Lovely cartoon by Steve Bell. Meanwhile the Pope is still dragging his feet over accepting the resignations of the bishops implicated in the scandal. What an outfit.
Category Archives: Beyond belief
A good election to lose
If you read nothing else this week, read John Lanchester’s terrific piece about the economic outlook in the current issue of the London Review of Books. In full. Here’s a taster:
The imminence of the general election doesn’t help. Broadly speaking, the circumstances are such that it shouldn’t much matter who wins the election, not in economic terms. The economic realities are harsh and are likely to determine most of what the new government does. Labour have promised to cut the deficit in half within four years. They haven’t spelled out how they are going to do it, and until recently Gordon Brown was talking about ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’ – which, given what he must know about what the figures mean, is jaw-droppingly cynical. The reality is that the budget, and the explicit promises of both parties, imply a commitment to cuts of about 11 per cent across the board. Both parties, however, have said that they will ring-fence spending on health, education and overseas development. Plug in those numbers and we are looking at cuts everywhere else of 16 per cent. (By the way, a two-year freeze in NHS spending – which is what Labour have talked about – would be its sharpest contraction in 60 years.)
Cuts of that magnitude have never been achieved in this country. Mrs Thatcher managed to cut some areas of public spending to zero growth; the difference between that and a contraction of 16 per cent is unimaginable. The Institute for Fiscal Studies – which admittedly specialises in bad news of this kind – thinks the numbers are, even in this dire prognosis, too optimistic. It makes less optimistic assumptions about the growth of the economy, preferring not to accept the Treasury’s rose-coloured figure of 2.75 per cent. Plugging these less cheerful growth estimates into its fiscal model, the guesstimate for the cuts, if the ring-fencing is enforced, is from 18 to 24 per cent. What does that mean? According to Rowena Crawford, an IFS economist, quoted in the FT: ‘For the Ministry of Defence an 18 per cent cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army.’ The FT then extrapolates:
At the transport ministry, an 18 per cent reduction would take out more than a third of the department’s grant to Network Rail; a 24 per cent reduction is about equivalent to ending all current and capital expenditure on roads. At the Ministry of Justice an 18 per cent reduction broadly equates to closing all the courts, a 24 per cent cut to shutting two-thirds of all prisons.
This is good blood-curdling stuff. But it is, I think, impossible for anyone to believe that any British government will ever administer cuts in public spending of that order. Getting rid of the army or of the courts? I don’t think so – and yet that’s the magnitude of change promised by the promised assault on public spending. The political parties are doing everything they can to look serious about cutting the deficit, but they won’t go anywhere near specific proposals, and for good reason: to do so would be electoral suicide. That in turn means that even if they wanted to administer this order of cuts, they would have no mandate to do so.
So why all the posturing about the deficit?
Chateau Ashcroft: the gigantic duck house
L’affaire Ashcroft has had one useful side-effect: it’s provided a reminder that no matter how touchy-feely Dave Cameron might like to appear, his party hasn’t escaped from its sleazy background. Marina Hyde had a nice column about this.
Still, we love a tax exile in this country. We let them fund our political parties, and watch as they coincidentally obtain peerages. In the case of Lord Ashcroft, we watch as they become deputy chairman of the Conservative party, amass unquantified power over its leaders, and begin ploughing some of those very millions on which they don’t pay tax into intensely targeted campaigns designed to swing elections. David Cameron has honked loud and long about making trust and transparency an election issue, yet he and his lieutenants either misled the public deliberately as to his lordship’s status, or were too craven or venal to ask questions. They certainly refused to co-operate with the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the matter. Meanwhile, the BBC feel obliged to announce cuts effectively designed to appease that other unelected foreign billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, as though you can appease someone whose goal is your complete destruction.
The biggest problem — as Hyde points out later — is that public outrage over MPs’ expenses is disproportionate compared with what Ashcroft and the Tories are up to. The MPs have been mostly foolish, occasionally venal and in a few cases positively criminal: but Ashcroft is a tax exile who is effectively using his foreign wealth to buy an election. And who also appears to have obtained a peerage after giving assurances that he did not keep.
Tortured logic
I love the Economist for its distinctive combination of excellent reporting and crazed editorial logic. Here’s an example from the latest issue. First the email ‘teaser’ from the Editor:
Imagine a democracy where politicians representing only a tenth of the population can frustrate the will of the majority, where the legislature is divided up into absurdly gerrymandered seats, where money politics is rife, where bipartisanship has disappeared—and where nothing ever gets done. With Congress failing to do anything about health care, climate change or the deficit, that is how an increasing number of Americans see Washington. Meanwhile businesspeople and politicians in the emerging world contrast this paralysis with China’s autocratic efficiency. In our cover leader we look at the idea that Washington is broken.
So far, so good. But then:
We argue that it is wrong to blame the system, not least because it lets Barack Obama off the hook. The main reason why his laws are not passing is because they are unpopular. He has done too little to win over independents and Republicans.
Eh? These are the same republicans who are determined to vote down anything and everything proposed by the Obama administration.
This is par for the course with the magazine. Its intellectual contortions over the banking catastrophe were comical beyond belief. On the one hand it could not do otherwise but report the stupidity, venality and systemic madness of the system. On the other hand, it couldn’t bring itself to admit that really radical changes in our regulatory arrangements might be necessary.
