will blow next", which when happening took so many by surprise two months later.) From the eyewitness account it was clear that this was a Sunni town and a local rebellion, but Juan Cole repeatedly described the conflict as one of local Shi'a Turkomen and Sunni Arab insurgents trying to take over. I'm not an expert, so this discrepancy nagged in my head for long. It turns out, Cole was just assuming from the fact that most Trukomen are SHi'a - as he is told here:

the Turkmen in Tel Afar are actually Sunni, not Shia'. They are nearly all Ottoman-era Sunni migrants, rather than Shia' descendants of the Akqoyunlu and Karaqoyunlu tribes who make up a majority of Turkmen in Kirkuk.

Read the rest, it is interesting.

Item #2: Cole drew up the image of total regional disaster after a US pullout from Iraq, and then made his unrealistic proposal: to bring in UN troops and give them US air support[*]. (This wishful thinking, no it's more: congitive dissonance - proposing what he reports to be unworkable - is very apparent in this post: he reports in the middle about a Shi'a province wanting even the Brits out, but harkens back to his illusoric position in the end.) He got a number of negative responses, and the last one stands out - I'll quote longer parts from University of California Santa Cruz professor Alan Richards:

...I am troubled by what I perceive as a tacit assumption--a very American assumption,--underlying most of the discussion. It seems to me that even "pessimists" are actually "optimists": they assume that there exists in Iraq and the Gulf some "solution", some course of action which can actually lead to an outcome other than widespread, prolonged violence, with devastating economic, political, and social consequences.

...I can see no course of action which will prevent widespread violence, regional social upheaval, and economic hammering administered by oil price shocks. This is why so many of us opposed the invasion of Iraq so strenuously in the first place! We thought that it would unleash irreversible adverse consequences for (conventionally defined) US interests in the region. I am very sorry to say that I still think we were right.

...As Patrick Cockburn has pointed out (London Review of Books), the Kurds destabilized Iraq for half a century, and the Sunnis can certainly do the same. No Sunnis, no deal, no way-as you have repeatedly stressed. ...The insurgents, and many Iraqis, want us out, by any means. Our continued presence cannot succeed.

...I can see NO possible way for outsiders to defuse this: not with the U.S. in Iraq, not with the U.N., not with a power vacuum. People from outside the region (U.S., E.U., U.N., India, China, whoever) can do very, very little about this.

...there is a tacit assumption in the discussion so far that low oil prices, including current levels, are viable. I don't think this is true, for at least two reasons. A) The terrifying truth is that how we consume energy now both in the U.S. and elsewhere is entirely unsustainable for environmental reasons. Denial is the national past-time on this; and it is deeply destructive. Global warming is a reality, it will get worse, and the consequences will be extremely serious. I now work surrounded by biologists and environmental scientists, many of whom would cheer (even as they paid a heavy price in lost jobs and income) if the price of oil hit $100 a barrel [as would I the Ed.], because they are in a panic about the consequences of our current profligate behavior. B) The jury is still out on the "Hubbert's Peak" or "Peak Oil" hypothesis, but the viewpoint is hardly silly. If it should prove to be correct, oil prices will rise, steeply-until we get serious about fostering the kind of changes in consumption and technology which are necessary, in any case (see A). To repeat: assuming that low oil prices are viable is very dubious at best, and at worst, constitutes a species of denial.

...no one, from either party, in the political arena is saying anything even remotely commensurate with the threat which most scientists see to the future of the planet. No one with any power is talking sensibly about energy use, global poverty, and their interrelationships. No one at all.

...So let me close where I began: I think it is delusional to imagine that there exists a "solution" to the mess in Iraq. From this perspective, the folly of Bush, Cheney and Company in invading Iraq is even worse than most informed observers of the region already think. Starting an avalanche is certainly criminal. It does not follow, however, that such a phenomenon can be stopped once it has begun.

[*] My short take on this: even if the US government would be willing to completely cede control, (1) most Iraqis are beyond the point of trusting any foreigners, (2) all of the foreign countries that would be needed for a UN army in necessary numbers (i.e. beyond one million in my estimate) can'd do that due to domestic complications or recognise (1).

Iraqis Want US Out

2005-06-28T14:40:00.000+02:00

...even onetime friends. In this Chicago Tribune article mirrored by the Arizona Tribune, we meet restaurant owner Dhiya Nour al-Deen, who had every reason to be US-friendly:

Police officers from a nearby station and workers from an industrial park, flush with disposable income, spent money at his kebab and falafel stand.

His older brother, Alaa, was earning a good salary as a bodyguard for a high-ranking Education Ministry official. At the time of the handover, Deen recalled that he and Alaa thought the Americans had put Iraq on the right path toward forging a lasting democracy.

...and, considering the standard argument for why the US has to say, every reason to hate the armed resistance:

In the past 12 months, his brother was killed in an assassination attempt on the Education Ministry official, his restaurant was badly damaged by three car bombings targeting the neighboring police station...

...but, what he says is:

"Nothing will change until the Americans leave," Deen, 33, said at his home in Baghdad's Saydiyah neighborhood. "The resistance will not stop until the Americans go away. Once they leave, we can then only figure out if there is any hope of the Sunnis and Shiites coming together."

...and for an American paper, to sum up Iraqi public opinion the following way, explicitely, rather than precede a few quotes from people balanced for pro-US and critical views with spin, is something rather bold:

Many Iraqis interviewed said they believe U.S. officials have too much influence in the nation's important decisions and the government is far too dependent on the Americans for Iraqis to place much stock in their sovereignty.

"This is not a democracy," said Sarah Abdul Kareem, 21, a Shiite. "This is chaos."

2005-06-28T10:30:00.000+02:00

The "title" is a poster of a British campaign against their government's intent to introduce ID cards. To me it is almost as if a response to my earlier criticism of the campaign. As Bliar & co thunder ahead with the project now, I think it is timely to rephrase my position of support with major quibbles.

As someone who lived with an ID card all his life, this Anglo-Saxon angst of ID cards is a bit perplexing. Let's start from the claim that a single number in all databases allows someone to get all your data. But the government could already get all your data, only instead of searching with your ID number, searching with your name (and address and what else) in the different databases. Even if it couldn't do that, if it gains access to your files in your company/school/bank/job application center/whatever, they got it.

This points to where the real danger lies: it is in a centralisation of databases, and unlimited goverment access to databases.

You can have that without ID cards. Rumsfeld wanted to have just that in the USA: remember Total Information Awareness. In fact, he still wants it, he just stopped issuing shiny new Orwellian code names for it.

And, here is the real issue, Bliar wants this Orwellian control too, proposing the necessary changes hidden behind the ID debate. So the ID card is advocated as a trojan horse. This is why I think NO2ID campaigners fight a very real menance and gave my support to them in the end.

Here is my worst-case scenario: the ID is defeated in circumstances reminding of the poll tax, everyone goes hope believing they saved personal freedoms - but the government implemented the part about database synchronisation and unlimited access anyway.

...which is why I am happy about this "and the database state" subline: it gives hope that the real menance won't be lost sight of.

Some Want Civil War

2005-06-28T09:55:00.000+02:00

It can be argued that the number of sectarian-motivated killings in Iraq is overestimated (killings by criminals, rival tribes etc. may be propagandised as such, just remember the bodies fished from the river and how Iraqi puppet President Talabani jumped on it), but some attacks like bombings of mosques make certain there is are elements wanting civil war.

On the Sunni Muslim side, I thought about which branches could be behind this. I close both nationalists and ex-Baathists out. While I wouldn't put such a cynical mass-murdering strategy beyond the ex-Baathists, it just doesn't make sense: without tanks and planes and area weapons, I doubt they won't realise that this would is a conflict they are bound to lose. While the USA can be chased away, the Shi'a will have to stay - and with both well-trained militias like the Badr Corps and militias of high numbers like the Mahdi Army, they'd be crushed.

No, I more see the sectarian religious extremists as culprit. On one hand, Arab groups like Zarqawi's, on the other, the Kurd Sunni fundamentalist group Ansar-e-Islam and its spinoffs. (For the latter, a sectarian Sunni-Shi'a instead of an ethnic Arab-Kurdish conflict would be a boon, in most part to be watched safely from a distance.)

As for the Shi'a side, it's not just the US-dependent powers-that be with irresponsible propaganda. Some in the police, possibly ex-Badr-Brigades, have started abducting, torturing and killing Sunnis, allegedly on suspicion of their membership in the resistance. As this chilling Knight Ridder report suggests, they're not behind the Sunni extremists and the Americans in cruelty - their methods include dragging someone to death behind a car. (That report is close to how I imagine real journalism - for example, after giving the official 'explanations' for the killings - Sunni insurgents dressing as police - they put forth a truckload of evidence that, let's just say, makes the official explanation unlikely.)

So, just like in Yugoslavia, it might happen that while majorities in even the sub-populations don't want war, extremists and irresponsible leaders at home and misguided to irresponsible to malicious foreign powers will make it real.

To close this off, interestingly, ever more Islamic clerics who support armed resistance denounce and call for an end of attacks on civilians - the last was the top cleric in Egypt. He said:

"The individual operations and almost daily bloody acts which kill civilians under the slogan of jihad to liberate Iraq are a kind of mockery and chaos which distort the image of Islam and Muslims," Grand Mufti Ali Gumaa said.

It is strange that an atheist like me would like to see the word of a cleric followed, on the other hand, I am pessimistic about anyone heeding his and others' calls.

A Soldier's Blog

2005-06-28T00:20:00.000+02:00

I found an interesting blog-post by a US soldier serving in Iraq.

This post drives me nuts and gives me hope at the same time. It reads to me like someone slowly waking from brainwashing. I mean stuff like this:

I believe more and more each day that things like freedom can't be given.

I mean. Wow. Heh. What an Einstein, I feel compelled to say. Yet, that he could figure that out, in the situation he is, is very commendable. And, hopefully, this happens to ever more of them. He continues:

They must be fought for and earned to have value. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that the Iraqi people don't rise up against the insurgency themselves.

It has apparently never appeared to him that the "insurgency" contains in large part people who - well, rose up for freedom, against - the occupiers. But, maybe he figures that out next time.

The rest of this post doesn't elicit such ambivalence in me. He mentions the Downing Street Minutes - I hope the DSM will have more impact on soldiers than the US population.

His previous blog-post is also of interest, he explains why he doesn't want to be conscientious objector, summing up in the end:

To quit, to walk away is to not see my family. That is a choice I am not willing to make.

In other words, he'll commit murder to be with his family. Well, at least that's a better reason than to avoid humiliation or the end of military career.

On a more general note, the frequent references to 'foreign insurgents' by him and other soldiers in the comments reinforce my impression that the US in Iraq is essentially fighting a war with imaginary enemies. It's not simply that they don't have a clue about the place and situation they are in, but that they have a complete phantasy world ready-made by propaganda in their heads, and fit their vision of reality to it.

Kind of like what Edward Said wrote about Orientalists visiting the areas cobbled together by colonialist minds under the nomer 'Orient', who are only out to find reinforcing evidence for the picture that they already have in their mind, and ignore the real nature, the real diversity and the real relations of peoples there.

Bulgaria (Into The Coalition Of The Unwilling, or Of The Fakers?)

2005-06-27T19:58:00.000+02:00

Bulgaria held elections last weekend. The Socialists (post-reformed-communists) won it, but with only 31%, they are forced to pick coalitioners - which could be the losing centre-right government party of the onetime king and present PM (20%), or one of three small right-wing parties, along with the party representing the Turkish and Gipsy minorities (13%). Unfortunately, the far-right also had a strong showing: 8%. Also worth to note, except for this one, all parties support joining the EU.

What makes this election a global issue is that while Bulgaria has been until now one of the staunchest members of the Coalition of Bribed & Blackmailed in Iraq (also with one of the highest casualty rates), the Socialists promised a pullout in the campaign.

Now the question is: will they fulfill their promises like Spain's Zapatero? Or, are they about to be bribed & blackmailed, and use shifty rhetoric towards the own population while in truth remaining in Iraq? That is, will they join the Ukraine's Yushchenko, Italy's Berlusconi and Poland's leaders, who keep on talking of pullout but with ever changing conditions and dates. The US certainly hopes the latter - the US ambassador already visited the Socialists.

Now Even I Sense Change

2005-06-27T14:27:00.000+02:00

In comments on several blogs recently, I spread my scepticism towards the US Left's optimism, an optimism regarding a turn of public opinion that argues from recent polls on the Iraq war. I argued, it doesn't matter whether Americans think the war was worth it or whether they approve Dubya's handling of the war: these are general questions, not hard policy questions, nor the questions that might matter in people's minds after being exposed to a lot of spin. What has true weight is whether they still approve the original decision to go to war, and whether they want to keep troops or demand them to return home.

Now, in the June 20-22 AP/Ipsos poll, the original war decision's support fell to 42%. At the same time, those who favor immediate pullout rose to 37% - still far from majority, and less than the 46% favoring pullout in the June 8-12 Pew Research Center poll (a number containing those who buy the necessity of a staged withdrawal), but much more than the 28% in the June 6-8 Gallup poll.

In other news, there is something on the move in the progressive base of the Democratic party. Here is a Dailykos diary of someone convinced of the need of an immediate pullout, after meeding independent trade unionits fron Basra. Steve Gilliard demands an immediate pullout for some time now, and he even attacks a liberal proponent of staged pullout (the war in the comments is maybe more significant than the posts itself), and the Billmon spinoff Moon of Alabama attacks even atrios for not denouncing the government for WMD lies.

The apparent catalysts for these changes were back-stabbing attacks by mainstream Democrat representatives (like Biden, Edwards) against DNC chair Dean, after Dean dared to speak badly of Republicans.

Another Poll: The 'Sunni' Resistance

2005-06-14T09:08:00.000+02:00

If you believe the propaganda spewing forth from the US government, the sycopanthic 'liberal' media and 101st Fighting Keyboarders, the Iraqi resistance is a bunch of foreign terrorists allied to local diehards from the 20% Sunni Arab part of the population, who coerce even the majority of this 20% to boycotts and such. However, in truth:

"... a recent internal poll conducted for the U.S.-led coalition indicated that nearly 45 percent of the Iraqi population supports the insurgent attacks... Only 15 percent of those polled said they strongly support the U.S.-led coalition."

Let's contemplate what this means. Even if we assume

that this poll was not warped from the beginning by its assotiation to the occupiers (wording of the questions, willingness of the polled to answer honestly),
that it managed to represent Sunnis in the inaccessible Anbar and Niniveh provinces,
and further assume that all Sunnis and all members of smaller minorities are pro while all Kurds anti (no Occupation there),
and use the standard numbers (55% Shi'a Arab, 20% Sunni Arab, 20% Kurd, 5% other),

- that is: the scenario most favorable to war supporters - this still means that more than a third of even the Shi'a Arabs supports armed resistance. (I suspect if we take the above four points in account, it's more like 55% of both the Shi'a and the entire population.)

