Howard’s Kyoto alternative will have dire economic consequences

Clive Hamilton, once mentioned here for his debate with George Monbiot, has a nice piece on Crikey.com, today.

The 1992 UN Framework Convention is the mother treaty for the Kyoto Protocol, and the latter was agreed in 1997 because it was accepted that the voluntary measures set out on the Convention had failed to have any appreciable effect on the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

The decision by the United States to negotiate a future treaty under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention has left the Howard Government stranded. Although Australia ratified the Convention in the early 1990s, the Prime Minister has repeatedly attacked the UN process as flawed and insists that any progress on climate change must occur in other forums, notable AP6 and the forthcoming APEC meeting.

It does not yet seem to have acknowledged the import of the G8 agreement and the dramatic US shift.

His discussion is of Australia’s plan for a (domestic) emissions-trading economy, and the ability of that system to link up with, say, those of Europe and the US. Howard’s plans for APEC, non-Kyoto ratification and voluntary targest means, according to Hamilton, that ours will most likely not be acceptable to ‘theirs’ (for the same reason that one does not permit trade in manufactured goods with a country that, say, used slaves to make very cheap products – it’s unconscionable, first but, second, you’re at a spectacular disadvantage in the market). Europe would not allow such weak standards to invade their market, while Australians would find the price of trades increased drastically in the new market.

Hamilton concludes:

The only way to avoid this problem, which will apply to all attempts to link trading systems, is to harmonise not just the structures of the systems but the process of setting emission targets too.

Of course, this is precisely what happened at the Kyoto conference in 1997. Thus, implicit in the Prime Minister’s grand plan to develop a system to replace the Kyoto Protocol is a structural imperative to replicate it.

This replication process even extends to the proposed method of integrating developing countries into a global trading scheme. The Prime Minister’s Task Group recommends a process based closely on the Clean Development Mechanism of the Protocol, which allows firms with carbon reduction obligations to generate credits by investing in emission reductions in poor countries.

So all roads lead back to the Kyoto Protocol or a structure very like it. Despite all of the ill-informed attacks on the treaty in this country, the protocol was in truth an extraordinary achievement, the essential elements of which will inevitably be imitated in any subsequent global system.

The ubiquitous reduction of green politics to ethical consumerism

This is one very good line in an article in today’s Guardian, concerning this idiotic notion that coal can ever be clean.

China, that rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black and miners are killed at the rate of 5,000 a year (witness this month’s coverage of the 180 trapped and probably killed in Shandong province, and the two brothers who dug their way out of a collapsed shaft near Beijing), is building an average of two coal-fired power stations a week, and in six years has doubled its annual coal production. India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade. Panicked by the possible policy repercussions of George Bush’s departure, US power corporations are desperately pushing ahead with plans for about 150 coal-fired stations and leaning hard on presidential candidates – as evidenced by Rudy Giuliani’s recent suggestion that the US should “increase our reliance on coal”.

Moreover, the new coal rush is truly global: in the next five years, 37 countries – among them plenty of Kyoto signatories – will build additional coal-fired capacity, while world coal production heads towards a peak that will apparently materialise in about 25 years’ time.

In most cases, certainly in the likes of the US and China, one will simply find the profit motive working it’s abstract way around sound health and environmental policy, to wit: the people who want these things, and the people who allow them, all will make money from the enterprise while none will suffer the consequences.

Any country’s aristocratic class (however defined, and allowing for the pretense that they do not even exist, here) can afford clean land, clean air and clean water – all they get from coal is money and electricity.

For the rest of us, the whole idea of coal is technical efficiency, i.e. cheap electricity. It really won’t do to use coal for electricity, then throw taxes on it to constrain supply and demand because it’s so bloody toxic. Coal, as an environmental problem, does not have an economic solution. It requires a political solution, in a world in which fair political representation is as rare as ever (even the supposedly-enheartening case of Brian Baird is really only peculiar to the war in Iraq).

