Though Cowards Flinch

Many an armchair pundit has diagnosed the problem with President Obama – unlike his predecessor, he just isn’t stupid enough, or at least he doesn’t try hard enough to appear stupid.

Possibly the same armchair pundit has leaned over to one side and whispered the following into the ear of Republican candidate Herman Cain – appear more stupid!

Cain, only too happy to oblige, recently said the following in an interview (seemingly as an homage to former President Bush):

I’m ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions and they’re already starting to come. And when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?

Yes. He actually said that. The problem, of course, is that it might work – but it is certainly not Obama’s style, which may be why the Obama camp are worried.

But when the target audience has been situated so adequately, one which responds positively to their candidate appearing stupid on television, the worst thing to do is say something eminently sensible.

Or at least seemingly so.

David Frum, the very interesting right of centre North American commentator, recently put in an article for New York Magazine “Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment.” He notes that as a business model this “evolution” is wonderful, it consists in fear (“death panels” etc) and breeds distrust in other media outlets (the all too familiar confirmation bias) – but as journalism it is a disaster, and this is the stuff that pumps out of the TV sets of American households.

So, this being the case, either Newt Gingrich is very brave or very stupid for taking an unorthodox line on immigration recently, saying:

“If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out”

Already the other Republican candidates are saying the buzzword they know will not sit very well with right wing voters: amnesty! And already this is doing the rounds on debates – Gingrich wants an amnesty, and therefore is a soft touch on immigration, how un-American, how very Obama-esque you may hear them say.

As someone like Frum is all too ready to admit of the US conservative right – they are not ready for “compassionate” discussions on immigration.

But then if the news stations, telling viewers that Gingrich is a mad leftie dinosaur with his no good compassion, were to take a closer look at Gingrich’s plans on immigration, they’d soon question what is compassionate about it (one would hope).

He is in favour of what is called the “Red Card Solution” which would basically extend the guest worker status of an illegal immigrant if they were, in Gingrich’s words, “paying taxes and obeying the law” with a family.

But on the downside, the red card solution all but dissolves the rights of immigrants, makes second-class citizens of them and their families, and effectively marks them out as “cheap labor at the expense of native-born workers.“

Even conservatives think so. Dan Stein, president of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, said:

“This is effort to create a stratified labor force that provides wealthy employers with a way to get employees at below-market rates.”

What Gingrich supports both cheapens immigration and the movement of people, and is light years from the compassion which those on the GOP hard right are snubbing him for.

Given his recent words on the stupidity of child labour laws, one can only imagine what dreams he has of an entire cheap workforce, spared the burden of proper labour rights.

If his opponents, accusing him of wanting amnesty, were to do a bit of research then maybe they would reveal a different story about Gingrich’s so-called compassion. Not that many would listen anyway.

Elizabeth Warren, according to The New Yorker’s Financial Page columnist James Surowiecki, may be the most hated person in Washington right now, but I for one fail to see why – her proposals for consumer finance are reasonable and modest.

For wanting to rid financial products of confusing legalese and highfalutin jargon, conservative pundits have poured so much scorn over her anyone would think she’d denied the moon landing.

After Congress vowed to ensure against economic destruction caused by improper regulation, it passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, out of which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created.

Warren has been one of the busybodies setting up the bureau, but has come up against fierce opposition by Republicans and bankers obsessed that she harbours authoritarian tendencies and somehow spells certain doom for financial freedom in the US.

Even more frustratingly, however, is the fact that Obama has been reluctant to nominate her. Rumour is that many of his economic confidants – that same rabble of deregulationists who oversaw Bill Clinton’s Presidency – dislike her pro-consumer image, preferring instead the installation of a bank-friendly Wall Street insider.

However there are numerous benefits to having an established consumer advocate head up a new regulatory body – not only because currently consumers are bombarded with information including fine print hiding how much they are really paying on the high street, but because the CFPB promotes fair play among businesses, which for those who agree with competitive and efficient markets should sign up to lock, stock and barrel.

Republicans showing their true colours

On 13 May the majority of members on the House Committee on Financial Services voted to weaken the remit and weight of the CFPB.