You may wonder how that could be, if you bought that other line of propaganda that all the resistance are terrorists who mainly attack civilians. But don't let the relative numbers of casulaties deceive you: obviously terrorists have more success in killing defenseless civilians than guerillas have in killing soldiers in bulletproof wests riding armoured vehicles with superior weapons at their disposal, not to mention air support. Instead, remember that for at most a dozen terrorist attacks a day, there are at present 70 or so against the occupiers. (Consult this graph too.)

And then there are the demoralised local auxiliary forces, whom their instructors, in best colonial tradition, detest for lack of "courage, discipline and dedication". (Read this and more in this superb WaPo account of the supposed crack Iraqi unit, the "Charlie Company".)

So here is the double Argument From Absurdity that currently keeps too many non-warbots from calling for a withdrawal of occupying forces: the spectacular failure of US troops - busy attacking those who want the occupiers out - to stop the terrorist attacks on civilians means they are still needed there to stop terrorist attacks; and the US troops can't withdraw until local troops fail to take over the job of confronting attackers of US troops...

Polls Scepticism

2005-06-14T00:24:00.000+02:00

What the heck, one post if I'm here.

There is much buzz across the blogosphere about new US polls showing a fall in various ratings of Bush and the war. I am sceptical about a turning point, however: there hasn't been much change in the numbers that count. Here are two of them (the latter in two versions from two polls), via pollingreport.com:

"Do you think the U.S. made the right decision or the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq?" [June 8-12 Pew poll]

Right decision: 47%, Wrong decision: 45%

What this means when contrasted with the often touted numbers about whether the war was worth the costs: there are some 10% of Americans who think it will be worth the costs - after more blood has been paid for it.

"Do you think the U.S. should keep military troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized, or do you think the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible?" [June 8-12 Pew poll]

Keep troops: 50%, Bring home: 47%

"Which comes closest to your view about what the U.S. should now do..." [June 6-8 Gallup poll]

Send more troops: 10%, Same as now: 26%, Withdraw some: 31%, Withdraw all: 28%

The "Withdraw some" camp in the latter obviously involves those who for some reason believe a total, but phased withdrawal somehow means less mess than the alternatives. Note that the "Withdraw all" camp, those who supposedly realised that the occupiers won't keep the situation from turning worse (in fact help it become worse), slumps back from a 30% glass ceiling every few months. I'd say 75-80% of Americans still live in fairyland.

To close, I repeat what I wrote elsewhere: Bush and the neocon puppetmasters aren't in real danger until some of the core numbers - Bush's overall job rating and 'War on Terror' job rating, approval of the original decision to go to war, support for withdrawal and/or lack of support for "finishing the mission" - skirt 40%.

Not Out Of Work

2005-06-14T00:14:00.000+02:00

...I mean, sorry for no posts for a month now, but I am busy lately, I can barely keep up with my news reading, not much time left for posting.

The US Oil For Food Scandal

2005-05-17T20:22:00.000+02:00

The bigger story today is not anti-war British MP George Galloway's trashing of the US Senate. It is this:

The new report focuses on both the $228m Saddam Hussein's regime is estimated to have made through illegal surcharges on the oil-for-food programme, and on the $8bn it made through sanctions-busting oil sales to Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Jordan.

US oversight was weak on both fronts, the report says - and sometimes amounted to facilitation of the illicit trades.

Kickbacks

It takes the example of Bayoil, a US oil firm which was indicted by US authorities in April and was allegedly used by the three Russian politicians as a go-between with the Iraqi authorities.

According to the report, the firm imported more than 200 million barrels to the US between 2000 and 2002, selling it to US companies and in the process paying $37m in illegal kickbacks to Baghdad.

US agencies such as the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) failed to examine its activities, the report warns, assuming that UN agencies would do the job - despite UN resolutions which clearly made such oversight the responsibility of national governments.

In all, US buyers paid more than half the $224m in total kickbacks, the report estimates.

USA, invade thyself. And kudos for the BBC for separating kickbacks on the OFFP and oil smuggling - and recognising the latter was magnitudes bigger.

BTW, I wrote about these numbers before - where I note that probably half of the surcharges were legal.

Squatters & Vile Estate Developers

2005-05-17T13:05:00.000+02:00

In August 1980, when I was just a small child, my family did a big tour of Western Europe, made easier by relatives in the Netherlands. When we visited Amsterdam, I remember we got in the middle of a big protest or what - I saw water guns holding crowds at bay and riot police hovering on crane platforms beside a house.

Two decades later I tracked down the bit of history I was an underage witness of: it was the 19 August storming of the Prins Henderikkade ("PH-kade") building, one of the last battles between the kraaker (squatters) occupying empty old buildings, and police enforcing the property rights of vile estate developers. Estate developers who'd keep the houses empty and let them go crap, so that they can tear them down and build expensive new buildings. My parents remember talking to a far-leftist on-looker, who upon learning that we are from Hungary, said that such housing problems must be unknown to us in our social security.

Well, now that was a bit ridiclulous: in the "shortage economy" of late 'real existing socialism', one had to wait years for a house, flat or a building permit; if building on their own (like we did) construction took at least half a decade; and the dictature's idea of social housing was Soviet-style ten-story concrete silos where you can hear your neighbours across the wall, where it is always too hot (either due to the Sun or crappy central heating), and where families whose houses were razed for these monsters found flats with maybe half the area. I don't know if there was a silly hidden policy behind this to force-create the egalitarian-minded socialist man, or (more likely) was it just the usual blind technocrat operation ("we can make X tons of concrete & Y meters of pipes, & the five-year plan foresees Z new flats"). At any rate, the result was rather the creation of the anti-social man: the inhabitant who cares shit about neighbours or the common stairway interest, even if he gets back the same treatment.

However, then came our shiny new capitalist world.

Construction of social housing fell almost to zero. Repeating the mistakes of the West, and that in accelerated fashion, middle+upper class suburbanisation and inner-city (+ concrete silo orbit-city) ghettoisation was allowed without limits. (Ironically, in my city Budapest, this process stopped itself about five years ago: while barely maintained commuter trains were too dirty for the suburbanites, radial roads within the city just couldn't swallow their cars each morning - fed up with traffic jams, many started to move back.)

And in place of bulldozer-minded apparatchniks, now we also have the vile estate developers. The vilest of course are those employing the so-called Apartment Mafia: first tricksters pretend to be from some authority, let people sign papers that turn out to be documents stating they sell their house - and after the tricksters come the (sometimes fake, other times real) lawyers and security guys who do the eviction. But let's turn to 'legal' businessmen. Among them, even the smallest estate sharks show a level of recklessness and arrogance outstripping old Party anti-capitalist propaganda. Two examples:

Near where I work, a developer wanted to build an office block. They bought an empty parcel still not built up since WWII, and the neighbouring old house - which was under heritage protection. After much squabble, they got a permit to rebuild the inside of the old house, keeping structural walls and the facade. What they did then was to start construction of the office block's basement in such a way that the empty shell of the old house got destabilised - they had to tear it down before collapse. Then it was revealed that construction started already with the old plans (new office block on both parcels). This created such an outrage that the developer was forced to build a replica of the old facade onto his office block... and now the building stands empty: the whole construction was a speculative scam, there wasn't sufficient market for offices.

A much lesser fish but even more brazen was the guy who ran a small restaurant in a rented state-owned building beside the Citadel (a 19th-century Habsburg fort). One day he decided he needs an extension - and started to build without a building permission, without informing either the owner or the heritage commission, across terrain filled with history from the Celts through Romans and Avars to WWII... When the heritage commission took notice, even when the press took notice, he said fuck y'all - and built on. At the point when the opposition started to blame this on the government, he should have known money into pockets and creating facts won't be enough - yet he (he!) went to court, claiming his building permit took too long...

Yeah these two failed, but these are the exceptis caught up by the media, while hundreds of other cases fall under the radar and hence succeed. (I know some.)

What I can proudly announce now is the appearance of a counter-movement, a latter-day Budapest version of the kraaker, inner city youths who organise protests and even some squatting. I may report more on them in the future via a relative who knows some of them.

Salvadorian Option, Sadr, Privatisation

2005-05-17T11:25:00.000+02:00

Three important news from Iraq in a single day - Juan Cole has them.

The first story is that the fifty executed civilians found recently appear to be Sunnis (Cole is not very clear but it seems he refers to two different sources on this), executed by puppet government security forces (or, is the Wolf Brigade one of the pop-up militias?). This seems to be evidence that the 'Salvadorian Option' - subduing a guerilla movement by staffing out local forces that terrorise the population - is at work. Tough, the Badr Brigades are capable of starting this all on their own, with the occupiers only required to look away.

The second story is that Muqtada al-Sadr, whom I predicted and still predict to be the big winner in all this bloody mess (that is, unless he is assassinated before a US pullout), appeared for the first time in public since the Najaf siege last August. True to his nationalist agenda, he preached against sectarian conflicts and against the occupation.

At this point I have to stress one point about the present puppet government again. The general image, one accepted by Juan Cole too, is of Jaafari, al-Hakim et al in the government, and Sistani being forces of restraint who try to hold back a sectarian war pursued by some Sunni terrorists. But I think the facts I read daily at Juan Cole's blog don't support this view. It's not that they pursue sectarian war. It's that they are so eager to vilify the Iraqi resistance that they will grab any chance to paint an attack sectarian, and thereby inflame tensions even more than by their manoveuring all Sunnis out of puppet-governmental power.

Remember the mass hostage taking in Mada'in that never was, and the following lies about the unconnected corpses fished from the river. Remember the macabre (staged) 'confessions show' on Iraqi TV. Remember the anti-Jordanian protests based on false rumours on an alleged suicide bomber and celebrations of him. And of course there are the internal Shi'a (or Kurd) attacks by tribal militias or criminals - recognised as such only if the attackers don't wear masks and some locals identify them.

The third story is a new hint at the US 'advisers' at work behind the scenes (not recognised as such by Cole): the new Industry minister announced plans of partial privatisation of state companies. This contradicts the official campaign programme of some Shiite coalition members (not to mention public opinion).

Dahr Jamail Is Back

2005-05-16T19:25:00.000+02:00

...in Amman/Jordan, Iraq is now too dangerous even for him. But he has contacts in Iraq. Two tidbits I thought are worth to highlight:

Another interesting incident which occurred the beginning of the month was when two F-18 Hornet jets crashed in Iraq. The military claimed there was no indication of hostile fire, yet they crashed in different locations. On the day of their crash, Baghdad airport was closed to commercial air traffic for three days with no reason given by authorities.

Landing at different locations can happen easily if one plane was less damaged than the other, but the closing of the airport is more suggestive.

Abu Talat phoned his family today in Baghdad. They’ve had no electricity for four days. They told him (unconfirmed) that all of Iraq has had no electricity for several days. As Abu Talat says, “Baghdad is running on the generator.”

The worsening of everyday life may be even more important than the mass killings by all armed sides.

Jamail's second post from Amman so far deals with truck divers, who curse the Occupiers in unison, be them from Ramadi, Basra or Sadr City. One factoid that caught my eyes is that the Jordan-Iraq border queue now lasts 18 days. Eighteen. Days.

We Will Not Repeat the Mistakes of Other Generations

2005-05-16T18:38:00.000+02:00

I have been rather uneasy with the US Left's response to Bush's speech in Latvia. While they rigtly pointed out the sillyness of the present-day political intentions behind Bushie's blurtings, and the blind eye he turned to Baltic participation in Nazi crimes and historical amnesia about those, elevating Roosevelt's and Churchill's decisions into wise statesmanship is too much.

The view of Yalta as a sell-out by the West was not shared only by the US Right, but it is pretty much widespread in a Central-Eastern Europe that for example remembers capitulation attempts not taken up by the Western allies. (Or what about the British abadoning of the Prague uprising.)

But Josh Narins @ Remain Calm has found a better way to lampoon Republoscum historicism:

President George Washington, knowing full well that Canada had been used as a staging ground for attacks against America during the War of American Independence, and also that Canada was a land yearning to breathe the sweet air of freedom, sat idly by and let Canada live [ed:if it can be called that!] under the tyrannic bootheel of monarchic oppression, and, like Presidents J Adams, T Jefferson, and J Madison after him, was an appeaser of tyranny!
Had it not been Thomas Jefferson himself who penned the Declaration of Independence, explaining the depths of the injustice of this "King" George, the undemocratic ruler who still held sway over so many suffering subjects, including the innocent Canadians so close we could touch them?

Was it not only thirty years later, during the War of 1812, that Canada, once again, became a staging ground for enemy troops bent on destroying America's liberty, troops who burned down the White House? [ed: Never Forget The Burning Of the White House!] How could these early American Presidents have stood by and let America be attacked? Why did they not bring the war to the enemy? We pray history obliterates these types from her books!

Don't Mention The War...

2005-05-16T17:34:00.000+02:00

DER SPIEGEL's correspondent in Britain has been asked "for a strongly worded polemic about the British obsession with Germany and the war". He delivered a fine piece (tough maybe wording strongly was too much at the expense of making distinctions), here is one quote:

Every German schoolchild knows the tales of German atrocities. But in England, Prince Harry parties with a swastika arm band. Eighty per cent of youngsters don't know what Auschwitz was about, but each one will be familiar enough with heroic films about the "Battle of Britain" to believe they had personally kicked the Hun up the backside.

Where does this giddy pride come from - and the lack of sensitivity toward the victims?

The Russians in the meantime consider us friends, even though they lost 25 million people in the fight against the Nazi horde. They respect us as a hard-working, peace-loving people who have emerged renewed from the devastation.

The British, who only survived thanks to the Russians and Americans, behave as if they had conquered Hitler's hordes single-handedly. And they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they had to refight the battles every evening. They are positively enchanted by this Nazi dimension.

(A less frequent but not milder version of this syndrome exists in the USA too; witness US pro-Democrat, pro-capitalist economist and blogger Brad DeLong's recent mad diatribe against Nobel laureate, onetime standard bearer of the post-war West German anti-fascist and rememberance movement, German novelist Günter Grass: after Grass's attack on capitalism in a piece translated and reprinted by the NYT, DeLong manages to accuse him of being a "crypto-Nazi scum"...)

The author also refers to the silly discussion going on in Britain about the film Downfall, something I covered before.

And then he connects the recent rehabilitation of imperialism (Gordon Brown: "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over") to the present war that shouldn't be mentioned:

I believe the official British triumphalism has to do with the Iraq war. If you continuously inflate your self importance with memories of grandeur in the Second World War, if you endlessly replay your "finest hour", you will have a distorted view of the moral problems of today.

A Britain which assumes itself too much in possession of all virtue has dangerously self-aggrandising features. Through deception and manoeuvrings you can find yourself going into a war that breaks international law and costs thousands of innocent civilian lives - simply because of an uncritical faith in an historic mission. For Tony Blair, it seems to me, "Rule Britannia" applies to the moral sphere as well.