ACPO makes £18m from criminal records checks
Until this moment, I had naively assumed that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was an official body, funded by the Home Office to co-ordinate policing policy. Well, guess what? It’s a nice little privatised earner, as this Telegraph report suggests.
Concerns have been raised that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is being run as a private company and as such escapes many of the rules that ensure public bodies are accountable.
Nevertheless it has been taking on an increasing role in advising the government on strategies to fight terrorism and organised crime.
The ‘not for profit’ company does not pay dividends to shareholders but its accounts show ACPO has built up £15.8m in assets, including £9.2m cash in the bank on a turnover of £18m.
It has emerged that the association is charging between £35 and £70 for criminal record checks for US visas which used to cost £10.
It also markets a service to endorse crime prevention measures which made £225,000 profit.
The money comes on top of £15m received from the Home Office for the “co-ordination of the national police response to terrorism, organised crime [and] large operations such as the Suffolk prostitute murders” according to its accounts and payments for its involvement in arranging the “use of police cells across the country to house prisoners”.
Its president, Sir Ken Jones, the former Sussex Chief Constable, earns £138,702 a year along with £30,000 pension contributions on top of his police pensions.
Other former chief constables head up different subsidiaries and the overall wage bill comes to £1.4m for 21 employees, although that also includes outside consultants.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties group Liberty, has called for a “fundamental review”, claiming that the functions of ACPO need to be determined by Parliament.
She said: “ACPO is many things. It advises Government, it sets policing policy, it campaigns for increased police powers, and now we learn it is engaged in commercial activities – all with a lack of accountability”.
Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn’t Actually Win 2008 Election
Wow! There are more nutters in the US than even I had supposed. According to this report,
The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, ACORN stole it.
This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama’s agenda is against America, but they don’t think he was actually the choice of the American people at all! Interestingly, NY-23 Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is now accusing ACORN of stealing his race, and Fox News personalities have often speculated about ACORN stealing the 2008 Minnesota Senate race for Al Franken.
The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.
Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.
Now, the obvious comparison would be that many Democrats felt that George W. Bush didn’t legitimately win the 2000 election. But there are some clear differences.
First of all, Al Gore empirically won the national popular vote in 2000, and lost in a disputed recount process in Florida. By comparison, John McCain lost the national popular vote by a 53%-46% margin.
In order to believe that Obama wasn’t the true winner of the 2008 election, one would have to think that ACORN (and perhaps other groups) stuffed ballots to the tune of over 9.5 million votes, Obama’s national margin.
What’s 26 per cent of 200 million? And this is a country with nuclear weapons.
We are where we are with Afghanistan. And where is that, exactly?
Terrific blog post by Andrew Sullivan. Excerpt:
So how are we where are we now? In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been empowered by the long occupation and the government is as corrupt as ever and fast losing its own people. Al Qaeda have simply moved to Pakistan where they remain safely as long as they duck drone attacks. In Iraq, we actually gave al Qaeda a new opening and had to spend billions and lose thousands of lives to push them back. Even now, we have no guarantee they will not re-emerge in a still deeply divided country when far fewer American troops will soon remain. And through all this, we threw away one core advantage: our moral high ground. Through torture and the mass killings of civilians, through allowing sectarian genocide in Iraq and giving the world Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as symbols of the new America, we even managed to blur the lines between civilization and barbarism. And in this struggle, our political leaders failed to keep the country united, or the alliance intact.
The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.
Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance…
Exclusive: holocaust and incest jokes not a good “fit” with the “Windows brand”.
Wonderful story in the Daily Telegraph.
The episode was to be called “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show”.
A publicly released preview featured characters from Family Guy using Windows 7 and making computer related jokes.
However, the writers also included more typical Family Guy material which has been described as “riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest”. There was also a section in which the writers stepped in front of the camera to play Latino housekeepers.
After executives saw a run through of the show a Microsoft spokesman said: “We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humour of Family Guy.
“But after reviewing an early version of the variety show, it became clear that the content was not fit with the Windows brand.”
The motorcade factor
This is arguably the silliest thing ever said by a British Foreign Secretary (well, except for all the guff they used to spout about Ireland in the old days):
“I think it would be very good for Britain as well as very good for Europe if Tony Blair was a candidate and was chosen.”
He added: “It’s about whether or not Europe wants a strong leader in that position. I think that hasn’t yet been resolved in the minds of a number of Europe’s leaders.
“My own view is that we need somebody who can do more than simply run through the agenda. We need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop and talks do need to begin at a very, very high level. I think Europe has suffered from the lack of that clarity.”
You’d never guess, would you, that young Miliband owes his political career, such as it is, entirely to Blair.
So which was the bigger scam — balloon boy or the Collateralised Debt fraud?
Terrific NYT column by Frank Rich comparing the “balloon boy” scam with those perpetrated by Bush/Cheney in invading Iraq and by Wall Street in fuelling the banking collapse, and putting things nicely in context. Excerpts:
Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.
[…]
Richard Heene [the father in the “balloon boy” incident] is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”
[…]
If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.
Great stuff. Worth reading in full.