This was following a raft of blatant lies and scare tactics by prominent Republicans. Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., claimed last month that the CFPB will possess virtually unchecked discretion, a clear as day fabrication given that under Dodd-Frank, the Financial Stability Oversight Council can overturn the CFPB’s rules by a two-thirds vote (which is by no means an impossible sum).

During an interview with CNBC in March, Tom Donahue, the chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major donor to the Republican party, called the CFPB “the most powerful regulatory agency that’s ever been put together.” An odd claim given that what the bureau can do is pretty standard; hold hearings, subpoena documents and witnesses, issue case-and-desist orders and penalise individuals to the tune of $1m for every single day they violate consumer law (only bank regulators can take banks directly to court). In fact according to Kate Davidson the only “new” power which the bureau has is a twist on an old one, namely the CFPB has power to define “unfair, deceptive or abusive” practices, but unlike the Fed will be “expected to be more proactive in pursuing practices”.

Davidson goes on to say “The real fear is not that the agency is much more powerful, but that unlike the bank regulators, it may use its authority.”

The best act of deception by the Republicans came via a scoop from Ali Berman writing for The Nation. He uncovered how Sean Duffy, the Republican member who serves on the committee on Financial Services, entered Congress freely announcing that he “wasn’t very familiar” with “banking issues, housing issues, insurance issues. These are specific issues that I didn’t deal with in my entire life.” And yet, as luck would have it, within a few months found himself in a position to denounce “the CFPB as a “rogue agency” with an “authoritarian structure” and [introduce] legislation to give existing banking regulators greater authority to override the bureau’s new rules.”

Miracles really can happen, and the benefits are terrific. As Berman elaborates: “the legislation has endeared him to the most powerful financial interests … In recent months groups opposed to the bureau … have donated thousands to Duffy’s re-election campaign”.

Does it go far enough?

The more reasonable complaints of the CFPB concern themselves more with how much it can actually change. Megan McArdle, business and economics editor of The Atlantic, suggests that the goals of the bureau do not seem to match the problems they are trying to fix. She says “it’s far from clear to me what this agency is actually going to spend its time doing.” It’s a fair point. She highlights the fact that there are already usury laws to protect poor people away from expensive and unmanageable loans, and promoting transparency and more options for consumers seems to miss the mark of the real issue at hand.

The real problem is not loans, but reasons why people decide to take out unmanageable loans. Similarly, the problem is not spells of debt, but constant debt cycles.

Larry Meyers writing for Payday Loan Facts quips that the bureau may not have the power to cap interest rates, reducing it down to the status of an advocacy role. And yet it’s quite clear that the US needs something significant to tackle excessive amounts of personal debt, over and above a mere advocate against it.

Paul Leonard, director of the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), recently pointed out that: “it’s a myth that these loans are meant for one-time use. They are a trap for—and the lenders business models rely on—repeat borrowing.” Further, research carried out by the Consumer Federation of America found that families earning $25,000 per year with no emergency savings were eight times as likely to use payday loans as families in the same income bracket with more than $500 in emergency savings.

CRL also point out that:

Three quarters of loan volume of the payday lending industry is generated by borrowers who, after meeting the short-term due date of the loan, must re-borrow before their next pay period [while] [t]welve million Americans are trapped every year in a cycle of 400% interest payday loans.

To even scratch the surface of payday loan problems politicians need to address why in some states like Tennesse (4th poorest state) and South Carolina (5th poorest state) there are 5 payday loan shops for every 10,000 households. Additionally a credit agency levy ought to be imposed in order to finance counselling services for those most at risk of spiralling personal debt.

Until then, and despite Republican hyperbole, the CFPB is a welcome intervention, but is it on the money?

Slate Magazine tonight have said Newt Gingrich will run for Republican presidential nomination.

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association – a conservative organisation which promotes “Christian values”. He has been keeping US bloggers and commentators busy recently with his almost daily dose of bile which he often pumps out during his talk radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio.

To cite some examples, it is Fischer’s opinion that all new immigrants to the US must convert to Christianity or stay put and that the US should put an end to all Muslim immigration.

He once wrote on his blog that welfare in the US has destroyed the African-American family by telling them that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and that the state has incentivised “fornication rather than marriage” to which he reasoned “it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.”