Thoughts On The British Elections

2005-05-16T10:48:00.000+02:00

It's now 11 days since Bliar was given a bloody nose, time for some less celebratory thoughts.

One is that while more than 60% of voters voted for leftist ideas, what they got in essence is three conservative parties in Parliament.

Take the LibDems, who were surprisingly fast in proving the truth behind the "Yellow Tories" mockery, by distancing themselves from their social campaign promises:

Charles Kennedy has announced a wholesale review of the Liberal Democrats' policies that could pave the way for them to ditch their tax policies.

The party fears it lost support because of its plans to replace the council tax with a local income tax, worrying people on middle-range incomes, and its call for a 50p top rate of tax on incomes of more than £100,000 a year.

[elsewhere] The policy review will also focus on Europe and energy. The party may drop its opposition to nuclear power amid evidence that it could provide a way to combat climate change.

But Bliar is not to be outdone in pandering to the nonexistent right-wing majority. I was chastised by Dead Men Left for comparing New Labour to US Democrats, yet the following attempt to get BNP votes surprised even me:

Tony Blair says he will "focus relentlessly" on the public's priorities after securing a historic third term in government.
He pledged to tackle immigration issues and re-establish respect in classrooms, town centres and on Britain's streets.

Yeah, the public's priorities. Home Office minister Hazel Blears upped this with a proposal to put yobs to community service work in orange uniforms, in US chain-gang style.

Now, what about the government's priorities? As I predicted [not on this blog], the issue of building nuclear plants is back - that after several studies showing nuclear as a dead option, and just recently more problems with waste disposal. (And after global warming, confronting Peak Oil is the new false argument of lobbyists.) As for public health service, the creeping privatisation is bound to roll on - minister Patricia Hewitt 'promised' to double private services paid for by the NHS.

As a second post-election issue, the minor progressive leftist parties. They grew stronger, but...

When factoring in the number of seats contested, the Greens could accomplish only minimal growth over 2001.

As for Respect, I think the important story is not Galloway's win, but the strong showing of some other candidates - three of them finished second place. While this is much better than what I feared, it is less than desirable - the party hasn't progressed much above what it achieved in the European elections, and the election of at least one other candidate would have been needed to unmake the image of the one-man Galloway Party in too many people's eyes.

The Greens and Respect failed to stand together in this election, and many continue to blame the other side, so it remains to be seen if they can cooperate effectively on the upcoming battles over nuclear power and nukes. On the other hand, the third Bliar government seems to be set to give plenty of opportunities to form a united front of rejection.

Coalition of the Ever Less Willing

2005-05-16T10:14:00.000+02:00

Lately the governments of a number of US vassals in Iraq - Poland, Italy, Japan, Ukraine, Bulgaria - tried to bridge the growing gap between public opinion and their obsequiousness with declarations on continued troop deployment that appear to promise a pullout.

But more important is something happening without much media attention. Do you remember the NATO promise of training Iraqi troops? That was the NATO decision even Germany hadn't vetoed, and tough it was derided at the time because most NATO members promised token units, still it represented real support and some countries' promises were of similar troop strength than in the previous phase of occupation.

For example, Hungary. Before parliament forced a pullout on the government, Hungary had 300 truck drivers in Iraq (who, giving the lie to the 'humanitarian' mission, dodged IEDs 95% of the time with military cargo). Our government sought to regain its (apart from red carpets rolled out at the White House, worthless) position in relation to Big Brother by promising 150 soldiers to guard the NATO training base in Baghdad.

Now it was leaked to Hungarian papers that there will be nothing of the sort. Allegedly, the new Iraqi puppet government doesn't want any foreign help in training, but at any rate, there won't be a deployment.

So the newest idea to savage our servitude at least in appearance is to offer the more than 70 stored T-72 tanks (yes, that means three-decades-old technology) to the puppet Iraqi army, if...

...if NATO pays the bill, that is.

Spin, Spin, Spin

2005-05-13T11:59:00.000+02:00

Two weeks ago, the memo of a July 2002 British government meeting was leaked. The news was that for the first time, we saw it explicitely laid out that diplomacy was not just not an option, but was meant to be used to create a casus belli for an already decided-upon war. (I wrote about it.)

However, for leftist Americans, it became a "smoking gun memo" for something else, a line leaked months ago already: MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove reporting that intelligence is "fixed around the policy" in the USA.

Now after much delay, as f.e. Left I notes, the US mainstream press started to cover the story.

Apparently, finding the right spin took time. Here is the LA Times's subtitle:

Critics of Bush call them proof that he and Blair never saw diplomacy as an option with Hussein.

Huh. Heh. Hah. No, critics call them proof that Bush and Bliar never wanted to allow diplomacy as an option. War of choice, not war of misunderstood necessity. The mainstream press is such a coward.

Mexico Overtakes The US

2005-05-10T15:36:00.000+02:00

The sixty-year successful campaign of the car, highway-building and airline industries against public transport in the USA, so far, also succeeded in stopping every high-speed rail project. IIRC Bush's election as governor killed the Texas Triangle, his younger brother in Florida succeeded to castrate the high-speed project written into the Florida constitution; and Arnold Schwarzenegger recently made noises about tossing California's well-advanced plans.

Meanwhile, even under the leadership of a Big Business President (Vincente Fox), Mexico has kicked off a high-speed project - nearing the tendering stage (via US pro-rail e-zine Destination:Freedom):

In a move to jump-start high-speed rail in Mexico, the country’s Ministry of Communications and Transport (SCT) has appointed SYSTRA to help draw up tender agreement terms for a turnkey project connecting Mexico City and Guadalajara, according to Railway Age.

Slated to run at speeds of 186 mph, the rail operation will cut travel time to two hours and serve some 28 million passengers. It also will link up with the cities of Queretaro and Irapuato. According to SYSTRA, the tender is scheduled for launch by mid-year.

In the project’s second phase, SYSTRA will help SCT draw up the contacts and deed of concession, which will be awarded to a firm responsible for the design, construction, and operation of a double-track line. Two Mexican companies are supporting SYSTRA in its work – one for legal aspects and the other for technical assistance.

The Mexican federal government reportedly has been in the developmental stages of high-speed rail since 2002.

(Needless to say, I'd prefer at least operation to be run by a public organisation rather than a private company.)

Shiite Theocracy

2005-05-10T10:02:00.000+02:00

There is a Western press consensus that Sistani is a 'moderate', who doesn't want to control the state like Khomeini.

I have argued earlier against this, to recap: the difference between what Sistani wants and what Khomeini wanted is mainly in official titles, not the power they can exert. Khomeini had a Guardian Council to strike down laws, and had the top ayatollah as quasi-head-of-state with control over some government organisations. In contrast, Sistani wants to rely on a permanent Shiite majority in parliament, where Shiite MPs would be constitutionally required to respect clerical rulings - a more indirect but just as sure control over lawmaking. And contrary to presumptions, Sistani won't keep himself out of daily politics either - tough it must be said, this time it seems a wise move, unlike his manoveuring during the assaults on Fallujah - (via Juan Cole):

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Sistani recently pressed the new Interior Minister, Baqir Jabr, to investigate the murder of 6 members of the powerful Sunni Dulaim tribe in the Kisra district of Baghdad.

Shiite Discontent Growing

2005-05-10T09:45:00.000+02:00

In-between the news of the continued bloody mayhem, the power struggle and the general chaos in Iraq, some news come along that allow us a deeper insight into what's brewing. I think the most important news of May so far is this (via Juan Cole):

Al-Zaman/AFP/DPA: Shiite followers of Sistani in Karbala demonstrated on Monday, demanding that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari distribute to the people their flour rations (the rations had been established under the oil for food program of the United Nations). They complained that this key foodstuff had not reached them for four months. They also demanded an end to corruption and bribe-taking by the police. They further insisted that a timetable be set for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

So now, first, even pro-Sistani people can't be kept back from demanding action on basic needs. This discontent is bound to grow, as Jaafari is unlikely to be able to fulfil their demands: if anything, the US control of ministries through the Bremer-imposed 'advisors' and through the control of the money sources will prevent that.

Second, the US-approved police are deeply unpopular just where they were supposed to beleast rejected. Unfortunately, the way this will most likely be 'corrected' is the takeover of the police by the Badr Corps in some form.

Third, even while they have such pressing needs for motivation as a four-months lack of food supplies, the rejection of US occupation is still a central issue for these pro-Sistani people.

Tunnels Supplement

2005-05-07T19:03:00.000+02:00

I didn't catch it while focusing on the British elections, but two days ago tunnelers reached hands after holing through the Guadarrama tunnel in Spain, which will be the fourth longest in the world when high-speed trains start to whiz through it in two years' time.

(pdf link in Spanish; I note they err when calling it the fifth longest - possibly they count the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which won't open until 2015)

More British Election: Nazis

2005-05-06T01:20:00.000+02:00

At this point five seats were declared. All held and kept by Labour, with strongly falling percentages. However, what's depressing that there is apparently a strong swing to... BNP. Yes, the British pseudonazi outfit. UPDATE: with three more seats declared, the trend is even more alarming. In Rotherham, Labour lost 11.1%, while BNP has gone from zero to 6.6%.

Slim Majority & Yellow Tories

2005-05-05T23:22:00.000+02:00

The first exit poll predicts a 66-seat majority for NuLab, a pleasant surprise (tough under 50 had been my wish).

Also, let's slack off the LibDems a little too - quoting from another fine pre-election rant, this time from Where There Were No Doors, some contrast to a LibDem campaign pamphlet claiming their party is the only one caring about the environment:

Nobody involved with the Newbury Bypass protest can forget David Rendell, Liberal Democrat MP for Newbury, and just how much he cared about the environment when big business wanted to build a completely unnecessary road through some of the most important and ecologically sensitive sites in his constituency. A sitting Liberal Democrat MP. Can you imagine the boost the campaign, if the local MP had come out against the project? If he hadn't been one of it's most vocal supporters?

And when a developer in Kingston wanted a row of mature trees felled in order to provide a better view from the luxury flats they built, the local LibDem council was quick to give permission.

You can't claim to be a "green" party when you consistently put business before the environment. Every party - the tories included - will make the environment a top priority when there's no financial downside. The only relevant question is whether your priorities change when there's big wodges of cash involved. And the LibDems (supporters of GM crops in Scotland) have demonstrated that whenever they actually find themselves in a position of power, they're just as willing to sell out the environment in the name of short-termist profitwank as the tories and Labour.

Indeed.

Third Way

2005-05-05T15:44:00.000+02:00

"Have you seen the stranded travellers on TV? Those left in Florida by the fake travel agency? 'WE WERE DEFRAUDED!', they cried. They just thought they have paid for cheap travel. Cheaper than the airline return ticket... but they cry, 'WE WERE DEFRAUDED!'"

[...]

Our electorate is like the man walking around and round a city block. Every time he steps into the doggie-do at one corner, he wonders why he got into such shit again... And the electorate cries, 'WE WERE DEFRAUDED!'" _Volker Pispers, 1998

One of those undying stereotopes that believers will always look and find evidence for, is that Germans don't have humour. (Then again, their private TV networks have no room for the multi-storeyed allusions and associations, not to mention relentlessly scathing and on-point political humour of a leading cabarettist like Volker Pispers, only mindless & harmless super-low-quality "comedy shows" by the dozen.)

Today Britain will re-elect Tony Bliar's New Labour government, despite its highly disliked foreign policy even among supporters, and domestic policies whose lack of success (at least in leftist terms) is only thinly veiled by massive spin and propaganda. Also, the leading opposition party will be one IMO economically less different from New Labour than Thatcher, which now tries to differentiate itself mostly with rhetorical excesses in xenophobia. Part of the reason is the first-past-the-post election system, which I blasted several times before, won't repeat here. But even so, at least 70% of the British voting/doggie-do-stepping population will have a chance to cry, 'WE WERE DEFRAUDED!' (Read Blood & Treasure's "fuck your misgivings" rant too.)

Still, I hope small leftist parties - Greens, Respect, Scottish Socialists - will do relatively well, and despite their even more mindless adherence to the free market idea than NuLab, the LibDems too - anything to weaken the two bigs if defeat is not realistic now.

Back to Third-Way-ism. It is often said thirdwayism doesn't have a real ideology, but I don't think that's the point. While caving in on fundamental issues is nothing new for social democrats (just think of WWI), I think what happened since the second half of the ninetiesis more fundamental, and just because of the ideological angle. We have to admit that it's not just the leadership: the party leaders led a great many people towards seeing everything in economic terms. (And to boot, in currently fashionable free-market economic terms.) To illustrate what I mean: for example, if there had been a 20% increase in the income of both the fast food industry and the fitness, fat-removing, cardiac-treating medical and pharmatic industries, even an old social democrat would have seen social decline, but a present-day one likely sees GDP growth.

The remaining strongly left Left (both 'radical' and what was just recently 'moderate') can't be content with just pointing out the broken promises of the "centre-left", the battle for ideology is as timely as ever.

To come full circle, back to Germany. While Tony Bliar's continued rule is the most significant influence of thirdwayism, with its ideological destruction and the bad role model Bliar has become for a lot of other SocDem top dogs, even bigger disaster for the broad Left is what is happening in Germany.

German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, tough called "Genosse der Bosse" (comrade of the bosses), was never as gifted as Tony. He was always a bungler who was lucky - being buoyed by the final frenzy of the New Economy bubble and such. (I for one never understood why he was popular in the first place.) The rare progressive successes of his government were mostly connected to the Greens, and then a few SocDem leaders always rose to brake out even those. And by now, the bungling has become an almost unbroken series of self-defeats, whether trying to lick the arse of foreign war criminals (from Putin to Bush), business interests or union archdukes. Meanwhile, with the burgeoing visa fraud scandal around (up until this) popular foreign minister Joschka Fischer, the in-charge "realo" fraction of the Greens reached the point where the public's diffuse sense of sympathy got exhausted. In short, this Red-Green government is on auto-pilot to self-destruction, almost certain to lose the elections in late 2006.

But German doggie-do-steppers won't return to circle the same city block they circled four times in the eighties & nineties. Old West German conservatives weren't as austere as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, they were kind of like what Social Democrats have become now: a clique maintaining a cozy relationship with business captains, and the former getting some benefits for workers from the latter to maintain social peace. A system reaching its height under Helmut Kohl, who'd mostly do nothing but that with an air of authority.

But the new breed poised to take over is entirely different. They sound civilised, but lie with the zeal of a missionary. Berlusconi somewhat, the neocons a great deal they view for inspiration. Not so much for ideology, as for recklessness and technologies of power. But what they take over in ideology (pro-business, anti-jobless, 'war on terror', 'war of civilisations' elements) is enough to make me cringe, given where things already head with Schröder. These guys seem to me like engineers fighting over who should drive the train as it races down the valley towards a missing bridge, instead of applying the brakes and change the switch at the junction.

But, maybe the current fools' destruction on the Left wasn't big enough to foil a regrouping into something better by 2010.

