Mutt Romney

The crassness of Mitt Romney continues to amaze Europeans. (It also amazes some Americans, but a surprising proportion of their electorate seems to think that he might be a serious contender for President.) Before his European and Middle East trip the idea that he might win in November was scary enough. Now, it looks like a nightmare or — as Maureen Dowd said in the NYT, “more like Munch’s ‘The Scream'”.

The strangest thing of all about Romney is that, as the saying goes, “there’s no there there”.

There’s a political joke doing the rounds in the US.

A liberal, a conservative and a Tea Party fanatic come into a bar.

Q: What does the barman say?

A: “Hi Mitt!”

Or, as Dowd puts it,

Wherever he went, whatever situation he was in, he remained frozen in himself. It was reminiscent of the stinging review of an Oscar Wilde lecture by Ambrose Bierce, who wrote that Wilde was a “gawky gowk” who “wanders about posing as a statue of himself.”

Dowd quotes a remark by Stuart Stevens [Romney’s Press spokesman] observation that “it’s easy to imagine Romney in the White House”. “I can visualize him right now”, says Dowd, “lapidary and frozen, in the Rose Garden. A statue of himself”.

Romney was annoying and gaffe-prone in London, but that was small beer compared to his irresponsibility in Israel where he effectively egged on the Israelis to launch an attack on Iran and made some unbelievably stupid comparisons between the innovativeness of Israeli high-tech industry and the alleged backwardness of the Palestinians. “As you come here”, he said at a $25,000-a-head fundraising dinner in Jerusalem,

and you see the GDP per capita for instance in Israel which is about $21,000 and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality.

He then went on to cite what he sees as the unique factor in this contrast. ”Culture makes all the difference” he said, a phrase that was immediately — and understandably — interpreted as racist, and not just by Palestinians.

As usual, Romney got his facts wrong. According to the World Bank, Israel’s per-capita GDP was about $31,000 in 2011, while the West Bank and Gaza’s was just over $1,500. And he conveniently ignored the fact that the West Bank and Gaza are territories which are effectively being throttled by Israel.

Romney’s observations about the differences between Israeli and Palestinian economic success emanate from a crass (mis)reading of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. In an excruciating dissection of Romney’s errors in yesterday’s NYT, Professor Diamond writes:

It is not true that my book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, as Mr Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the difference in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth”. That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr Romney read it.

But, says Diamond, “that’s not the worst part”.

Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book Wealth And Poverty Of Nations was mentioned favorably by Mr Romney — would find Mr Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date.

Ouch!

Darkness visible

There’s something terribly depressing about the hand-wringing commentary in US media that follows every small-town massacre. I suppose liberals have to go through the motions, because not to do so would be tantamount to tacitly condoning the craziness of US laws. So I started on Roger Ebert’s NYT OpEd piece with a sinking heart. But the closing paragraphs brought me up short. Here they are:

This would be an excellent time for our political parties to join together in calling for restrictions on the sale and possession of deadly weapons. That is unlikely, because the issue has become so closely linked to paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties that many politicians feel they cannot afford to advocate gun control.

Immediately after a shooting last month in the food court of the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, a young woman named Jessica Ghawi posted a blog entry. Three minutes before a gunman opened fire, she had been seated at the exact place he fired from.

“I was shown how fragile life was,” she wrote. “I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath.”

This same woman was one of the fatalities at the midnight screening in Aurora. The circle of madness is closing.

If Romney wins…

Good column by Will Hutton about the kind of capitalism that Romney represents.

Bain Capital is part of the problem, not the solution. The private equity recipe has ripped the heart out of innovative US while leaving its banks encumbered by massive non-performing debts. The business model is now broken and the US has to start to ask questions about whether the Bain type of allegedly individualist capitalism really delivers growth and jobs. As the answer is: no, what does?