Elsewhere Fischer stated that Native Americans, on account of their inability to convert to Christianity, were “morally disqualified” from maintaining their land.

He has also called grizzly bears a “curse” – but you get the idea; he’s not a very nice man indeed, and his rhetoric is filled with hate.

The American Family Association and a former US House Speaker

If you were planning on running for Presidential candidate (or at least testing those waters) – on a moderate GOP ticket – you probably wouldn’t want to touch the man with a bargepole. But Newt Gingrich has done just that.

Associated Press broke the story in March a “group connected to former U.S. House Speaker [...] contributed $125,000 to a Mississippi nonprofit organization […] AFA Action Inc., a nonprofit arm of the American Family Association”. Anyone else might have claimed ignorance saying they cannot micromanage every transaction or some other excuse, but instead Gingrich decided just to deny the extreme views of the AFA, saying:

You [Igor Volsky, Health Care Policy Editor for ThinkProgress.org, questioning Gingrich] bring a series of allegations that I can’t check about a group that is largely a Christian based membership group, that is fairly widespread in its membership and I suspect most of those people do not in any way think of themselves as a hate group even if that’s how you would characterize them.

I suggest Gingrich picks up a newspaper once in a while and checks the views of AFAs’ spokesperson – he’ll soon see rather than being a mere Christian organisation, it is host to an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Grizzly bear bigot whose absurd opinions are the real threat.

Islam and the Law of the Land

Another recent controversy involved Fischer saying Muslims have no first amendment rights “for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam.”

Of course the first amendment actually guarantees freedom of religion and “prohibits the government from passing legislation to establish an official religion or preferring one religion over another.”

But he wriggles out of this one, qualifying his comment: “They have that privilege [to build Mosques in the US] at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.”

So because Fischer chooses not to distinguish Islam and political Islam, Muslims for him are a political grouping (oh, whose sole intention is to destroy the United States) and thus not worthy of the term religion, safeguarded under the first amendment.

Islam, for Fischer, could not respect the laws of the land in the US and are thus a threat – informing his opinion that all Muslim immigrants are a “toxic cancer”.

But let’s not trust Fischer with the facts on Islam and law; why not consult an expert on the subject.

Professor Shaheen Ali of Warwick University in 2008 waded into the debate about Sharia Law and the UK, as caused by comments by Rowan Williams on the (“unavoidable”) role sharia law has in UK law.

With regards to what Islamic Law has to say about how a Muslim is to conduct oneself in a non-Muslim country, Shaheen Ali notes that:

• there is already a code of practice on how a Muslim conducts themselves and what their obligations viz-a-viz the country to which they now call home

• Britain affords a legal system to all its habitants and is therefore congruent with Islam and social justice

• Britain does not put a curb on the practice of the 5 pillars of Islam (Shahada – the professing of oneself to be a Muslim; Salat – prayer;Zakat – to give to charity; Sawm – the ritual fasting; Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca), therefore the laws here must be respected by Muslims, stipulated, Professor Ali states, by “Islamic law”.

The same applies to the US; providing the law does not prohibit Muslims from carrying out their religious practices there is nothing within Islamic Law that says it must distrust the law of the land in which the Muslim finds him/herself.

On first sight Fischer is clearly a crazed right wing nut job, but on closer examination he’s a crazed right wing nut job who doesn’t bother doing his research.

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association – a conservative organisation which promotes “Christian values”. He has been keeping US bloggers and commentators busy recently with his almost daily dose of bile which he often pumps out during his talk radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio.

To cite some examples, it is Fischer’s opinion that all new immigrants to the US must convert to Christianity or stay put and that the US should put an end to all Muslim immigration.

He once wrote on his blog that welfare in the US has destroyed the African-American family by telling them that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and that the state has incentivised “fornication rather than marriage” to which he reasoned “it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.”

Elsewhere Fischer stated that Native Americans, on account of their inability to convert to Christianity, were “morally disqualified” from maintaining their land.

He has also called grizzly bears a “curse” – but you get the idea; he’s not a very nice man indeed, and his rhetoric is filled with hate.