Star Scientists Against Bliar

2005-05-05T14:53:00.000+02:00

Stephen Hawking:

I urge everyone to vote in the election tomorrow only for MPs who voted against the war in Iraq.

Richard Dawkins:

Tony Blair's otherwise baffling conduct is illuminated by his statement that "I am elected as prime minister to do what I believe is right - and that is what I did" (Cheers and jeers in leaders' TV trial, April 29). No, Mr Blair was elected MP for Sedgefield and the Queen then invited him, as leader of the majority in the Commons, to form a government. He is first minister of a cabinet in a parliamentary democracy.

Article continues
But Mr Blair evidently thinks he is a president, if not an absolute monarch, whose private beliefs of right and wrong should determine a country's policy. In his unseemly rush to war, he neglected to inform or consult his cabinet, feeding them and parliament carefully censored allowances of intelligence and legal advice, doctored and spun to justify an irrevocable decision agreed long before in Washington.

Disillusioned Labour supporters now understand this and more, yet many dare not change their vote. Polls show them about to reward a known liar, because they have been conned into believing Michael Howard could become prime minister. This scaremongering is about as realistic as the infamous 45-minute weapons scare, which successfully duped parliament into voting for war. The constituency boundaries are such that no plausible swing could bring us even close to a Tory majority. Former Labour supporters who feel inclined to vote Liberal Democrat may do so without fear. Blair succeeded in scaring us into an illegal war. Don't let him scare us now into voting against our true inclinations.

(Disclosure: even tough I had to learn that political naivety can rule in even the brightest minds, as someone trained as an astronomer - but landing rather far from that in professional life - I still retain a higher respect for the opinions of scientists.)

BTW, who thought Terry Jones (of the Pythons) was a radical left voter.

Ethnic Violence?

2005-05-04T19:32:00.000+02:00

Juan Cole comments on the latest carnage in Iraq among police recruits:

Its location is significant, however. The guerrillas are also attempting to foment ethnic violence, and among the aims of the attack today was surely to promote Kurdish-Arab hatred.

This conclusion is not warranted. Here Juan Cole works from his assumption that most of the resistance is ex-Baathist (something he bases in part on Scott Ritter's earlier evaluation, something Ritter was moved away from by facts a few months ago). However, Cole forgets that one of the strongest (if not the strongest) Sunni fundamentalist fractions in Iraq is Kurdish: the Ansar-el-Islam group. In Ibril as in Mossul, Ansar is active.

Rail Renationalisation

2005-05-02T10:02:00.000+02:00

...was the demand of British transport union protesters last weekend in London.

Thatcher hater national rail, but even she didn't dare to start rail privatisation. It was her successor John Major who started this mess, but only under Tony Bliar's New Labour government was it fully going. The result was: both the numbers ond dissatisfaction of passengers rising, safety levels falling, private investment into infrastructure low, infrastructure costs spiralling out of bounds. No convincing examples elsewhere either.

In Sweden, a number of companies went bankrupt, and the remains of state company Sj is struggling too. Like elsewhere, tilting trains proved no substitution for investment into upgrading infrastructure.

Privatisation advocates would then point to the Eldorado of railways, Switzerland, where nationalisation was never all-encompassing. However, they'd ignore that most "private" companies fell progressively under the control of state, canton and local governments, or that of their supposed rivals - which of course made coordination easier -, that the state company SBB took over some services, and that current plans foresee the consolidation of major "privates" into two majority-public-owned regional bigs.

But despite the lack of positive examples, most major parties in all European countries support the basic idea of rail privatisation - even those who attempt some protectionist measures to defend their own national railways. Yet this basic idea is faulty even on capitalist terms. The lack of competition can't be the problem of railways, for there is already quite strong competition: from roads and airways.

The problem more lies in something that can't be solved for free, with a few new regulations: decades of lack of investment, while at the same time there was a lot of investment into competitors (new roads, airports, tax-free airplane fuel etc.). Worse, railways got most subsidies to keep (a part of) services at level, rather than to keep them competitive (i.e. improve steadily as the competitors).

Furthermore, there is a false philosophy that predates the privatisation madness, but whose bad effects are enhanced by it: the idea to break down railway profitability into the profitability of single lines. However, capping a branchline won't just mean losing those living nearby as passengers, nor just losing some mainline passengers who'd transfer from this line. It also means that people along mainlines who may not travel often along this line, but who now will have to use a car anyway, could abadon train travel altogether and drive to other destinations as well. (Yes, this is stating the bloody obvious - but obvious to passengers, less so to company car-riding bureaucrats and managers.) Railways are networks, and should be seen as whole. If "profitable" mainlines are opened to competition of private companies, those will eat up (with price cuts and dividend payments) all the surplus that could have been used to maintain other parts of the network.

Those are already serious problems, and I haven't even mentioned the usual problems with private companies - the pricing tricks, the sparing on safety and investment, the instability (from financial to that of services), the exploitation of rail workers (again leading to safety problems) etc. - there was a reason rail became a public transport.

As a sidenote, not all is bad in current EU rail policies. One reason that rail's market share of freight transport in the USA far exceeds that in Europe is borders. In Europe, borders usually mean system changes, which mean time-consuming locomotive changes, paperwork, different rules. The EU's aim of synchronising approval processes, safety standards and systems, and subsidizing cross-border projects are all sorely needed.

Everything Exposed: Giving War A Chance

2005-05-02T09:35:00.000+02:00

The final element of the puzzle is in place. From the records of a British government meeting in July 2002, leaked to The Sunday Times, we learn:

“If the political context were right, people would support regime change,” said Blair. He added that the key issues were “whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work”.

That is, we now have proof that all the British diplomatic efforts were aimed at giving war a chance.

In other words, there never was a honest effort to find the truth about WMD. And beyond the original sin of starting an illegal war I also note: given that by July everything was set for war, the lack of post-war planning now looks an even graver crime of omission than before.

Tunnels

2005-04-28T22:10:00.000+02:00

End of February, the 26,455 m bore of the Hakkoda tunnel in Japan holed through. Today, the 34,577 m Lötschberg Base Tunnel in Switzerland was blasted through (image above). Any time soon[UPDATE: on 5 May, see this pdf in Spanish], the 28,377 m twin bore of the Guadarrama tunnel in Spain will be finished. When opened, these will be the 5th, 3rd and 4th longest rail tunnels in the world[1].

A good ocassion for some analysis of tunneling, with an eye on issues like high-speed rail & subways, the economics and other benefits of such projects, and (you guessed it) public vs. private projects.

Tunneling
There is a trend of cutting across whole mountain ranges: three more tunnels in excess of 50 km are in works, all of them rail, in the Alps and with a target date around 2015[2]; and there are half a dozen other very long tunnels readied[3]. Some new lines, like the quadruple-tracking of the Inn valley line in Austria and the Bologna-Florence high speed line, will run almost completely in shorter tunnels[4]. A multitude of smaller tunnels complements the picture of the subway-isation of railways.

What enabled this is technological development -above all, TBMs (tunnel boring machines). There are six manufacturers of name: market leader is the young German company Herrenknecht, then there is Wirth, another German company that swallowed French NFM; two Japanese companies: Kawasaki and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; then the firm of an Italo-Canadian, Lovat, and finally the US firm that made hard rock TBMs commercially successful half a century ago, Robbins.

The latter firm is interesting. First, it is currently employee-owned. Second, while it doesn't make the largest (up to 15 m in diameter) or most advanced (fitted for more challenging or changing rock types) TBMs, its products were efficient enough in favorable strata for the firm to proudly claim almost all TBM advance records[5].

Often cheaper than TBM is blasting (or, as in its modern form it is called, the new Austrian tunneling method (NATM)) - however, it also gave the top entries in modern tunnelings' Hall Of Shame[6].

High-speed rail & subways
Two main drivers/beneficiaries of this feverish tunneling. (Tough road tunnels, especially in Norway, undeniably also are.)

For high-speed rail, The Year will be 2007. While European projects suffered many delays over the last one-and-half decades, of the two dozen lines currently under construction, half are due to open in or close to that year[7]. Of these, only the French TGV Est is without major tunnels.

While nowadays in West Europe it is fashionable to hail light rail as the way of the future, its lesser capacity and speed (having to stop at crossroads) means that in larger cities, it can never replace, just supplement a subway system[8]. This has apparently dawned on some - Paris is extending again, Madrid, Barcelona, Athens and others continue to grow apace.

But most development takes place in East Asia. The Chinese concrete heads realised in the last few years that copying US car culture will only lead to permanent traffic gridlock in smog. Thus began the construction of subways at breakneck speed - Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou are to get systems on the scale of the currently largest, and a dozen other cities also build theirs. In Japan and the Tigers there is construction too (the Seoul - Tokyo duo are edging closer to the leading but sclerotic New York - London pair).

Staying within budget
What can drive up the costs of a major rail project with tunnels? Based on the many I reviewed:

Delays. IMO the main source of extra costs: means more spending on workers' pay, rent, interests, paperwork [repeated tenders etc.]; while there is inflation, and potential customers lost - yet there are countless examples of owners thinking it's cheaper to, say, pay $100 million for four years than pay $150 million for two years.
Cost cutting. Yeah. It's when you spare €10 million in preliminary geological research, and end up paying €200 million to master an unforeseen fault zone. Or rationalise away safety exits, which are then prescribed by a new EU directive and have to be added with extra planning costs.
Lack of coordination. When one part of the project has to grind to halt because another is not finished, when there are unfinished legal problems, when the goals are changing or there is wrangling about them at the top, when project leaders are incompetent. When feeder projects aren't pushed to be finished right along.
Corruption. Not really separate: the level of this one is correlated with that of the previous.
Prestige/special interests. Where a public transport project is no longer public: when a project is more shaped by a leaders' intent to show off or others' demands[9].
Finally, unforeseeable construction problems. Tough often used as the culprit, when so usually to hide some of the previous - I'd put them in last place. (A recent example.)

The Channel Tunnel is a good example for total organisatory chaos, with connected projects unfinished (Thatcher sabotaged the construction of high-speed rail to London, see below); as well as cost cutting (the costy fire in the early years wouldn't have happened with closed truck transporting wagons) and some delays. Costs of the South Korean high-speed line soared mainly due to delays, and also due to corruption (one aspect: inexperienced domestic construction firms) and messy coordination (one aspect: local squabbles to modify plans).

The tunnel-cracking substinence of the instable valley side on which the high speed line descends toward Barcelona, or the mess at the Sigaue-Tunnel (see [6] again), are examples of problems not unforeseeable but due to silly cost cutting, despite warnings. The line of the latter, Cologne-Frankfurt/M, also exhibits two expensive stations for rural towns, which see minimal passengers but cause too long a travel time - they got there on the insistence of prestige-minded PMs of crossed provinces. And with some US projects[10], I have to wonder whether even the planners had a transport line as goal.

As a contrast three examples of doing it right.

First, what Maggie Thatcher prevented, Major and Bliar supplemented[11]: the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL). This is a public-provate partnership (PPP) project, but with most of the money coming from the state(s), and high-speed rail engineering experience from French firms involved in TGV projects. The remaining, 39 km second section takes the line under the Thames in a shorter double tunnel, and crosses London in 19 km of double tunnels (whose boring finished a year ago). Also involving three stations and an adjacent new suburban railway tunnel, the project stays in its original budget of £3.3 billion ($6 billion) [tough PPP might have racked up the original budget].
Second, in Switzerland, the Bahn2000 project was a complex programme of upgrading key parts of the whole domestic network (plus more trains for a more frequent, better linked service). Its centerpiece was Switzerland's first high-speed stretch, 45 km long, with one third in tunnels. All upgrades and the enhanced timeplan are in service since last December, and Bahn2000 stayed far below budget: CHF 5.9 instead of 7.4 billion (€3.85 resp. 4.8 billion).
But the really impressive feat is Metrosur (in English see this), a 41 km ring subway for three southwestern suburbs of Madrid: planned, tendered, tunnels bored, fitted, track laid, trainsets bought, commissioned - all this from €1.143 billion and less than four years!

Overall economics & Other Benefits
Of course, building within budget is only one half of the economics - the other is getting back value once construction finished. What can go wrong here, beyond faulty projections: delays in connecting projects and pricing. The latter is another such thing that should be obvious, but those responsible repeat the same error just too often: they try to set prices just this side of intolerable, so travellers/transporters stay away, traffic and income rises only after cuts.

Furthermore, one shouldn't watch the quartal numbers of major (public) transport projects, their timescale is decades. Spain's first high-speed line, once decried as a useless prestige object for the Expo '92 in Sevilla, turned profitable[12] after five years (in 1997), that profit grew, first years' losses were covered just four years later. One can think in even longer terms. The original Lötschberg tunnel had major construction problems, the worst when the northern bore hit a giant aquifier (tunneling had to be re-started along a diverging non-straight route). Plummeting traffic (due to WWI breaking out just after opening) helped to make it an unmitigated financial disaster. Then. But today, it is the centerpiece of a busy freight corridor, run by a profitable railway company.

This leads us beyond economics. Most of the superlong tunnels aren't expected to be profitable in a narrow economic sense. Some, just like subsidized air traffic, is expected to spurn business. Others are meant to spare along-the-way inhabitants the noise or the inconvenience of being cut off, including non-human inhabitants. Reducing CO2 emissions by getting traffic off the roads or planes is another benefit.

The place where this is most apparent is the land of direct democracy, Switzerland. There, on a number of referendums on expensive transalpine and local rail network projects (whose centerpieces I dealt with), invariably the "Yes" vote won. What's more, last year both a populist proposal and the government's 'alternative' version on re-starting road & highway construction was voted down. And a month ago Swiss parliament defied the government that thought the Swiss programme to connect to the European high speed network is the right place for budget cuts, voting down the proposal of delaying half the projects. (Contrast this with governor Jeb Bush's success in turning Florida voters against high-speed rail with sustained lying and propaganda.)

Public vs. private
I think it is quite obvious: those who lament about the efficiency of the public sector with examples in this field (i.e. transport projects, specifically with major tunnels) are half-eye-blind. For whatever is the record of public-owned projects, the record of the private sector is an absolutely dismal one: there is one real example (Eurotunnel) and they blew it, their involvement in PPP schemes usually led to price hikes at the planning stage and projects going ahead only after sizable state contribution, and of course the default is that they falter or don't even try.

Worse: many of the recent examples of public-sector-owned major projects doing something wrong are, in fact, examples of politicians and administrators trying to copy en vogue private sector methods and ideas[13].

In my opinion the most important factor in making such a big, complex project a success is dedicated decisionmakers with oversight - be them the project managers, or state/province/city transport ministers, or a PM/major, or railway bosses.