Amongst other things, the argument that it is necessary for energy independence does not make much sense. For a start, it is independence only so long as one has coal; but it is also only feasible so long as other countries, from whom one is therefore not independent, assisting with keeping the planet clean. Carbon sequestration is a fine idea worth pursuing, but I’m not sure China, for example, is capable of capturing its own emissions. It will need help. So too the US. I’ve always found environmentalist love affairs with clean coal odd. I’d much rather just use nuclear energy, if only I thought I could trust anybody to manage it without blowing me up.

As the article also identifys, it is also somewaht dependent upon subsidies – making it less the cheap energy source than you think it is. One wonders what a political economy would look like, if citizens were given the rights to direct their own taxes, as they pay them, to government uses. The revealed priorities of a country of tax-payers would be very interesting indeed, I think.

The article’s approach to the idea of clean coal is pretty good; its recommendation for British people realistic. Oddly, there’s another article in the paper today (or merely online) discussing the recent plan by the Lib-Dems to be carbon-free by 2050. Reading the article, it becomes clear that the writer does not seem to know that there is a report about how to do it. Strange.

Patients Turn to No-Interest Loans for Health Care

Also from my wife (who I’m told to point out is sick, yet not receiving adequate levels of attention from me. I, unfortunately, was not babied when sick, growing up: our attitudes towards deserving attention merely for having a summer cold differ), and from the New York Times:

Zero-interest financing, a familiar come-on at car dealerships and furniture stores, has found its way to another big-ticket consumer market: doctors’ and dentists’ offices.

For $3,500 laser eye surgery, $6,000 ceramic tooth implants or other procedures not typically covered by insurance, millions of consumers have arranged financing through more than 100,000 doctors and dentists that offer a year or more of interest-free monthly payments.

This has two points of interest. The first:

The room for expansion looks ample, as rising deductibles, co-payments and other costs may force more of the nation’s 250 million people with health insurance to finance out-of-pocket expenses for even basic medical care.

“As more and more of the costs of care are shifted to consumers, people are going to need more credit,” said Red Gillen, a senior analyst at Celent, an insurance and banking research firm. “They are still going to need health care.”

The zero-interest plans are not for everyone. In fact, they are available only to the creditworthy — meaning they offer no help to those among the nation’s 47 million uninsured who are in difficult financial situations.

This was of course turned out wonderfully in Michael Moore’s latest enterprise, Sicko. I have health insurance – it is a condition of employment at my University, just as it is a condition of enrollment for foreign students. I still do not, for a second, actually believe that, should I suffer a catastrophic, or even adverse, health event, my health insurance will do any good. It is also principally the reason my wife and I aren’t staying in the US for long.

The passage also highlights what ought really to be discussed far more than it is: it is the ‘disappearing middle’, such as we are wont to call it, that will (a) only benefit from but (b) surprisingly, needs this line of credit. Not that it ought to be that surprising, given that the median wage has stagnated over the last many years, here, while health care costs most certainly have not. The rule was always to have insurance while in the US, because you cannot afford to be sick (Americans: you probably would be surprised at the low regard in which you are held, internationally, with regard to health, health care and health outcomes). Now it would appear to be evolving: you cannot afford to be sick in the US, insured or not.

This also concerns the steady decline in savings in this country. Households simply do not save. We (because the trend most certainly includes countries like Australia and England) purchase on credit; anticipating better days ahead – precisely why a few classes on the Permanent Income Hypothesis and the Life Cycle Hypothesis would do our societies a bloody world of good. If anything, what ought to be noteworthy is that it is taking so long for negative savings instruments (credit) to apply to truly unanticipated events. Even here, the application is fairly elective surgery.

The Grossman Model, and investing in your own health

Thus the second point. The Grossman Model of the demand for health care posits, essentially, that we do not demand health care because we like health care: we demand health care because we want health itself. Moreover, we invest in health as a stock – i.e. we invest in our own level of health stock. If we are unhealthy, we add to our health. If we are super-healthy, we do not bother. Just like education, health is an element of human capital, the set of productive skills and technical knowledge held by each individual, and a contributing factor to our lifetime income.