The American Family Association and a former US House Speaker

If you were planning on running for Presidential candidate (or at least testing those waters) – on a moderate GOP ticket – you probably wouldn’t want to touch the man with a bargepole. But Newt Gingrich has done just that.

Associated Press broke the story in March a “group connected to former U.S. House Speaker [...] contributed $125,000 to a Mississippi nonprofit organization […] AFA Action Inc., a nonprofit arm of the American Family Association”. Anyone else might have claimed ignorance saying they cannot micromanage every transaction or some other excuse, but instead Gingrich decided just to deny the extreme views of the AFA, saying:

You [Igor Volsky, Health Care Policy Editor for ThinkProgress.org, questioning Gingrich] bring a series of allegations that I can’t check about a group that is largely a Christian based membership group, that is fairly widespread in its membership and I suspect most of those people do not in any way think of themselves as a hate group even if that’s how you would characterize them.

I suggest Gingrich picks up a newspaper once in a while and checks the views of AFAs’ spokesperson – he’ll soon see rather than being a mere Christian organisation, it is host to an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Grizzly bear bigot whose absurd opinions are the real threat.

Islam and the Law of the Land

Another recent controversy involved Fischer saying Muslims have no first amendment rights “for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam.”

Of course the first amendment actually guarantees freedom of religion and “prohibits the government from passing legislation to establish an official religion or preferring one religion over another.”

But he wriggles out of this one, qualifying his comment: “They have that privilege [to build Mosques in the US] at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.”

So because Fischer chooses not to distinguish Islam and political Islam, Muslims for him are a political grouping (oh, whose sole intention is to destroy the United States) and thus not worthy of the term religion, safeguarded under the first amendment.

Islam, for Fischer, could not respect the laws of the land in the US and are thus a threat – informing his opinion that all Muslim immigrants are a “toxic cancer”.

But let’s not trust Fischer with the facts on Islam and law; why not consult an expert on the subject.

Professor Shaheen Ali of Warwick University in 2008 waded into the debate about Sharia Law and the UK, as caused by comments by Rowan Williams on the (“unavoidable”) role sharia law has in UK law.

With regards to what Islamic Law has to say about how a Muslim is to conduct oneself in a non-Muslim country, Shaheen Ali notes that:

• there is already a code of practice on how a Muslim conducts themselves and what their obligations viz-a-viz the country to which they now call home

• Britain affords a legal system to all its habitants and is therefore congruent with Islam and social justice

• Britain does not put a curb on the practice of the 5 pillars of Islam (Shahada – the professing of oneself to be a Muslim; Salat – prayer; Zakat – to give to charity; Sawm – the ritual fasting; Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca), therefore the laws here must be respected by Muslims, stipulated, Professor Ali states, by “Islamic law”.

The same applies to the US; providing the law does not prohibit Muslims from carrying out their religious practices there is nothing within Islamic Law that says it must distrust the law of the land in which the Muslim finds him/herself.

On first sight Fischer is clearly a crazed right wing nut job, but on closer examination he’s a crazed right wing nut job who doesn’t bother doing his research.

I’ve said nothing at all to date about the UK regime’s involvement in military action in Libya. 

In keeping with my aid worker background,  I’d count myself as a conflicted ‘liberal interventionist’.  It’s what I was trained for, and getting stuck in where I can be of use is a habit that’s hard to shake off.

Thus, I’ve always tended to steer away from the perils of whataboutery.  This is reflected most recently in my fairly widely derided (on the Left) stance on Councils and illegal budget setting; I’d rather achieve something concrete for a discrete number of people than stand by more radical objectives which, however laudable, cannot be achieved in the absence of the kind of painstaking grassroots organisation that has been lacking so far in the response to the New Conservative regime.

Nevertheless, in the case of Libya, I can see that a good deal of whataboutery is entirely justified given the UK’s and other Western regimes’ inaction over other conflicts in which they might more justifiably have taken an interventionist role.  

Sunder has summed up some of other conflicts well, but those in Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo and now Cote D’Ivoire stands out as places where the UN’s and by extension the West’s responsibilities have been quietly set to one side.  Sri Lanka, for example, is doing very well in the world cup cricket, and remains a popular tourist destination, despite its regime’s participation in mass murder.