For public-owned projects, the frequency of the right people in the right places tells something about the quality of democracy there (or, ehm, the level of the dictator's enlightedness...). But for private projects, there are intristic problems even beyond the capitalist-vs-public conflicts of interest: the big-profit-fast mindset, the tendency to sub(-sub-sub-sub-)contract, the preference - and hence training - of keeping everything simple (such big projects just aren't simple), and the tendency to jump on whatever meaningless-catchword-loaded bandwagon economists prefer at the time.

[1] Of the currently five road or rail tunnels above 20 km in the world, the only road tunnel - the 24,510 m Laerdal tunnel - is fourth, and three are Japanese.

[2] They are: the 57,051 m Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) in Switzerland, a third of which is already excavated, the 55 km Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT) between Italy and Austria, and the 53.1 km Mt. d'Ambin Base Tunnel between Italy and France (for the latter two preparatory works are in progress). The connecting lines of all three will have shorter, but still up to 15 km tunnels which roughly add up to another 50 km (of these, the BBT southern connection is covered elsewere than the main link).

[3] The Transpyrenean and the Trans-Gibraltar-Straits tunnels (both 42 km and in state of geological research), the 32.8 km Koralmtunnel in Austria (preparatory works), the 24,667 m Pajares Base Tunnel in Northern Spain (excavation started), and the 22,225 m Iiyama tunnel in Japan (blasted since 1998).

[4] Some 43 out of 55 km on the Inn valley line, 73 out of 78.5 km on the Bologna-Florence line. They aren't without precedents: tunnels make up 102 km of the 130 km central section on the recently earthquake-stricken Joetsu Shinkansen; and 44 out of 50 km on the as-yet-waste-of-money (winds up along an Alpine valley in Italy towards Austria, with no similar-speed and -capacity line to continue it beyond the border) Pontebbana in Italy, finished in 2001.

[5] Note tough: they are a bit not up to date regarding others' records - mostly for larger diameters.

[6] The worst of the worst is the Hallandsås tunnel in Sweden: first bored with TBMs too heavy, then came blasting - to stabilize soil, a chemical was injected into the soil, which poisoned cows grazing above... Now it is finished with TBMs. Another is the Siegaue-Tunnel on the Cologne-Frankfurt/M high speed line in Germany, which runs under a city, and had to be stopped three times, having caused damage to buildings and a cementery.

[7] Near-complete list: in Spain, (1) the Madrid-Valladolid line (the Guadarrama tunnel is on it), (2) the Galician corridor, (3) the Córdoba-Málaga line and (4) the final section into Barcelona; (5) the Milano-Bologna and (6) Bologna-Florence lines in Italy, (7) the TGV Est in France, (8) the Channel Tunnel Rail Link section 2 to London, (9) the Liège-German border and (10) Antwerp-Netherlands (HSL Zuid) sections in Belgium/Netherlands; (11) the Ingolstadt-Nuremburg line in Germany, and (12) Botniabanan in Northern Sweden. High-speed trains will also use the above mentioned Lötschberg Base and Inn valley lines.

[8] But for cities of a few hundred thousand, light rail is good enough. Especially if trams are enabled to continue beyond city borders on railway tracks, maybe deviating again on light rail tracks in agglomeration towns (the highly successful "Karlsruhe model").

[9] I note I don't consider environmental issues a 'special' interest, and if local residents protest that is often not a case of NIMBY but planners planning above others' heads without asking them. I more think of stuff like routes serving a small rich area or avoiding a rich man's estate.

[10] These two made me shake my head: (1) The Boston's North-South Rail Link, linking two railway terminals with a 1 mile tunnel, using in part tunnels already built along with that road-building disaster, the $15 billion Big Dig, is tagged to cost $8.7 billion. That's 40% more than the entire Channel Tunnel Rail link, despite the latter involving ten-times-longer, all-new under-city tunnels, fitted for high speed. (2) The River LINE: an existing 34-mile line merely brought in shape and diesel multiple units purchased to run on them, with $1.1 billion spent. No tunnel involved, but just too absurd: in Europe we'd build this much from at most €100 million [a 17 km/€14.6 million German example], while a complex upgrade into an electrified-double-tracked, half as long suburban line with under- and overpasses, near Frankfurt/M, was done from just €309 million.

[11] This shall not be taken as an implication that Bliar deserves praise: the predictable (and predicted) disasters his government created with rail privatisation and the West Coast Mainline upgrade, plus the PPP idiocy with the London Underground make his record extremely negative - even without mentioning his broken pledges on road construction.

[12] By profitable I mean the operating surplus paying back debt and still more remaining; the operating profit - income from tickets minus operating expenses - is usually wildly positive for high-speed rail.

[13] A similar poke-in-the-eye (of neoliberal fundies) is to call privatisation the Least Efficient Activity of the State.

Just by having a thought, he convinced himself that it was true

2005-04-28T11:40:00.000+02:00

That's how Whatever It Is, I'm Against It described the following nugget from Rumsfeld:

I’m going to speculate here that a non-trivial portion of his finances and his recruits come from outside the country. And they undoubtedly come through Syria, and they come through Iran, probably, and through other countries

That politicians do this is nothing special. But that this is the exact same way the mainstream media nowadays acquires the facts for its 'fact-checking' is more serious matter.

Takeoff

2005-04-27T12:26:00.000+02:00

Of Liars, Removals & Replacements

2005-04-27T09:59:00.000+02:00

Via Juan Cole, I learn that by now 50% of Americans think the Bush admin lied on Iraqi WMD, possibly related to the slowly dripping info from the CIA weapons-hunting team led by Duelfer - the latest juicy bit being the deconstruction of the WMDs-smuggled-to-Syria myth (of course, still not without weasen word 'caveats'). Meanwhile, I'm catching this story a bit late, the more people point to a US origin of the forged Niger documents[*], but Vincent Cannistaro suggests it was the neocons themselves, not the CIA[+]. Meanwhile in Britain, the infamous legal advice on the war was leaked, it contained 'caveats' that nicely destroyed the legality of the war. (The link is to a superb analysis by Chicken Yoghurt; The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor has more.)

Unfortunately, the next line of rhetorical defense still has an effect on many (involving even opponents of the war): to insist that "removing" Saddam was a good thing. So I feel like exposing this trick again.

First, those who claim Saddam is the issue are the last perpetrators of Saddam's personality cult.

Do you see him as a cartoon villain, as larger-than-life as he wanted to be seen? Do you care more about the fate of a single individual than the millions of others affected by the war? The pro-war spinners exploit the fact that this single individual has a name and a face known to the public, versus the faceless masses.

Next, to the weasel word: there is no such thing as "removing" a regime. What an intervention achieves is replacing a regime - and the value of deposing a dictator should never be judged without the other half of the equation, should always be seen in the light of what came after.

In this case, a weakened and contained absolutist dictature was replaced by an anarchy of reckless foreign occupation forces that beyond doing destruction with arms and environmental pollution also destroyed public services by neglect and the economy by 'reconstruction', even more reckless mercenaries, scheming clerics and occupation-approved exile political parties whom the occupiers let gain nominal power in a thoroughly corrupted political process, Saddam's henchmen continuing the torture and police brutality but now in the occupier-organised forces, reckless resistance fighters and terrorists, uncontrolled criminals, uncontrolled tribal and party militias, tribesmen pursuing vendettas, and religious male chauvinists from all factions who made the majority - women - captives in their homes again.

So the chief problem with the Iraq war is that it managed to replace Saddam's regime with something even worse - not that the war's perpetrators lied about their motives. (On the other hand, their recklessness in dealing with the facts pretty much foretold their recklessness with Iraqi lives and fates, so the defense of the bandwagon-hopping liberal interventionists - from John Kerry to recently deservedly trashed NYT columnist Thomas Friedman -, that the war was right but fought the wrong way, is still hogwash.)

P.S.: read This Is Our Guernica, Dahr Jamail's and Jonathan Steele's article on Falluja.

[*] To recap: Josh Marshall tracked it to Italian intelligence, while a German documentary tracked it to disgruntled CIA employees who wanted to 'burn' their neocon rivals in the Pentagon with an obvious fake, an operation that backfired.

[+] BTW, kudos for GNN for remembering that the German handlers of 'Curveball', the Chalabi-related perpetrator of the infamous mobile bioweapons lab story, already warned the DIA and the CIA upon informing them that 'Curveball' is untrustworthy (something the US mainstream media always forgets to mention - in line with the "they too believed Iraq had WMD" spin).

Pope Benedict XVI

2005-04-21T14:51:00.000+02:00

(Stolen from and older edit of wikipedia, via A Fistful Of Euros)

UPDATE: A tangentially fitting quote from Philip Challinor:

F.D.,abbr. Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith. This title was conferred upon King Henry VIII of England for services rendered to the Catholic Church - which, oddly enough, did not include his leaving it. When he did eventually leave it, in order to form his own Church with himself as pope and England's coffers, rather than the Vatican's, as God, Henry retained the title. Consequently, with the sense of honour which lesser nations have come to expect of the British, all subsequent English monarchs since Henry have been both head of the Church of England and Defender of the Catholic faith. There is nothing an Englishman hates more than a hypocrite.

Puppets On A Long Leash

2005-04-21T00:42:00.000+02:00

The tragedy for many of the new Iraqi "transitional"[*] parliament members elected (or not) in the sham elections[+] this January is to discover how much the US is still in charge, to discover that they are puppets on a long leash.

Of course, the discovery usually comes when they feel it on their own skin, rather than see it done in policy matters.

It is getting the usual treatment at the entry of ther Green Zone that upsets our shiny new MPs. US soldiers who treat any raghead as a raghead constitute a hearts-and-minds operation reminding me of Christian tales - about Satan and his little sadistic games with people who sold their souls. This story is almost comical:

“When I told the translator with the soldier that I was a member of the national assembly, he answered: To hell with you and the national assembly,” Sheikh told his colleagues.
“I got really upset, so I got down from my vehicle to confront him and at that moment a US soldier came over and grabbed my neck and choked me for a minute or so.” ...

He said he decided to get out of line and come back later when it was less crowded, but that as he began to pull out, a US soldier came over and kicked his car. “I showed him my badge, but he grabbed it from my hand and tossed it in my face,” said the bearded Sheikh. “When I got out of my car, the soldier twisted my arm.”

[*] Remember, this is only the body that is supposed to draft a constitution and name a transitional government until the 'real' elections come.

[+] To recap: under occupation, no international oversight, yet even in the little that comes out massive irregularities reported, widespread pressure on voters reported; most contesters unknown (only numbers), most contesters without media access, choice thwarthed within Shi'a Arab and Kurdish communities by multy-party lists with pre-set quotas, clear occupation opponents arrested and their offices rampaged by US army; election rules designed by the Bremer admin and the parties in the US-selected Governing Council, elected bodies bound by further rules of the same, while the US retains military control and indirect control of ministeries through delegated 'experts', and so on...

Red Latin America

2005-04-20T22:21:00.000+02:00

From what I know, the present turmoil in Ecuador heralds the return of a Chavez fan, so prepare for WaPo/NYT/etc. articles about more hidden evil Venezuelan meddling (and more articles about triumphs of democracy in the progressive blogosphere).

Said turmoil in Ecuador just appears to have reached its conclusion: Congress deposed President Guitérrez and made his Vice his preliminary successor.

Guitérrez entered the political arena five years ago, when instead of dispersing a leftist protest by indios as ordered, he sided with the protesters and helped make it a coup - a short-lived one, with only the then-vice-President benefitting. But using his fast-earned populist credentials, not three years later he was elected President - only to instantly break his promises and go on with conservative economic policies etc.. His undoing began with a tactical alliance: when his party, the neolib party of the billionaire whom he beat in the elections (Alvaro Noboa), and the populist party of a then self-exiled ex-President (Bucaram) teamed up to tramp on the Constitution and depose the Supreme Court (opposed chiefly, choose your sides, by a rabid right-wing party). Guitérrez's undoing, for the allies had different things in mind: when Guitérrez in turn 'fired' this new Supreme Court, the real reason behind the official one (street protests against) was surely their clearing the ex-President from corruption charges. (Note tough, Bucaram was removed eight years ago by the then-Congress under the charge of being crazy!).

Bucaram said on his way back: "I come to Ecuador to copy Chavez's style with a great Bolivarian revolution". (But before you clasp your hands, remember that his "crazyness" meant f.e. renting his own brothel on state funds, and that he basically emptied the Presidential Palace upon leaving, stuff worth a few dozen millions of dollars.)

Meanwhile in Mexico:

This protest of at least 300,000, of course ignored or played down by most of the Western media, was against the machinations meant to prevent Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador from running for Presidency (something the right-wing incumbents' and the nominally centre-left old establishment party joined forces in, with heavy encouragement from across the Northern border). Good commentary at Blood & Treasure.

The above mentioned playing down involved the choice of photos if present: close-ups of the major and his entourage in an absurd number of varieties. I found just two photos showing the mass from above, - and the wider one, from Reuters, just as thumbnail. The one I used is from the NYT. (If someone has a link to a free copy of the Reuters image I'd be thankful...)

The Internal Contradiction Of Modern Consumerism

2005-04-10T23:17:00.000+02:00

We are celebrated as individuals precisely at the moment when we are most subsumed into the morality of advertising, most integrated into capitalist production and consumption.

A quote from Lenin's Tomb's latest philosphical rant, one about how the Sixties counterculture directly led to today's apolitical consumerism and hyper-capitalism.

Downfall

2005-04-10T21:42:00.000+02:00

From a story at Jews Sans Frontieres, I see there has been a bizzarre discussion in the British Guardian's letters about the new German film Der Untergang (Downfall), but one that parallels some of my own thoughts raised by the film (I saw it last week).

The film recounts the last week in the life of Hitler, primarily based on a recent long taped interview of Traudl Junge, one of his secretaries, with other eyewitness accounts weaved in. Somehow both debating sides see the film as a right-wing nationalist account, one side even assumes that the film's thesis was "Germans were also victims". Well I got the opposite impression: maybe it was never seeing Germans suffering in WWII war movies that got the debatees focused on this part only and ignore the real message(s).

For me, who read excerpts from the transcripted-to-book version of the secretary's interview in the German press (Der Spiegel), and other articles on the finale of the Nazi regime, most events in the film weren't news - what captured me most was the excerpt from the taped Junge interview at the end of the film.

In the Adenauer era, West Germany's first decade-and-half, the Past was meant to be left behind after the Nuremburg trials: the new conservative elite didn't want a serious confrontation with history, especially not at the courts, nor did it want to kick out ex-nazis from top jobs. The bad-apples theory of West German ordinarism (which needed the '68-ers for a smashing) needed a national mythology with new idols: one where the "good" and patriotic German soldier is contrasted with the bad SS, and where a few Germans who resisted got lots of official worship, in representation for the supposedly all-innocent German masses (e.g.: see, "we" resisted!).

One of these real but abused group of heroes was the clique of army officers around Count von Stauffenberg who attempted to assassinate Hitler; another the White Rose group of students in Munich, who tried to agitate against the regime and organise resistance, but were arrested and executed, including the later most idolised, Sophie Scholl.