Ergo, according to the Grossman model, financing health interventions with debt is not a bad idea: it is a leveraged investment in future earnings, just like a mortgage, or a home loan that is used explicitly to improve the value of an existing home (or business, for that matter). Here lies the problem, though. Elective dental and optical procedures to not fit this mold. An operation to correct macular degeneration? Yes, that will increase your future income, relative to no intervention. Laser surgery so that you don’t need glasses? If you’re a professional athlete, maybe – but then, you would have the money already. The same is true of the Times’ anecdotal patient:

For people able to keep up their payments, though, the plans can make it possible to receive treatments that otherwise might be out of reach.

“There was no way I had $6,000 right out of my pocket,” said Nancy Schlachter, 40, who has dental insurance through her job as an accounts payable manager for a national construction company. She went to Dr. Mercurio for a series of dental procedures including a new crown, fillings and a tooth implant.

“The implant was very expensive, and it was not covered,” Ms. Schlachter said. But the dentist’s office arranged 12-month zero-interest financing. “It was the only way I could do it,” she said.

I must have made the point many times over, here and elsewhere, that the principal cause of the sub-prime debacle (and I flatter myself that I was among those with the sense to do this, however unnoticed, before ‘the media’ caught up) is people buying that which they cannot afford. Some people cannot afford to own their own home, and should not be allowed to be told that they should (up yours, Mr. President). Similarly, and definitely in the US, many people cannot afford cosmetic dental and optical surgery, and should equally (if not moreso! One cannot foreclose and sell their teeth to recoup a loss) never be led to believe that they can, with a little borrowing.

So, why? To protect the lie. The lie that the system in the US works; that the American Dream can be the American Reality. In Australia, the UK, etc. it is not that much different. A decade of Howard and Blair has to show that our wealth, as signalled by our ability to purchase, if not afford, things, has expanded. The politicians, the talking heads on Fox news, they all can afford to live above this mess in the first place, and as long as they can keep the lie going, they make their money while we elect them, watch them, buy their products and truly come to believe that Work Makes Free.

The fundamental difference, and one our conventional wisdom long ago left behind, is between “able to purchase” and “able to afford”. They are not the same thing, and as our ability to afford lifestyles has deteriorated in concordance with the rape of economics by utterly corrupt aristocracies (however defined), the mechanisms through which we can purchase them nevertheless, along with our own ignorance, vacuity and insularity, have increased. Are still increasing, in fact.

It’s getting late, and I am tired. There is an open invitation to fill the comments with counter-arguments about personal responsibility. If you’ve the mind to, see if you can do it while also addressing the media, rationality and information asymmetries.

Almost 1.55 Million New Yorkers Live in Poverty; NYC’s Income Gap Between Rich and Poor is Huge

Another wife-sourced article! And another New York article.

Yesterday, the U.S. Census released data showing that the number of New Yorkers living in poverty increased, though the national number dropped. With more than 1.54 million New Yorkers in poverty, that makes it a 2% increase from last year, a change the city attributes to how the data was collected. Still, Mayor Bloomberg said, “Whether the numbers are overstated or understated, there is no question that they are much too high and you have to keep working on finding ways to reduce the poverty level.”

…

The Census data also shows that the income gap between the New York’s richest fifth and poorest fifth is the biggest in the country. And in Manhattan, the numbers break down to the richest 20% making $351,333 annually versus $8,855 of the poorest 20%.

I’m not convinced this is even newsworthy, frankly. In that it should not come as a surprise. That very rich people live in New York City is not surprising. Given the size of the city, and the lack of decent rail transport almost anywhere in this country (apropos commuting by rail from even Allentown, Pa. to New York City, a distance many Sydneysiders cover in their commute) it is also not surprising that the servicepeople also live here and, also given the nature of this country, they earn very little. Put them together and you get income inequality.

Apropos homeless and poverty statistics, also: there is an ethnic gradient to income and industry type, meaning that New York’s working poor most likely migrated in – as will many of the homeless have, either as homeless or inexorably on their way to it. Poor and homeless people, like some/many working poor, may have ‘happened’ to New York, rather than the other way around.