The “Rogue Cop” (aka Bad Apple) narrative

This is the line that’s always trotted out whenever a bent or violent or racist police officer is outed. It’s also the line invariably parroted by the tabloid press. We shouldn’t buy into it, as Jonathan Moses argues in this piece:

The charity Inquest notes that there have been just over 1400 deaths in police custody or following police contact since 1990 and not a single conviction of manslaughter. Clearly not all of these will be due to incidences of violence and neglect – but Tomlinson’s case is only one amongst many examples of police brutality leading to death. The public order unit Harwood was a part of, the TSG (Territorial Support Group), claims it recruits from the ranks “on merit, and much emphasis is placed upon their personal ability, motivation and good communication skills.” Yet Harwood already had ten complaints to his name by the time he joined the unit, and had been quietly dropped from the Met once before on medical grounds before disciplinary proceedings could begin against him.

Between 2005-2009, 5000 complaints were made against the TSG, with only 9 upheld, leading the Metropolitan Police Authority (the Met’s watchdog) to warn that TSG officers were seen as “practically immune” to criticism. Anecdotally, innumerable incidents of TSG violence are seared into my memory, nearly all of them involving unthreatening, unarmed young people posing no danger to the officers in question. I’ve come away with the feeling that a significant proportion of TSG officers, are, as London Assembly member Jenny Jones said of Harwood yesterday “thug[s] in uniform”, looking for the legitimacy of a police badge and the impunity of the legal system.

It is worth thinking about the culture which feeds this legitimacy, often facilitated by the mainstream media. As witnessed in the example of the Standard, the rule of thumb is that whilst protesters will inevitably be described as “violent” the moment that, say, a window is broken, police attacking protesters with batons, tasers, CS spray and shield strikes are never described as such. If it’s mentioned at all, it will always be under the pseudonym “robust”. The double standards are also apparent in the justice system. For protesters, what would be minor infractions in the context of everyday life become serious criminal offences in the context of public order. For the police, it is the other way around: Harwood used the abstract context of disorder on the day to justify his specific actions, which included pushing over a BBC cameraman, then another person who was helping someone on the floor, before going on to attack Tomlinson.

In some ways, the Territorial Support Group resembles News International’s journalists in the years before the Leveson Inquiry. They believed themselves immune from prosecution and so felt able to do whatever they wanted. Milly Dowler’s family were victims of that mindset. Ian Tomlinson was a victim of its police equivalent.

How to blow $6.2bn

Verily, you could not make this up. A headline saying that Microsoft had made its first-ever loss caught my eye. I assumed it must be a mistake: Microsoft doesn’t make losses for the simple reason that it has a licence to print money. It’s called Windows+Office. But then it turns out that Microsoft blew $6.2bn a while back on an advertising company which has now turned out to be worthless. What always amuses me about tech company valuations is how solemn are the assurances from men in suits that the valuation they have arrived at by consulting the entrails of a goat is in fact a perfectly rational assessment of the asset’s value. I am sure that that $6.2bn valuation was likewise quality-assured by the same clowns.

Microsoft has written down the value of an online advertising firm it bought five years ago by $6.2bn (£4bn).

Microsoft bought Aquantive for $6.3bn in cash in an attempt to catch rival Google in the race to increase revenues from search-related advertising.

The writedown effectively wipes out the acquisition’s value, although there was little impact on Microsoft’s shares in after-hours trading on Monday.

The purchase of Aquantive in 2007 was then Microsoft’s biggest acquisition.

It has since been eclipsed by the company’s $8.5bn purchase of internet phone service Skype last year.

Microsoft said in a statement on Monday that “the acquisition did not accelerate growth to the degree anticipated, contributing to the writedown”.

The Real Scandal of Mitt Romney and Bain

I really don’t understand the US. I mean to say, here’s a rich, inventive country stuffed full of innovative and smart folks. And yet the best it can do by way of a presidential challenger is a hypocritical creep like Mitt Romney. Now, serious folks tell me that he might even beat Obama, despite the astonishing contradictions and evasions in his account of himself. This nice New Yorker blog post by James Surowiecki ponders the recent revelations which suggest that Romney didn’t part company with Bain, the private equity firm that made him rich, when he claimed he did.