Even as someone who only lived in West Germany in its last few years (and continued to follow the political life after leaving), whenever I see von Stauffenberg or Sophie Scholl remembered, I have the faint feeling of self-absolution at work.

Now, one thing the film really is is a study of the various ways people deny reality, and go along with Hiter's madness one way or the other. And when the real secretary speaks at the end of the film, she speaks about how she felt guiltless even after the war, after learning of Auschwitz and the full scale of the crimes, thinking naivety and cluelessness is an excuse - until one day, she walked by a memorial stone for Sophie Scholl. She read the text, and realised Sophie was her age - and was arrested just when Traudl got her job with Hitler. Then she realised she could have known the truth if she had wanted, if she had looked for it, if she had thought about it.

So for some a real heroine was breaking the hypocrisy, rather than serving as means for it.

Some Gays In Politics

2005-04-10T19:20:00.000+02:00

Arthur Finkelstein, a senior campaign consultant for a long line of US Republican and Israeli Likud candidates, used Massachusetts' liberal laws to marry his male partner of 40 years - citing financial benefits as motivation.

Patrick Guerriero, President of the Log Cabin Republicans, co-signed a call for Social Security 'reform' with the President of USA Next, the far-right group whose earlier effort in this campaign was a homophobic slur against the American Association of Retired Persons, using a photo of a gay couple kissing just after marrying.

Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, the gay prostitute and US far-right propagandist foot-soldier posing as reporter, played blogger in a ridiculous conference about who is a journalist, after which a guy in the audience posed the hard question: whom in the White House did he sleep with to get his pass to press conferences? (The rumour is spokesman Scott McClellan - relatively small fish.)

Nichi Vendola, who was the united Left's candidate for President of Puglia province in Italy's regional elections last week, won with a hundred thousand more votes than the party lists of the Left (for the regional assembly) combined - even tough he was both gay and a communist.

Of course there is no general truth about gays emerging here, except if the triviality that members of persecuted minorities can have the same faults and virtues as the rest is news for someone.

However, these examples serve to highlight two separate truths in a sharpened way. One is that the most basic and essential feature of conservativism is: hypocrisy[*].

The other is that centre-left attempts to accomodate to perceived "centrist"/right-wing views, fearing that the Left would seem too extreme for a majority of voters is not realism, but defeatism and appeasement.

[*] I like to put it this way:
A conservative is one who sells the misdevelopments of yesterday as solutions for tomorrow.
What conservatives want to conserve is the illusion of a golden age, so that they can ignore all the problems hidden behind the facades.
The only thing conservative politicians want to conserve is their power - secured and expanded by all means.
The only moral conservative politicians follow: forgive the sins of fellow conservatives.

Latin America: Playground For US Imperialism Again

2005-04-10T17:59:00.000+02:00

Recently released documents disprove Condi Rice: the Bush admin had its hands in the 2002 coup against democratically elected (and multiple times reinforced) Venezuelan President Chavez.

In Colombia, where US soldiers participate in a dirty war against peasants and guerillas and drug cartells which for some reason is called a War On Drugs, some of these soldiers were found to be trafficking drugs themselves. In line with the Iraqi meaning of sovereignity, these guys will go in trial in the USA.

The Bush admin also funds a campaign (supported by the reliably pro-establishment Washington Post and New York Times - if it's bibartisan, it must be right...) against the Sandinistas in the upcoming Nicaraguan elections. (This is a good place to endorse The Jaguar Smile, Salman Rushdie's account of his visit to the country when Daniel Ortega was elected President.)

Two weeks ago the USA resumed military aid to Guatemala, citing improvements by new centre-left President(-against-US-wishes) Berger, but those improvements were cosmetic so far - so the help goes to a quasi-independent army still filled with perpetrators of some of the most cruel war crimes of the second half of the last century. (And thus may undermine Berger's presidency too; altough centre-left conflict-aversion could achieve that anyway.)

And in Mexico, the Bush admin ecouraged/pressured President Fox et al in a thinly veiled attempt at blocking the most popular, left-wing candidate in the upcoming Presidential elections: removing Mexico City major Obrador's immunity so that a trial can go forward against him - a trial about allegedly ignoring court orders when constructing an access road through alleged private property to a hospital... I repeat, what a heinous crime, an access road to a hospital...

"Thousands protest..."

2005-04-10T16:25:00.000+02:00

Baghdad, Firdous Square, 09.04.2003, anti-Saddam's-statue/pro-US crowds:

Baghdad, Firdous Square, 09.04.2005, anti-Saddam/Bush/Bliar crowds:

With hat tips to Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. The number Juan Cole quotes for the above is up to 300 of those "thousands", and he comments what I said last August: Sadr is winning. (On the other hand, Muqtada has no sovereignity over the Sadrist movement: for example, recent troubles in Basra were linked to the Fadila Party, which is run by a rival claimant to his father's heritage.)

UPDATE: I see Bella Ciao (who have the Budapest peace-sign protest in their banner at top: third from right) had the same comparison in mind. Check the photos there, you'll see the crowd even filled a long street, not just the place.

We'll Apologise When...

2005-04-07T15:03:00.000+02:00

Quoted from a Lenin's Tomb report of a Respect[*] townhall meeting, Tariq Ali recounted an anecdote al Jazeera's chief told him:

Al Jazeera had got footage of a US tank firing at a car filled with Iraqi civilians. It was able to do so because it has eighteen reporting teams working in Iraq, and naturally enough, it broadcast the footage. The tank firing shells, the shells hitting the car. Man, woman, children in back all disappear into a conflagration. Within hours of having shown this, the US military commander in Qatar had arrived in a car with bodyguards and backed by a row of military vehicles. He stormed into the director's office and said "you owe us an apology for showing that, you have placed our troops in danger!" So, if a news channel broadcasts evidence of US atrocities, it isn't America who should apologise, but... The director of Al Jazeera, to his credit, said he couldn't apologise for showing the news, but in fact the US army owed Al Jazeera an apology. For blowing up its headquarters in Afghanistan, and for killing its chief correspondent in Baghdad. "When you make a public apology for that, we can talk".

[*] For those not accustomed to British politics: Respect is a new British radical left/antiwar party.

On Recent Poll Numbers

2005-04-07T13:03:00.000+02:00

In Italy, 13 of the 20 regions held elections last weekend. The right-wing coalition behind PM Berlusconi controlled eight of these, but lost all but two.

Now if we look at the detailed election results (courtesy of La Repubblica), the picture is somewhat less rosy: the united Left won over one region (Liguria) only narrowly, three (Piemont, Lazio, Puglia) with a minority of the votes cast (but the Right was split or composed of too many small parties in the present elections). In these four, victory was thanks to the communists entering the alliance (they were in it last time in 2000, and plan to stay in next's year's national elections, unlike in those of 2001 - something Lenin's Tomb lambasts them for).

While the Left dominates Umbria (63.4% for all leftist lists, including a record 9.2% for communists) and Toscana (a record 65.0% for all leftist lists, including 8.2% for the exceptionally outside-the-coalition communists), the lack of pull just in the more industrialised North and Center may highlight the Centre-Left's departure from its base.

If Prodi takes over from Berlusconi next year, his immediate job should be a new media law, undoing the laws introduced in the last four years for Berlusconi's protection, and setting up a task force to destroy his likely next competitor Fini (the slimeball post-fascist AN leader, who gained a statesmanlike aura as foreign minister). But given the precedents, fat chance.

In the USA, there is much hype about Bush's approval rating sinking to the lowest for a re-elected president two months after re-inauguration (Juan Cole is making much of it for example). But that low is still 43-49%, i.e. the solid base that votes like zombies isn't broken, and if you check Bush's favorability ratings, the further 10-15% who may be put off with something now and then but forget about it after a few weeks is also there. (In fact, Juan Cole refers to the before-last Gallup poll; the newest has Bush's approval up 3 points since.)

In Britain, Labour's lead melted away: in the last polls, Labour is in the range 34-37%, the Tories 33-39%, the nausea-empowered LibDems 19-21% (averages: 36.0%, 35.4%, 20.6%); the rest aren't tracked. Is there is hope that Labour lead would shrink down to the size of the remaining Old Left among the MPs? Phil Hunt @ Calabamat Journal not only hopes (he's LibDem) but argues otherwise: election districts favour Labour. Now, maybe Respect & co can do something about that.

Brave New Nineteen Eighty-Four

2005-04-07T09:36:00.000+02:00

I'm sometimes so happy to have some blogs on my blogroll.

For example, Under The Same Sun, written by a leftie whose care for the Third World involved actual work there (whom earlier praised for her take on outsourcing, similar to mine), departed from the usual "hypocritical religious extremists vs. science and the husband who first tried everything" B/W script, and dug deeper into the Schiavo case, finding more issues of general importance.

Then there is Billmon, somewhere at the border of the US centre-left, who shared many mainstream-ish assumptions (was also unenthusiastically pro-Kerry) but also had independent thought. Last summer he suddenly stopped posting, then returned with posts containing only quotes. He recently explained what happened:

What happened, roughly, is this: Last summer I got off a boat after a week [...] the real trip wire was coming out of radio silence and finding both the blogosphere and what we had then not yet learned to call the “MSM” immersed to the tops of their pointy little heads in the Swift Boat Veterans for Lies campaign – last year’s version of the vegetative patient story; the patient, in that particular case, being American democracy.

Now this was only a few weeks after I had concluded, rather rashly, that it would be virtually impossible for the Rove machine to pump its usual tanker load of slime all over John Kerry’s war record, based simply on the word of a brigade of Jane Fonda haters led by a Nixon-era retread who has made destroying Kerry his lifelong personal ambition. Surely, I argued, such an absurd ploy wouldn’t get beyond the usual right-wing echo chamber pots – and would quickly be dumped in the same sewer of right-wing delusions that holds the murdered corpse of Vince Foster.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . oh my yes. It is amusing to recall what a naive idealist I was back then. What I hadn’t learned was that the eyes of brain-dead people, like your average MSM journalist, will still track the movement of shiny objects when they are waved in front of their faces. Involuntary reflexes. Lower brain stem activity. The Rovians understood this perfectly well, even if I didn’t. So it didn’t take them long to organize a full-scale chorus of media vegetables, all making vaguely articulate grunts and other mouth noises about Cambodia, the Christmas of 1968, purple hearts, after-action reports, etc.

And that’s when it hit me – as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I’d been shot in the forehead with a diamond – that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.

This rhymes with some of my more pessimistic thoughts. I believe progressives of different couleurs (especially liberals and socialists) often underestimate the power of propaganda, versus people's ability to recognise and enforce their own best interests.

I mean, first, some don't realise their own vulnerability. Truth is often buried under multiple layers of lies from different sources, with differing agendas - for example in the Iraq mess it is below the pre-Gulf-War Reagan & Bush I admin's, the post-war Bush admin's, the Clinton admin's, and the Bush II and Bliar admin's multiple pre- and post-invasion neo-con and StateDep etc. versions; depates on energy policy are tainted by long-running, often-opposed campaigns by the oil, coal and nuclear industries; and even among stark opponents of capitalism; and just how twisted is the usage of economic terms like productivity, GDP and its growth, etc. (and how intended that is) is lost even on many opponents of capitalism. Second, some others who did recognise and overcame their own vulnerability, deceive themselves about others' chances (chances, not ability) to come clean. There is the frequently quoted but false more that you can't deny reality forever. (You can, all you need is to replace worn-out lies with new ones.)

As referred to in my very first post already, I came to see the American Empire (its core, dominions, and also both its geographical and mental sphere of influence) as an emerging marriage of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. A postmodern dystopia where seduction by and addiction to the superficial compete (and mix) with totalitarian control and repression and war psychosis as the means of induced self-deception.

Via histologion (another blog I'm so happy about having enrolled), I found an article [pdf] by Varda Burstyn, who had similar thoughts, and points to a lot of little-noticed developments that can further enhance this, in the author's words, Janus-faced dystopia. Some of the more phantastic-sounding stuff in both visions is already with us - and so are stuff emerging from their fusion. Have you heard about BrightHouse and CEO COM LINK? Read about what the Carlyle Goup is up to recently? Heard of ICT and militainment? Of the NanoSoldier Institute?

Burstyn's analysis also goes where neither of the two visionaries have gone, and for that matter many idealists haven't gone, beyond human society: it deals with environmental destruction.

And ends with a glimmer of hope.

UPDATE 10/04: Billmon, linking to me and histologion, also comments on Varda Burstyn's article; and I'll shamelessly put up his photoshopped illustration:

Those Scary Female Rulers In Patriarchal Societies

2005-04-06T09:27:00.000+02:00

After JPII's death, the Blogosphere compensated for all the media's pious saturation coverage by taking out the dirty laundry of the Papacy - for example jamie @ Blood & Treasure has quotes on the cutthroat antics of 9th-10th -century Papacy.

That era is often called the 'pornocracy', for most historians (even liberals) traditionally lay the blame at the feet of a few influential women: Theodora, the wife of a Roman patrician, and her daughter Marozia, who stand accused of sexual relations with Popes, of installing their lovers and sons as Popes, and of poisoning other Popes who stood in their way.

Now what got me thinking is not the obvious, that history was written by their enemies and unfounded accusations turned into fact, but some other things. First, there was nothing unusual about their attempts to control the Papacy (not to speak of sexual exploits) - other aristocrats of the time did the same (including the husbands of said women), some of them with much stronger effect.

The best example is Alberic II, Marozia's second son, who saw his chances for becoming King of Italy slipping when her mother married for a third time (to Hugh of Provence). So he fired up a bunch of Roman knights, with agitation about the shame of being ruled by a woman (Marozia again), stormed the palace, and imprisoned his family. He went on to use the next four Popes as mere signers of his own rulings, with his own elder half-brother (installed under Marozia) the first among them, and his son also became a scandalous Pope.

So in the memory of patriarchal societies, strong women transform into the scapegoats for decadence existing anyway. And there is a wider issue buried here. Even most strong women didn't last long enough in patriarchal societies to leave their mark on history - and lasting long enoughmakes a difference: if someone did, his/her vendettas and palace coups are remembered as wise moves to solidify power, if not, as excesses of cruelty.

When I read up on Roman emperors, what struck me was that the popular villains - Nero, Caracalla & co - were not at all worse than most of the praised ones, in fact much less bloodier: they generally fought less wars, but historians recorded levels of cruelty from the viewpoint of the capital's aristocracy. Which was decimated by other Caesars too, but not many lived to tell of it.

Srgena Shooting Complications

2005-03-29T16:34:00.000+02:00

When they put up photos of the shot-at car only showing its left side from front, that was fishy enough - considering that the 'checkpoint' was on the side (their side) of the road.

Now from this article, via histologion, I learn the acar was actually (also?) shot at from behind. The bullet hurting Srgena most came from behind. This explains why the driver as the only one lightly hurt. While making the clueless GIs shooting from panic theory less likely. Also, this was a VIP route, not the route used by ordinary people to the airport.