There are two phenomena, here, also, which should not be overlooked: inequality is one thing, but poverty/homelessness is another, and they have different explanations and appropriate policy responses.

This does not mean I don’t think there’s a problem. The welfare state as it exists here is a crime. I would just rather see some more informative description of the problem. The phenomenon, as it is presented here, is belied by its own statistics. There are quite a few non-welfarist explanations for the heterogeneity of workers and incomes in New York City, and the wage disparity does not, in fact, need to be ‘unfair’. While poverty and homelessness is always a failure of society, it too has broader causes – and, potentially, cures – that we tend to overlook.

They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold; but the wind goes right through you it’s no place for the old

My wife put me onto this story:

ON July 12, someone slipped a letter under Ann Shannon’s front door and under the front door of every other apartment in Knickerbocker Plaza, a hulking government-subsidized complex on Second Avenue at East 91st Street.

The letter announced that the owner of the 578-apartment complex was withdrawing from the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, which subsidizes lower- and middle-income housing, and would be raising rents to market levels by next summer.

…

Transformation of housing for middle-income families into luxury apartments has become an ever more persistent refrain in the city, accompanied by ever more anger and unhappiness on the part of residents.

When Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village along the East River were sold in a record-setting deal late last year, howls of dismay were heard, not only from tenants but from champions of affordable housing. The intensity of their reaction was due in part to the immense complexes’ symbolic role as havens for generations of working- and middle-class New Yorkers.

Here’s where the New York Times cocks up their argument (I think). The bad side of this is that these areas ’should’ exist to benefit New York City service people (police, firefighters, teachers, etc.). The New York Times’ welfarism, though, takes this bent:

The anxiety that filled the apartments and hallways of Knickerbocker Plaza after the letter arrived was especially noticeable at the complex’s senior center, a popular meeting place for the elderly men and women who make up about a third of the buildings’ 1,500 residents.

“Everyone is very stressed,” said Carol McCabe, a tenant of 32 years who helps run the center. “You’re afraid. You don’t know what’s going to happen to your life in a year.”

Residents are already eyeing the future uneasily.

“Where am I going to go?” asked Shirley Deonarine, a retired nurse who has also lived at Knickerbocker since it opened. “Everywhere you turn, it’s luxury rentals.”

Near Ms. Deonarine sat a retired Teamster who used to work for Pepsi-Cola, a former hospital administrator, a man who used to sell produce, two former employees of the city’s Parks Department and a retired teacher. The group was typical of the people the Mitchell-Lama program was designed to benefit.

Here’s where I’m a bastard. New York City has more housing problems than this (like its approach to affordability by way of rent control and rent stabilisation), but the main argument one must consider is the space Manhattan has, and the people working and living (or trying to live) in it. By listing a building full of retired people, all the Times probably does is remind us of the manufactured housing shortages that plague the rest of us trying to find an apartment here.

I’m not saying that luxury co-ops, etc. are good – it will not help matters, it will only let new-wealthy people spend more of their money. I doubt average rents will ease, or that the rental market here will get any slack. What I am saying is that no point of welfarism is going to be carried by pointing to retirees. Let them move to New Jersey; let them move to Florida.

It is the unkindness characteristic of a dismal scientist, but keeping a system in place, artificially, for the benefit of retirees whose preference is to live in a place that is only affordable if the rest of us suffer is extra-welfarist. Even in the social-welfarist countries of my background, that will not be popular. If you lost a high-paying job and had to take less money, you would not be able to insist the city keeps rent low so you can afford to stay where you are. If you retire and settle on a lower fixed income, the same principle should apply.

The moral implication is not good, I admit. It says we should have a city of few families and no elderly, except the very rich. Mate, if you thought Manhattan was anything besides heading that way already…

What did surprise me was that this was the Times’ take although, given the nature of New York City The Culture, perhaps it should no. No argument is made, though, that the people who keep us safe, clean and educate our children are owed affordable housing here while they do so. That welfarism I will support, because it makes perfect sense. This argument does not.

The special place of Indigenous people in the history and the life of this country

John Howard visited the Aboriginal town of Ntaria (Hermannsburg) Tuesday this week.