In the end, though, my overriding impression of the Left’s reaction to events in Libya is that its powerlessness in the face of these events is being expressed through frustration with the judgments made by others on the Left.  

I’d love the Left to be busy making a clinical assessment of how Western regimes got themselves into/are planning to benefit from the current situation, and then see how the facts behind these regimes’ moral duplicity might be used as a tool to promote alternatives from the bottom up.  I’d love to the Left to f ocus on what we can actually achieve now as part of a longer term strategy.

Instead, much of the Left (or at least its influential commentariat) seems totally focused on a) saying how awful everything is: b) blaming others in the Left for not thinking through the awfulness of everything properly.

So as a counter to this tendency, in the second part of this (inevitable) two-parter I’ll eschew feeling guilty on my own behalf  about what’s going on in Libya.  

The bloodshed in Libya not my fault. It’s not Owen’s. It’s not the fault of those on the Left.  It is the fault both of Gadaffi and of rightwing regimes in the West who thought it was useful realpolitik to embrace him as a buffer against the supposed perils of Islamism. 

Instead, I’ll focus on what our very own regime’s most recent adventurism tells us about the nature of the New Conservative state, and what the Left might do – tomorrow and the next day and the day after that – to counter it. 

Of course meaninfgful change in the UK regime will not come quickly.  It is considerably better embedded than Gadaffi’s, and his looks pretty hard to topple.  But if we spend our time complaining about each others’ integrity and judgment on situations over which we simply have no control, then we’re not really going to get very far.

“How much is Mubarak worth” asks CBS recently.

“I would be very, very surprised if it was 70 billion,” said Kerry Dolan, a Forbes Senior Editor who oversees Forbes Magazine’s World’s Billionaires list. Dolan says the Forbes list only looks at capitalist billionaires yet she finds the $70 billion estimate “exaggerated and unproven”.

Where is this figure of 70 billion from? According to ABC News, the figure includes $17 billion for Mubarak, $10 billion for his second son, Gamal, and $40 billion for the rest of the family (cf the week).

PressTV has said that the figure is from “Middle East experts”.

Further to PressTV’s report, Mubarak’s son Gamal, formerly an investment banker at Bank of America, persuaded his Father to shift Egypt’s economy from a socialist one to a neo-liberal one, selling off state assets and reducing regulation.

Egypt has requested that the EU freeze the Mubarak family assets and indeed according to Avaaz Switzerland has already frozen his finances – however if history is anything to go by Mubarak will have by now created a “maze of obscure bank accounts”.

According to the BBC, the EU has already frozen “the assets of 46 allies and relatives of the deposed Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali ad his wife” so nothing is impossible, but the figure of 70 billion still seems vague.

It just so happens that 70 billion is how much was missing from US aid (2 billion dollars a year in US aid for more than three decades). Mubarak’s salary was less than 10,000 dollars a year while president, which has led people to believe that aid money was being diverted to property deals elsewhere in the world.

Though according to another writer, about 60 billion is said to have benefited American businesses – $34 billion of which in American made military equipment.

The figure of 70 billion is also the same amount lost which led to the closing of the Egyptian exchange – closed since January 28 and thought not to be opening again at least until Sunday February 20.

So, to conclude:

• 70 billion missing from US aid, though someone else has said aid money can be traced to US businesses.

• Mubarak didn’t make anywhere near even the conservative estimates of his personal fortune; his family are on many business boards; his son convinced Mubarak of making sell-offs after working for an American investment bank; money of the Mubarak family is now in bank accounts and property all over the world.

• Days before Mubarak was toppled 70 billion was taken out of Egyptian circulation.

For legal reasons I may well just finish this blog entry up by saying I smell a rat.

Update: Al-Masry Al-Youm have said this morning that:

The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not requested that the assets of ousted president Hosni Mubarak nor any of his family members be frozen in European Union (EU) states, an EU source revealed.

At first we wonder whether the original estimates were too liberal, as the Forbes editor said, but then later in the article we find out that:

A banking official, who also asked to remain anonymous, said that only assets in US dollars in American banks can be tracked, should Egypt authorities ask for information on specific accounts. The official said that if these accounts were turned into euros, the process would be further complicated.