Communist Capitalists

2005-03-29T15:07:00.000+02:00

In the Real Existing Socialism[*] this side of the Cold War, the type of economy was state capitalism.

The means of production weren't owned by the people or their elected government, but the party elite.

Personally I received this eye-opener from Gásár Miklós Tamás, a Hungarian publicist-philosopher who made through a more extreme version of my own ideological journey. A liberal dissident in the eighties, in the early nineties a self-described small-r republican (roughly = libertarian), taught at a US university, got his doubts seeing Real Existing Capitalism there, boiling over upon his return to see the side effects of the march of freedom for markets here, going 'far'-left and greeting the globalisation-critical movement.

The above framing of Real Existing Socialism should also help Westerners (of any ideological stripe) to better understand what's going on since 1989 in my region. To a large part, privatisation here resulted in former factory heads and other party cadre turning owners. While the picture of post-communist Left vs. post-dissident Liberals and Right would be wrong - all parties have their share of former cadre, and many if not most leading members of the Right weren't exactly active members of the opposition -, one can say that 'centre-Left' parties are dominated by former cadres. And they are also the constituency they serve - and if you consider what I wrote previously, you'll see why they are largely pro-business.

This is also why, tough that may not be well known outside my region[+], here decrying elites is a rhetorical weapon mostly utilised by the Right.

Of course, the best example of communist capitalists is in China. Where the Party razes workers' homes to make way for gated communities. Blood & Treasure, always with an eye on China, has a good post on this.

[*] To the uninitiated: this was an actual propaganda term of the regimes, which - at least in Hungary and Germany - became catchphrases with a mocking undertone in popular usage.

[+] For example the libertarian loon posting as 'Hayward' in the comments @ Lenin's Tomb.

Another Revolution

2005-03-24T23:51:00.000+01:00

Kyrgyzstan, the country whose just dumped leader a decade ago announced his intent to create the Switzerland of Central Asia, went through a revolution peaking today.

This time, without apparent Western involvement[*]. There were violent protests in the southern towns five years ago and a few years later too, tapping serious popular discontent. However, judging from the list of opposition leaders, without exception former cadres sidelined by now deposed President Akayev, the actual power change is more of a palace coup than an elite replacement.

I wonder when, on a very basic machiavellian level, Putin & remaining cohorts will realise that old-style quasi-dictatures are - well - just too old in comparison with the new democratures. Too instable and too obviously non-democratic.

[*] Tough the vita of the ex-foreign-minister in the link suggests the possibility.

What's Up With India?

2005-03-24T17:14:00.000+01:00

The previous government of India, led by Hindu nationalists from higher castes, had the idea of declaring India no longer a developing, but a developed nation - because of some booming industries like the software industry in Bangalore. From this they also followed that India no longer needs any foreign help.

Nevermind that whatever improvements a hundred million Indians enjoyed, 90% of India is still living in the same shit (literally). (My sister toured around Northern India just last month, her photos attest to that.)

Then came the Congress party election victory, where the spin was that the rural people had enough of the BJP's delusions. But they continue just where their predecessors quit. (Complete with the same idiocy about foreign help, refused after the Tsunami.)

The latest and worst idiocy is that in order to get into the WTO, the government is willing to end the production of generic drugs (f.e. against AIDS), pleasing the Western multinationals. Under The Same Sun and histologion have the story.

Who Was Jeff Gannon's Customer In The White House?

2005-03-24T16:40:00.000+01:00

Come on, how else did he get his press pass?

Rigorous Intention aims high. (Via Blood & Treasure)

EU Constitution vs. The Directive From Hell

2005-03-24T16:07:00.000+01:00

The worst of the neoliberal schemes European governments pursue in the mantle of the EU, the services-liberalising Bolkestein Directive, became a threat to the EU project: despite all major parties' endorsement, a slight majority of the French public opinion turned against voting "Oui" on the EU constitution.

To head off the shipwreck, the recent meeting of the EU Council decided to re-work the directive. I don't expect more than cosmetic changes, tough.

Should the EU Constitution be rejected by an anti-neoliberal, pro-social French majority, rather than an anti-EU, pro-"sovereignity" British majority, that could actually have positive effects: a re-drafting of the Constitution with more weight on social matters. (I'd be happy with strenghtening the parts on environment too, tough I don't see that happening due to a French "Non".)

On the other hand. The weights in the Constitution, the near-unanimous support of states behind the Bolkestein Directive on services, and the software patents directive (actually another work of Bolkestein; held up only by vetoes of single states until the Luxemburg Presidency, there goes my respect for PM Juncker, pushed it through) shows the unfortunate fact that pro-business dogmatism is firmly implanted in the heads of nearly all the continent's major parties. So until that is changed[*], I will expect neither a much better Constitution, nor a better conduct of national governments with or without a Constitution of whatever nature possible at this time. (And, of course, without an EU, we would have zero common limiting regulation where we now have minimal.)

Hence, the neoliberal odour around the Constitution doesn't have much practical importance to me - the small increase in the European Parliament's powers, the small advance towards a common foreign policy and the big advance towards a fairer weighting of countries (after Chirac messed it all up in Nizza - which only got him the memorable Spanish-Polish blockade duo a year and half ago) matter more.

But everything possible should be done to defeat the Bolkestein Directive.

BTW, for those readers speaking German, taz has some recent good articles on the issue.

[*] For the Left, the EU should be something to take over, not something to oppose as f.e. many in Sweden think. The Social Democrats wasted their time in the nineties when they dominated the EU-15, an example not to repeat.

Can't Do Body Counts

2005-03-24T14:04:00.000+01:00

85 insurgents killed by Iraqi forces becomes 85 killed by Iraqi forces with US support becomes 85 killed in US air strike becomes 11 killed in US air strike.

Read here.

Yesterday In Budapest

2005-03-21T09:59:00.000+01:00

Looming US Financial Crisis Part XLVIII

2005-03-20T01:02:00.000+01:00

I'll extend this post with some more analysis later; for now, I link directly to the 2004 4th Quartal/full year US International Transactions table[M$ Excel], and point out the bottomline: it's line 70, "Statistical discrepancy (sum of above items with sign reversed)". Why the sign has to be reversed (and not put as the very last line) I don't know, the issue is: for four consecutive quartals now (i.e. all of 2004), net capital pouring into the USA and smaller items failed to balance the net outpouring of money paid for goods (i.e. the trade deficit).

This item, which as yet lacks a handy name, is the deficit that really can put pressure on currencies and economies (rather than at times dominant subtotals like the over-hyped trade deficit).

War For Oil

2005-03-18T10:27:00.000+01:00

The outbreak of modern wars are the work of many people, each with his/her own agenda.

So on one hand, trying to identify a single motivation for a war is a wasted effort, while on the other, naming a second motivation (or some actions not following from the first) is no negation of the first.

In Iraq: oil, strategic military position for further wars, popularity, a power demonstration, Israel's security and spreading phony democracy were all in the cards. In various people's minds. For example, as I argued, the two neocons Richard Perle (who co-authored Clean Break) and Paul Wolfowitz (the Combman nominated for President of the World Bank[*]) may had have rather different outcomes in mind (the former not minding a disintegration into fiefdoms).

Even on the issue of Iraqi oil, there were multiple motivations. Oil execs wanted to make money and their friends in government wanted campaign contributions (if the State spends more in the process is irrelevant - it's the taxpayers who lose not them), others wanted to bust OPEC, still others wanted to secure control of oil supplies ahead of Peak Oil.

As it now becomes clear, the above multiple motivations even led to conflicts. As a Greg Palast report for BBC revealed,

the first secret plans (in 2001, before 9/11) aimed for indirect control after a coup (keeping oil state-owned and controlling it through the puppet government),
pushed out by the neocon plan of selling off the oil business (to kill OPEC quotas with unlimited production), which is acknowledged by some as a big motivation for the Iraqi resistance,
again stalled by oil industry people during the first months of the occupation, who also feared an outcome in which US companies are barred from privatisation and new Iraqi companies leave them out from trading, and didn't want to bust OPEC as high crude oil prices are good for their profits, too.

[*] I looked up vote shares in the IBRD and its Board Of Exececutive Directors (the latter votes on President) - USA 16.39%, Japan 7.86% and UK 4.30% are certainly on the Yes side (Jack Straw already gave his glowing recommendation), I guess Italy for the block it heads (3.50%) too, as well as, ridiculously, Kuwait for the Middle East block (2.91%), that's 34.96% so far. So some bribing & blackmailing is needed to get Wolfie in. (The Netherlands with its group is likely; if I add India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland with its group, it'd do it: 51.42%.)

Protect The Minority of The Opulent Against The Majority

2005-03-11T21:49:00.000+01:00

Who said this?

‘In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body.’

Well?

It was US Founding Father James Madison. At Lenin's Tomb, commenter David Traynier quoted it from: Jonathan Elliot, ed., ‘The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 1787’ Philadelphia: Lippincott, 2nd edition, (1937[1836]), p. 450

This quote is towards the beginning of a longer multi-comment essay on business's use of propaganda to ensure its interests, with a historical scope, and many facts new to me - like the NAM campaign in the USA of the thirties-forties.

Two Factoids On Lebanon

2005-03-11T10:53:00.000+01:00

The Blogosphere is awash with laughter at the Bush admin, on the news that after the mass protest they grudgingly accepted that Hezbollah is a democratic political party (too), originating in this NYT article.

However, this article is also a prime example of mainstream media crap, with the usual crimes like failing to mention even passingly Israel's occupation of Syrian territory or quoting administration officials spouting rhetoric anonymously and without checking for facts. Factoid #1 regards the latter - this bit:

"Hezbollah has American blood on its hands," an administration official said, referring to such events as the truck bombing that killed more than 200 American marines in Beirut in 1983. "They are in the same category as Al Qaeda....

While the comparison is outrageous enough - the truck bomb hit US soldiers not civilians like al-Qaida, hit them in a country they invaded and not in New York City, and with the backdrop of US actions like warships shelling Lebanon -, the Marine base was not hit by Hezbollah. Hezbollah didn't even exist then! (Contrary to US/Israeli rewriting of history, formally established from various pro-clerical groups only in early 1985.)

It was done by off-shoots of the Daawa party. Yes, that one, the party of the future Iraqi PM. (Read Juan Cole on the details, also of other Daawa terrorist attacks.)

That was factoid #1. As for #2: while even the official propaganda and clueless journalism doesn't manage to cut a simple line over Hezbollah's foreign ties - i.e., there's both Syria and Iran - what goes amiss is Amal.

Amal what, you may ask? The thing is that not only is Hezbollah's relation with Syria a rather shaky one not without armed confrontation (a loveless alliance), there is actually a rival Lebanese Shi'a militia+political pary (founded in 1974 by a member of the Sadr family) that was Syria's real surrogate, the Amal movement. Only it was eclipsed so much by the Iran-linked but more domestic-based Hezbollah militarily that Syria had to deal with the latter.

Hat Tip To Canada

2005-03-11T10:10:00.000+01:00

I was not one impressed by Paul Martin, Canada's Liberal Party PM since last year's national elections there[*].

A social conservative, who was finance minister, who publicly questioned his predecessor's commitment to the Kyoto protocol, who avoided criticism of US foreign policy even at the height of the Iraq war protests - I saw him as a Bliarite type.

I sounded similar opinions at Left I On The News when it quoted from Martin's impressive speech on things changing including himself, in his opening speech of the parliamentary debate on introducing same-sex marriage - it looked like the Bliarite trick of making much fuss over a relatively minor progressive issue, while ramming through crazy conservative policies in serious matters.

But I really had to accept that Martin can change when he made Canada the first significant country (a participant in ECHELON, after all...) to opt out of the missile defense system[+] pushed by the Bush government. Tough his argument was only that the system would mean Canada paying for something unreliable while not having control over it (which, as usual in all the important things in NATO too, the USA wants to keep for itself), he toughed up after the US ambassador's predictably frothing-at-the-mouth response. The guy had the audacity to claim Canada just gave up its sovereignity - to which the Canadian government responded with an explicit warning that Canadian aerospace is Canadian aerospace and the US can't fire its missiles into it at whim.

However, even better was Canadian ex-foreign minister (1995-2000) Lloyd Axworthy's quite explicit reply, in the form of an op-ed addressing Condi Rice (via Left I via DailyKos). I quote the first five paragraphs only:

Dear Condi,
I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.

As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we've had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we're going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.

Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

[*] Which, BTW, were remarkable for the fact that while leftist parties increased their share of the votes almost everywhere, it was the conservatives who significantly increased the number of their seats, just because the two main con parties united. Which reminds me of my frequent grumblings regarding the majority vote system - Canada should beware of a slide into a two-party system.

[+] Brief summary of why missile defense is a dangerous idiocy:
(1) It won't ever approach anything like a 99% hit rate, even if technology can give the precision to hit a chosen target at that rate: there are too many ways to fool the system with decoys.
(2) No rogue state would be crazy enough to attack a major nuclear power with a missile: a missile would immediately give the address for a return strike.
(3) What missile defense is really suited for is not limiting first strike capacity of an attacker but to limit return strike capacity of an attacked.
(4) Would rogue states really be the aim, it would be more practical to install the system nearby - so that large, still accelerating (hence slower) missiles can be intercepted rather than warheads.
(5) The real target of missile defense, major competitors like China, would/will/do not just respond to this attempt at their strategic weakening with decoys, but with the production of even more nukes, too.
(6) The system, by way of a comparatively simple upgrade, would enable Rumsfeld's dream of not just using it defensively to intercept incoming missiles, but also offensively, as global-reach (cruise) missiles that can strike any target within hours (rather than having to wait for days and weeks while equipment or airplanes are deployed).

Democracy, Good Cop/Bad Cop, Unions

2005-03-10T18:13:00.000+01:00

[11/03: link to Zogby poll in Lebanon, Uruguay's population added]

Hundreds of thousands protest for the removal of Venezuelan President Chavez, which is achieved in a coup.

Hundreds of thousands protest to keep their elected President Chavez, who manages to regain his power.

Chinese students protest for (among others) press freedom, the army dissolves the protests, people are crushed by tanks.

Sadrists protest for press freedom (after the first in US viceroy Bremer's series of provocative clampdowns on the Sadrists that led to the first uprising: closing off the Sadrist newspaper for nothing more than criticising Bremer), the US army dissolves it, people are crushed by tanks.

Hundreds of thousands follow the Orange opposition's call to protest in Kiew against election fraud in Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of Blue supporters turn out to protest in other Ukrainian cities.

A hundred thousand, mostly from minorities in Norther Iraq, turn out to protest election fraud in Iraq.

After calls from Maronite and Sunni leaders and the weasely Druze warlord who 'found' the perpetrator of a political assassination without any evidence, up to 70,000 Lebanese protest for the withdrawal of Syrian occupying forces (which entered in the first place with the then US government's green light, whose even earlier predecessor rigged the 1957 elections there) and for new elections which are skewered to favor Maronite Christians,

After calls from Lebanese Shi'a political party/militia Hezbollah and some Sunni and Shi'a political groups fearful of a returning civil war and Israeli/US intervention (and earlier smaller protests mainly by Sunni), 500,000 Lebanese turn out for pro-Syrian demonstrations.