“We have a simple aim,” he told the locals, “and that is whilst respecting a special place of Indigenous people in the history and the life of this country, their future can only be as part of the mainstream of the Australian community.

“But unless they can get a share of the bounty of this great and prosperous country, their future will be bleak.”

On this point, the Prime Minister is quite correct. They will only progress as part of the mainstream: because people like John Howard see to it that government policies punish them completely if they attempt anything different. In this instance, the Prime Minister displayed a remarkably idiosyncractic defition of “sharing bounty”:

In moves seemingly impossible to reconcile with the protection of Aboriginal children on remote towns and communities in the Northern Territory, a document has come into the hands of Crikey that presages a federal government takeover of millions of dollars worth of assets owned by Aboriginal organisations.

…

Organisational assets above the value of $400,000 are to be compulsorily acquired by Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) and transferred to a new entity, the Indigenous Economic Development Trust (IEDT), and then rented back at commercial rates to the same organisations from which the asset has been taken from.

In some cases this will make those organisations commercially unviable, leading to financial collapse and loss of Aboriginal jobs. Every reason for Aboriginal organisations for acquiring property as part of engaging with capitalism has been thrown out in favour of a centrally controlled government bureaucracy.

The article contains details of the supposed policy. I’m sure there must be more to this than appears – even by the disgusting standards of the Howard government this is something else. We shall see.

If Britons want to stop Afghans growing poppies they must stop using heroin

I had meant to write about the opening of the new bridge on the River Panj, with specific regard to its position as facilitating the trade in drugs more than the trade in just about anything else. Look forward to US forces bombing it to hell for exactly that reason, a year from now.

A friend just put me onto a recent Free Comment (after the fashion) on the Guardian’s website:

Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand

The vast increase in opium poppy farming in Afghanistan is indicative of an inability to grasp a basic law of economics

The British government for sure knows how to do one thing. It knows how to help farmers in need. Since it arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and was put in charge of the staple poppy crop, ministers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting it. On Monday the United Nations announced the result. Poppy production in Afghanistan has soared since the invasion, this year alone by 34%. The harvest in the British-occupied protectorate of Helmand rose by 50% in 12 months. This is a dazzling triumph for agricultural intervention.

…

Every schoolchild economist knows demand will always attract supply. If the government wants to restrict demand for heroin in Britain, it could do so by making it more expensive. This was the covert rationale for the spectacularly failed poppy eradication policy of 2001. But impoverishing local Afghan farmers, processors and traders, who receive a tiny proportion of the eventual street price, will not achieve this any more than it has done already.

The article also discusses, briefly, the plan as great as it was laughably never going to happen with the politicians at all of our helms: buy out poppy farmers. Nationalise the drug trade, so to speak, then shut it down.

The visionary proposal of the Senlis Council thinktank, to buy the entire Afghan poppy crop, which some have been pushing for five years, must now be rated close to hopeless. The hope is that the UN could use the opium to meet a world shortage of morphine, in the same way as the Turkish and Indian crops are bought at present. The Afghans would thus get a fair and legal return for what they produce so successfully.

After the invasion in 2001, poppy production was minimal and bulk purchase might have been worth a try. But the US privately allowed anti-Taliban warlords to start replanting and the proposal is now pie in the sky. To buy the whole crop would be wildly expensive and logistically close to impossible. Without curbing demand, stemming one supply route would merely increase price and stimulate substitute supply from elsewhere.

If you’ve the time and inclination, it’s worth a short while wandering around the website and publications of the Senlis Council. They’ve written not a small amount on what we could learn from narcotic production, over the years – Lord knows the clearly-drug-inspired Scorched Earth/War On Drugs approach has yet ever to prove useful for more than the odd Tom Clancy novel.

UPDATE! Today’s Guardian is running an article addressing various solutions to the problem. It’s interesting enough.

Monbiot on neo-liberalism

George Monbiot’s latest post considers our contemporary crises, and lays their origins, like Vercingetorix, at the feet of neo-liberalism (Asterix fans: Vercingetorix was real):

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society’s founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take a least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would promote it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.