What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

North-West Frontier v2.0

From Dexter Filkins’s sobering New Yorker assessment of the prospects for Afghanistan after the American withdrawal in 2014.

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

American soldiers and diplomats are engaged in a campaign of what amounts to strategic triage: muster enough Afghan soldiers and policemen to take over a fight that the United States and its allies could not win and hand it off to whatever sort of Afghan state exists, warts and all. “Change the place?” Douglas Ollivant, a former counterinsurgency adviser to American forces in Afghanistan, said. “It appears we’re just trying to get out and avoid catastrophe.”

Or this:

It may be that American officers, after eleven years of doing almost everything themselves, have created such a sense of dependency in the Afghan government and military that they must now see if their charges will stand on their own. And maybe they will. But the American strategy appears to be an enormous gamble, propelled by a sense of political and economic fatigue. The preparedness of the Afghan Army is only one of the many challenges that are being left unresolved: the Afghan kleptocracy, fuelled by American money and presided over by Hamid Karzai, is being given what amounts to a pass; and the safe havens in Pakistan which allow Taliban leaders and foot soldiers an almost unlimited ability to rest and plan remain open. After so many years, this is it. There is no Plan B. “I think it will be close,” a senior American diplomat told me in Kabul. “I think it can be done.”

Oh yeah? The Americans have discovered what every other Western government that tried to control Afghanistan has learned. It can’t be done. The funny thing is that the Brits could have told them. They tried — and failed — umpteen times between 1849 and 1947.

Facebook and your phone’s address book

Interesting report in The Register:

It has emerged that Facebook’s war on competing services now extends beyond the manipulated Timeline and into punters’ pockets. The social network’s mobile app appears to be altering address book entries to direct messages to Facebook mail accounts. A user composing an email on his or her phone will send the missive to a Facebook inbox the recipient has probably never looked at, and as the original email address is overwritten there’s no alternative.According to reports, address books on iOS and Android devices are being updated by the Facebook app whenever there’s an entry in the address book linked to a Facebook account. In some cases it seems the @facebook.com address is being appended to the contact details, but other users are reporting that it’s being overwritten too.

With most companies one would assume that this is a bug. But with Facebook…..?

Banksters will keep on escaping justice until the politicians act

Good Observer column by Rawnsley.

We already knew from the financial crisis that the banksters were greedy, reckless and incompetent. We already knew from their reluctance to account for themselves or change their behaviour that they were shameless. The latest mis-selling scandals confirm something else we already knew: that they fleece their customers. What has changed over the past few days is that we now have proof that they are also corrupt and fraudulent. The rigging of Libor, the key interest rate which is used to value contracts worth trillions and affects everything from home loans to credit card charges, has shocked those who thought they were beyond being shocked. Sir Mervyn King has long held a scathing view of modern banking culture, but even the governor of the Bank of England seemed staggered that they had fallen so low. Barclays and the other institutions involved in this particular fraud were not just practising casino capitalism. They were rigging the wheel, loading the dice and marking the cards. The “few bad apples” defence will not wash. Some 20 further banks, including several other big household names, are also under investigation for perpetrating this scam. This could only happen in a City in which cheating and deception have become institutionalised.

A scandal of this magnitude demands a matching political response. That it has yet to receive.

Yep. And I see little evidence that it will.

Rawnsley also puts his finger on one of the most maddening aspects of all this — the fact that there really is one law for the rich and one for the rest of us:

One of the most shocking dimensions of this latest scandal is that no one may face prosecution. After last summer’s urban disorders, the police were imaginative in the use of the law to apprehend those involved. The courts handed down sentences to looters which were designed to be exemplary. A college student, with no previous convictions, was imprisoned for six months for nicking a £3.50 pack of bottled water. Yet there is serious doubt whether it will be possible to prosecute banksters who perpetrated a massive con involving sums which would buy many millions of bottles of water.