So perhaps Mubarak, his family and other corrupt officials in his now binned government did steal that money, but it has now been lost in the maze of bank accounts. The mystery remains.

Reading through the government’s new ‘Giving Green Paper’ I came upon this wild idea:

We want to explore funding opportunities outside of government. For example, private foundations are already a major source of funds for voluntary and community organisations.

Some suggest that foundations should make a minimum pay out annually, as is the case in some other countries, as this could result in extra income for charities. Others suggest that a requirement would not help charities in the long term, and could generate unintended consequences (p18, my link, my emphasis).

One of the other countries being referred to here, and I suspect the principal model, is the US, where the following applies:

The purpose behind the minimum payout requirement is to prevent foundations from simply receiving gifts, investing the assets and never spending any funds on charitable purposes. The basic rule can be stated simply, but its calculation is complex: Each year every private foundation must make eligible charitable expenditures that equal or exceed approximately 5 percent of the value of its endowment.

Here is not the place to go into the complexities of the US tax code where this requirement is set out, other than to say that because this 5% can include running expenses etc., it doesn’t seem generally to be too onerous a requirement on properly run charitable and philanthropic foundations in the US.  It is a measure to stop abuse of the legal status of a foundation rather than a way – as is suggested in the ‘green paper’ – to get extra cash out into the voluntary and community sector. 

This seems to suggest that, if the plan were really to extract more readies from foundations than they have given out to date, rather than simply ensure that they properly meet their charitable objective, then the ‘minimum payout’ might have to be higher than 5% of the foundation’s assets. 

If the minimum were high enough, foundations would find themselves with reducing capital levels for investment and therefore consistently reduced amounts of cash to give away.  This in the longer term, it might be argued, would act as a disincentive to set up charitable foundations in the first place.

Now there’s a bit of me that actually quite likes the idea of the forcible expropriation of the billions of quid held by charitable foundations, though of course that would depend on who then gets to decide how the cash is used. 

However, that’s not really the point here.

The point is that for the government ever to consider legislating in this way seems incredibly hypocritical.

On the one hand, they seem to be saying it may be ok to use the authority of the state to tell a legally autonmous organisation what to do with money which it has been given by a wealthy individual – most commonly a wealthy individual who gained that wealth from their business endeavours and know-how.

On the other hand, the government accepts that they have pretty well no control over the massive bonuses paid out by banks whose continued existence has been, lest we forget, guaranteed by the tax payer.  Moreover, the government seems incapable of making the banks play their essential economic role of actually lending to UK businesses in the real economy. As Peston says:

[E]ven reaching agreement on business lending isn’t easy. For example, shareholders in HSBC might well query why on earth that bank should allocate precious capital to what they would see as relatively risky and low-return lending to small British companies, when there are arguably far better opportunities for a bank with global reach in India, or China or the Middle East.

Of course, in this respect, Paul Sagar is right:

[G]lobal capitalism has bred megacorporations that are bigger – and more powerful – than sovereign nation states.

That much we knew already.

But what I think these few sentences in a slightly obscure government consultation paper reveal is actually something quite important about this government.  

This is a government which is not interested in the logics of capitalism (and the associated singular importance of property rights) for their own sake, though they will certainly use those logics where it helps there case – as they do when they say reining in bankers bonuses will simply drive away the banks. 

This is actually a government which has moved past the relative ‘purity’ of neoliberal doctrine, and is wielding what David Harvery describes as ‘naked class power’. 

This explains perfectly why they are quite content with the idea of ordering foundations to prop up a minimal ‘big society’ state infrastructure wiit their (generally dead) capitalists’ money, while at the same time bending over backwards to let their (very much alive and skiing) banker friends to keep theirs.

This is, as I’ve argued, the New Conservatism in action, and it makes me alm0st nostalgic  – at the huge risk of sounding like Tim Worstall – for the utterly wrongheaded, but to some extent at least internal consistencies of Thatcherism.