You may remember this school of thought from the Brooklyn Rail’s article about New York city. Needless to say, it will not comfort you if you are of a neo-liberalist bent. If you aren’t, or if you’re un-affiliated, one way or another, you should give the article a few minutes.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted

Originally found at the delightfully-named Dandelion Salad, Rolling Stone Magazine has quite the excoriation in its current issue, with regards cost-plus contracting and what to do when corrupt anti-governments starts wars.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity – to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over – not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

There are pages of the same. Very impressive, no? I actually use Halliburton (or contractors in Iraq, generally) as a examplars in my economics class for the systemic flaw in using cost-plus pricing for government work – particularly a war, which is supposed to so adequately-planned that cost-plus pricing should never even be needed in the first place.

Here’s an analogy: would you hire a bunch of people to build your house, paying them a daily rate for as long as it took, and telling them you’d pay whatever costs they incurred to build your house, plus 3%? If you would, please, please can I build a house for you? I’ll be in and out in no time, I promise: the land will practically pay for itself, anyway.

It reminds me, actually, of something a friend sent a while back. Be warned, this may suck some steam out of your current outrage, and possibly just make you depressed, even suicidal. Lord knows, it inspired me to give up my remaining hope for our idiot species.

Yes, that is 1933.

Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

He wrote a book about it.

UPDATE! Speaking of dim views taken of the White House’s War(s): the ever-entertaining Apple Trailers site is carrying that for No End In Sight, the decidedly anti-war (or, probably more accurately, anti-Bush-administration) documentary about the fall, and fall, of Baghdad (no, that was not a typo).

The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality.

Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003), as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and prominent analysts.

NO END IN SIGHT examines the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy – the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government and the disbanding of the Iraqi military – largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today.

He said the Prime Minister, John Howard, had been “drunk on power”

Ah, politics:

The Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard today unveiled the long-awaited transition details of Labor’s plan to rip-up the Howard Government’s WorkChoices plan and abolish Australian Workplace Agreements.

It also announced it would keep the Government’s rules on secondary boycotts and preventing union bosses from demanding entry into a workplace without notice.

…

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said Labor’s policy was “by the union bosses for the union bosses” and accused Mr Rudd of going through a “charade” that he had stood up to the unions.

…

“Labor’s policy will mean more power to the union bosses to push industry wide wage claims, leading to increased inflation and upward pressure on interest rates,” Mr Howard said.

He said Labor’s plan would overturn the rights that small business have to run their businesses free of interference from the trade union movement.

…

ACTU president Sharan Burrow welcomed Labor’s policy, saying it would improve rights in the workplace but said the union movement did not support elements of the transition plan.

Ms Burrow said the ACTU believed Labor could have abolished AWAs sooner, opposed the decision to keep the Government’s limits on union right of entry into workplaces and opposed the decision to allow workers earning over $100,000 to not be covered by awards.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout said “important concerns” remained about Labor’s plan and business was still unhappy about the policy to scrap AWAs but the transition arrangements announced today “appear workable”.

Making it rather a nice move, what? I did skip, in the interests of making everybody look criminaly vacuous while a country’s industrial relations would rather have, say, grown-ups in charge, some other details that demonstrate the policy is more worker-friendly than not. I wouldn’t say it’s especially Union-friendly, though but, then, I’m not the Prime Minister. Even the wankers at the Wall Street Journal feel inspired to be dicks in Rudd’s direction, for Cliff’s sake.

Another of the Prime Minister’s responses is, by now, a familiar friend:

“Labor’s industrial relations policy is not a plan to keep the economy strong. It is a deal cobbled together to buy the further financial support of the union bosses until election day.

One can almost hear, within Howard’s whiny voice, a cry of despair that, unlike his BFF Bush, he does not live in a country in which he just say Labor will cause terrorist attacks. I can’t imagine that he seriously thinks that being a crybaby will alter the opinion polls favouring Labor as economic managers – although the fact that it was 39% to 36%, with fully 25% undecided, should demonstrate to both sides that the rest of us would like them to grow up.