Thousands protest against terrorism in the Iraqi town of Hilla after a suicide bomber kills more than 100 would-be policemen lined up for the medical check.

Those same protesters demand that authorities imposed by the US resign for failure to ensure security.

George W Bush is iaugurated for a second time as US President with lavish parties and ceremonies before exclusively screened guests.

Tabare Vazquez, Uruguay's first Socialist President is inaugurated with half a million joyous supporters present (in a country of 3.4 million).

Now guess which of these was spun by the US media (and by those European media that follow it) as a pro-democracy upswell, to be celebrated on cover pages and the first news slot; and which was spun as say the fanatic followers of X marching on command, and relegated to the back pages.

One could also recall the US media's coverage of 'anti-globalisation' and later anti-war mass protests.

The Lebanon example (BTW Juan Cole predicted that pro-Syrian Lebanese are in majority) also nails the coffin of old weasel French President Jacques Chirac's recent attempt to make peace with the Bush junta by playing good cop/bad cop in the Middle East and elsewhere. Already in the second attempt (after the disastrous (for Haitians) test run in Haiti). France authored the UN SC resolution to demand Syria's withdrawal (which would have been less hypocritical had it also called for Israeli and US withdrawals from occupied territory). Arabs did take notice of it[*]. Proving my point in my confronting of Phil Hunt @ Cabalamat Journal after he advocated a European good cop/US bad cop strategy.

Finally, a story from Iraq overlooked by most - assassins (by - well - assassinations) and the Allawi government (by dissolving them) clamp down on unions.

[*] I reiterate it again: when you read Raed and may be put off by his on-off extreme rambling, remember that he is not a fundie but a secular Iraqi with a secular Iranian girlfriend, who one year ago still believed the US could correct its mistakes and help build secular democracy in Iraq. (The original reason I put him in the "Uploading/Downloading" category on my blogroll; now he's there for some simplicisms in - well - his extreme rambling...)

Sham Elections Update/Iran In The Crosshairs

2005-02-21T22:08:00.000+01:00

Scott Ritter says (implying this is the stuff of an upcoming Seymour Hersch article) that the US cooked Iraqi elections results to get the UIA vote below 50% (and, I suppose, to get participation up). Of course, the UIA already 'cooked' the results with Badr Corps manning polling stations (shades of Germany 1933).

UPDATE 25/02: Juan Cole reports of similar rumours in the Iraqi press. (And he drinks the kool aid when commenting on it; beyond the fact that most election results falsibication methods have their limits, it is entirely possible that either a) the American vote count manipulators were just clueless about the fact that due to 'lost votes' for minor parties that weren't enough for even one representative, even in a proportional voting system the bigger parties' share of seats in parliament is greater than their percentage of votes; or b) they counted on Chalabi as agent saboteur. And why he thinks post-Baathist, secular Allawi's voters were all Shi'a is beyond me.)

Scott Ritter also says that Bush already signed the plan of a June 2005 bombing raid on Iran... and the situation reminds of 2002 and the run-up to the Iraq war also in how much the Bush admin tries to foil European efforts here, something that is apparent in DER SPIEGEL's English-language article on Bush's visit to Europe.

Protest on 19/20 March!

Gender Equality

2005-02-21T11:01:00.000+01:00

This is one of the posts struck in my backlog.

A few weeks ago, someone came to my blog via this older post @ Fistul Of Euros, in which an American progressive living in Belgium (Scott Martens) sees French displays of naked women (like the bust of Marianne) as a sign of France being behind in gender equality. Well I'm not convinced that naked women in art and national symbols are really anti-feminist, but another measure that is unfavourable is women in politics.

On the other hand, I have another, ad-hoc measure of gender equality: look at the cars passing you on the street, focus on family cars and couples in cars, check who drives. By this measure, I evaluated France to be rather advanced, right there with Scandinavians - and definitely ahead of Germany.

* * *

A recent post by James Wolcott claims that women don't listen to advice on dating, or rather, listen and nick but then ignore it all. I'm not at all sure this is that universal (has Wolcott never dated the amateur intriguess who may later admit she read it in a women's magazine or someone told her?), but it is a good ocassion for me to present the train of thought below.

I noticed most (Western) people won't separate an emotion and its outward signs. Implicit in this is the assumption that the outward sign is always the same, and that it can always be interpreted unanimously. (In Far-Eastern culture, see f.e. Kurosawa's In The Woods, perspective is much more thought about.)

This is why, opposed to popular assumption, I don't think that women are more emphatic than men. If there is a pattern of difference, it is of more men not noticing at all, while more women noticing only what they want to see. And it's not just that.

Some women (and much fewer men) drove me crazy when they asked me something. They would nod attentively when I explain, but from talk thereafter it is clear they haven't understood a thing. But they aren't even conscious of that! And no, these people weren't all morons or, ehm, blondes. It was as if they have substituted the behavior of moving the head up and down (and the social function of signalling understanding) for the mental labour of understanding an argument, that is an abstract logical construct. (And, sometimes, it is also true for talk about how one feels.)

Service Update

2005-02-21T10:17:00.000+01:00

Thumbs up for Blogger after all; they have created their own pop-up comments - it's not perfect yet, but I have now set my own blog accordingly. (I don't like Haloscan.) Old comments were retained.

Also, I changed font sizes slightly - but how it appears depends on the browser you use and the font size setting of that browser; so I'm sorry to those for whom it will look ugly from now on.

Elections Day In Europe

2005-02-20T21:20:00.000+01:00

I will add updates about results to each [done - hence bumped; later with commentary]:

Spain: first referendum about the EU Constitution (Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia already accepted it by parliamentary vote); will surely pass but low turnout expected. [Final] results: participation was 42.3%, "Yes" vote at 76.7%. BTW, the Catholic Church and the postfascists (the forever-yesterdayer fans of Franco) campaigned for a boycott, which was said to be seen successful if participation got below 35% - it didn't, and I'm for once happy about a king, for Spain's Juan Carlos defied the boycott call and went to vote Sí (which is quite something, he doesn't vote in general elections to demonstrate impartiality).

Portugal: the right-wing government (a minority government of a conservative party uniquely called Social Democrats; supported from outside by a far-right party) left behind by now European Commission President Juan-Manuel Barroso [see previous post] faces early elections with less than 30% in the polls, while the Socialists are put at 50% - the PM threatened pollsters with litigation should they have erred... and in their desperation, they started to copy the Ukraine and are campaigning in orange... Voting just ended, exit polls predict absolute majority for Socialists. [Final] indeed, 120 seats out of 230, with 45.0% of votes. Social Democrats got just 28.7%/72 seats, its former far-right outside supporter CDS/PP got 7.3%/12 seats, while the two radical-left small parties - the Green/Communist coalition CDU and the leftist block BE - got 7.6%/14 seats and 6.4%/8 seats respectively. Participation was 67%, a high for the country.

I am happy that the new PM, José Socrates, is an ex-environment-minister, tough the desolate economy Barroso left behind - almost no growth, large public deficit and joblessness - makes him vulnerable to demands of economists with bad advices. BTW, seldom noted, the losing government withdrew Portuguese forces from Iraq just before the elections, which didn't save it. Socrates commented: “I never agreed with the deployment of the national guards to Iraq,” he added. “I think that war caused much harm to the world. We were on the wrong side of history in this.”

Cyprus, Turkish part: the pro-EU PM is set to win, his nationalist opposition also campaigns in orange... The pro-EU PM indeed won [later]: his Republican-Turkish Party has 44%, the also pro-EU party of the President's renegade son got 14%, the nationalist Party of National Unity only got 32%. Participation: 74%. Now it is the Greek side's turn to show readiness for cooperation rather than issue ultimatums - while the international community shouldn't hamper efforts with strong-arming and ultimatums of its own.

Germany, Schleswig-Holstein province: the last polls showed the Social Democrats of incumbent Heide Simonis and her Green coalitioneers 3% ahead of the Christian Democrat+Liberal combination - however, there is a new scandal in Germany hitting the Greens (about too easily given visa at embassies) which the opposition tries to capitalise on. Indeed, exit polls show the opposition ahead by around 2% - but, strangely enough, the bigger swing was not from the Greens (last polls -1%) but the Social Democrats (-2%). [Later] In the end, the Social Democrats got more - 38.7%/29 seats, vs 40.2%/30 seats for Christian Democrats, 6.6%/4 seats for liberals, 6.2%/4 seats for Greens -, and due to just 70 votes, the opposition ended up one seat short of majority. The fifth force in the regional parliament, the party of the Danish minority which got 3.6%/two seats, announced its support for the Social Democrats and their school reforms. Thus the bruished Left will stay in government, and so will the pro-wind-power policy (Schleswig-Holstein alone has 2174 MW installed - a third of what is in the entire USA - which supplies a fourth to third of electricity there). Participation was 66.6%, an absolute low for the province (it was below 70% twice before, in 1949 and 2000).

[Now] Three-and-a-half good news! Hopefully, the centre-to-radical-left coalitions will regain France and Italy too; I'm resigned about the third-way-suicidal centre-left losing Germany and having another meaningless victory in Britain... but, my British readers, I'll be the first to admit I'm an idiot should your fellow voters positively surprise me.

Unlimited Hypocrisy

2005-02-20T19:49:00.000+01:00

There just are no words left to describe it.

As zeynep @ Under The Same Sun notes it too, the US regime and its media accomplices accuse Syria of assassinating a political leader, or at least of being the source of instability by occupying Beirut, and remind of Syria's bloody crackdown killing thousands in a city where there was a fundamentalist Islamist uprising - while they maintain resp. keep on defending the occupation of Iraq and pretend that troops are there for security despite the total chaos, where political leaders are assassinated by various groups including US troops, which also levelled whole cities killing thousands after fundamentalist Islamist uprisings.

UPDATE: Calabamat Journal points to another angle of this hypocrisy.

Riverbend's Latest

2005-02-20T16:52:00.000+01:00

I nodded and handed over the bags to be weighed. “Well… they’re going to turn us into another Iran. You know list 169 means we might turn into Iran.” Abu Ammar pondered this a moment as he put the bags on the old brass scale and adjusted the weights.

“And is Iran so bad?” He finally asked. Well no, Abu Ammar, I wanted to answer, it’s not bad for *you* - you’re a man… if anything your right to several temporary marriages, a few permanent ones and the right to subdue females will increase. Why should it be so bad? Instead I was silent. It’s not a good thing to criticize Iran these days. I numbly reached for the bags he handed me, trying to rise out of that sinking feeling that overwhelmed me when the results were first made public.

It’s not about a Sunni government or a Shia government- it’s about the possibility of an Iranian-modeled Iraq. Many Shia are also appalled with the results of the elections. There’s talk of Sunnis being marginalized by the elections but that isn’t the situation. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s moderate Shia and secular people in general who have been marginalized.

That sinking feeling.

Read the rest.

And if you think Sistani is a 'moderate', read this (via again naive Juan Cole).

Directive From Hell

2005-02-19T18:27:00.000+01:00

I wouldn't be ungrateful towards British Eurosceptics if they brought down Barroso with some scandal...

That idiot who presided over economic stagnation to recession at home despite EU funds, not to mention certain other issues, now styles himself as a neoliberal revolutionary (revolution from above). He has chosen a former finance minister (Stavros Dimas from Cyprus) as environment commissioner, who in his recent first communication nicely scaled back previous plans, omitting post-2012 reduction goals - just when even more alarming predictions and a revised evaluation of Antartic ice sheet stability came out. (I hope there aren't too many idiots among EP socialists - I'm already giving up on the governments - who'd let such a proposal through.)

Another issue he took up to champion was the total liberalisation of all services in the EU, the Bolkestein Directive. This is the swansong of Frits Bolkestein, former Internal Market/Taxation Commissioner in the EU, a 100% neoliberal madman (who was also the author of the software patent proposal) and Islamophobe (thinks the EU will be Islamised).

Histologion has a good link roundup on the issue - noting that Chirac may prevent it [so might Schröder - most the German government and the SPD party opposes it, but Schröder is a man of foul compromises just like Bliar], linking an excellent leftist review of the plan, and inviting us
to sign the petition against it.

As a closing note, I want to remind people (especially Eurosceptics) again that we can thank Bliar for having Barroso, who was trying to appease Eurosceptics in the process.

Unions & Social Democrats

2005-02-19T11:19:00.000+01:00

Two current events, as symptoms of problems with the traditional workers' rights structures (in Europe).

This last Tuesday, my union achieved victory in getting a payraise closer to its demands than the employer's offer, averting a strike. (Tho' it's not that much; a general raise equivalent to €64.)

However, my employer is the Hungarian State Railways, which - beyond a few EU-supported renovation programs and a far-below-required investment into the replacement of the capital's overcrowded suburban trains - doesn't get enough money from the state to maintain services, much less to invest in what is needed to attract customers (for example more carriages for the well-frequented lorries-on-train [RoLa] services).

So while my union has recently taken on to include demands for sound railway policy and investment during protests, what it will actually pick a fight for is still just getting more money: because our payrise is not coupled with an investment funds rise, it just plays into the government's hand in its policy of creating a disaster to 'solve' it. I think this kind of short-term thinking is one of the reasons behind traditional unions' decline in the developed world.

Second story. In Social Democrat-governed Germany, the greatest private bank, Deutsche Bank, caused a storm of outrage with its plans to continue sparing by outsourcing/slashing 6400 more jobs - this after a record profit of €2.5 billion (pre-tax: €4.1 billion) in 2004!

As an example of brazen corporate greed and the hypocrisy of corporate explanations of outsourcing, this is dime of a dozen. What is more noteworthy that the government just last year appeased business with a string of employment law changes (Harz IV), expecting an improvement of the jobs situation in return - but apparently, corporations just thanked for the present and laughed in their face. Which is exactly what I expected.

If one tries to appease them, business will either have the Centre-'Left' implement the changes it wants with much less opposition than a conservative government would (Bliar's Britain), or go for what they can get without anything in return from this government while placing their bets on the takeover of the conservative opposition (Schröder's Germany).

Democracy

2005-02-19T03:07:00.000+01:00

Too many 'moderate' liberals assume a word can only have one meaning.

What the neocons call "democracy" is a Hamiltonian system in which the people exercise formal power to elect the government, but the key directions of policy are determined by a small and relatively stable Power Elite that is insulated from any real public pressure.

(from a post on the Mutualist blog, describing how the new elected powers of Iraq are straitjacketed by Bremer's pro-neoliberal laws; [Added 20/02:] also noteworthy because anti-war libertarians often take neocon rhetoric about spreading democracy at face value - so that they can denounce neocons as unrealistic dreamers, rather than cynical propagandists)