ABC is running an article saying that National Economic Council director Larry Summers is expected to leave the administration after the mid-term elections. Rumour has it that he will return to his position as University Professor at Harvard University at the end of the year (the FT also have it – £)

Summers was always a thorn in the side for the left. When Obama became President, progressives were hoping for a wholesale change to the political landscape left by his predecessor – George Bush Jnr – which would have seen a massive change to the deregulated financial system.

But Summers’ appointment – along with that of Robert Rubin – took the wind out of the sales. The two were part of Bill Clinton’s administration, and responsible for a programme of deregulation, which caused Clinton in April of this year to admit “Summers and Rubin gave me lousy advice“.

The economic playing field has changed somewhat since Summers’ appointment in 2008. This gives Obama the opportunity to appoint someone more in touch with the order of the day: a careful watch on the financial sector, and the new appointment of a bold, independent regulatory body to oversee all areas of the economy, particularly the housing market which is under constant scrutiny around the world since the economic crash – believed to be the product of the bursting US housing bubble.

It also means the left, once again, will be putting pressure on Obama and hoping he qualifies his election promise of change with economic priorities that reflect that.

Today at TCF we will mostly be exposing attempts of authorities to justify odious policy choices with the aid of completely ridiculous arguments.

First, there was Dave setting out how the US policy on gay people in service is ‘justified’ by the argument that the end of the cold war meant the Dutch army allowed gays into their ranks, and this meant they became no good at fighting. 

Problem is, as Dave points out, he’s factually wrong as well as stupid.

And now here’s Home Office Minister Meg Hillier justifying her decision to imprison children on the basis that she’s really protecting them:

[W]ith children being detained I’m faced with a number of options.

One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying say if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported and I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route

(Daily Politics, BBC 19 March 2010.)

I can’t improve on the End Child Detention Now blog’s caustic commentary on this nonsense:

Hillier’s comment was clearly intended to create the impression that either:

a) destitute single asylum seekers would place orders for small children to be trafficked half way across the world by criminal gangs with forged identity papers (and no doubt matching the false ‘parents’ DNA and blood group;

or

b) they would somehow borrow or adopt children who had already been trafficked into the country (with neatly forged ID documents etc) for, as Meg said, a ‘high price’, the minute some empty-headed government decided to follow the soft-hearted Swedes, Australians and Canadians in not locking up children in detention centres.

Because of course these governments foolishly gave into the pro-children/pro-human rights lobby, and we all know there are containers full of trafficked children just waiting to be delivered to failed asylum seekers for large sums of money in Toronto, Sydney and Stockholm!

Quite simply, this is a ridiculous statement from Meg Hillier. 

It’s so far from a being a sensible justification that you almost have to admire the gall in coming up with it.  

When I set out in a previous post how wrong the government was to lock up children, I assumed any defence she might make of it might be on the grounds that the care afforded to children outside prison was even worse than in prison.

That would have been wrong-headed enough, but this justification defies belief.

(The above piece was written before I saw this similar piece at Open Democracy by Clare Sambrook of  End Child Detention Now.)

Socialisation, liberalisation, unionisation, social engineering. These policies, in the Dutch army, led to the inability of the Dutch to defend Srebrenica against the invading forces of the Republic of Srpska.

For retired General John Sheehan, formerly Supreme Allied Commander Europe, this is a fancy way of saying that allowing gays to serve in the military is a Bad Thing. Part of his testimony can be seen below.

Leaving la-la land for a moment, I’ve no idea how 400 Dutch soldiers were expected to fight off the invasion by 15,000 soldiers of the Drina Corps, without serious air and artillery support – which wasn’t forthcoming.

That’s the military reality of Srebrenica.

Sheehan says that the end of the Cold War saw Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg decide that they would no longer be called on to pursue “active combat” operations. This led to the policies I quoted from his testimony at the start of the article.

Except there’s a few problems: the unionisation of the Dutch armed forces took places in 1966. The removal of all discrimination against gays in the Dutch military occurred in 1974. Nothing to do with the Cold War, nothing to do with Europe going soft.

In fact, had the Soviets come pouring across the Elbe, there would have been gay men and women under the command of SACEUR General John Sheehan, fully anticipating active combat operations and not peacekeeping.

How inconvenient it is when you can’t find the facts to fit your bigotry. Ah never mind, just make them up!