The Rag Blog

Why the former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions resigned his post.

I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.

In my view — and I think most lawyers would agree — it is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality. Yet the political appointee known as the “convening authority” — a title with no counterpart in civilian courts — was not living up to that obligation.

In a nutshell, the convening authority is supposed to be objective — not predisposed for the prosecution or defense — and gets to make important decisions at various stages in the process. The convening authority decides which charges filed by the prosecution go to trial and which are dismissed, chooses who serves on the jury, decides whether to approve requests for experts and reassesses findings of guilt and sentences, among other things.

Earlier this year, Susan Crawford was appointed by the secretary of Defense to replace Maj. Gen. John Altenburg as the convening authority. Altenburg’s staff had kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality. Crawford, on the other hand, had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution’s pretrial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases, among other things.

How can you direct someone to do something — use specific evidence to bring specific charges against a specific person at a specific time, for instance — and later make an impartial assessment of whether they behaved properly? Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused.

The second reason I resigned is that I believe even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with skepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors. Telling the world, “Trust me, you would have been impressed if only you could have seen what we did in the courtroom” will not bolster our standing as defenders of justice. Getting evidence through the classification review process to allow its use in open hearings is time-consuming, but it is time well spent.

Crawford, however, thought it unnecessary to wait because the rules permit closed proceedings. There is no doubt that some portions of some trials have to be closed to protect classified information, but that should be the last option after exhausting all reasonable alternatives. Transparency is critical.

Finally, I resigned because of two memos signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England that placed the chief prosecutor — that was me — in a chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.

I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor’s office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes’ place in my chain of command.

The Military Commissions Act provides a foundation for fair trials, but some changes are clearly necessary. I was confident in full, fair and open trials when Gen. Altenburg was the convening authority and Brig. Gen. Tom Hemingway was his legal advisor. Collectively, they spent nearly 65 years in active duty, and they were committed to ensuring the integrity of military law. They acted on principle rather than politics.

The first step, if these truly are military commissions and not merely a political smoke screen, is to take control out of the hands of political appointees like Haynes and Crawford and give it back to the military.

The president first authorized military commissions in November 2001, more than six years ago, and the lack of progress is obvious. Only one war-crime case has been completed. It is time for the political appointees who created this quagmire to let go.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have said that how we treat the enemy says more about us than it does about him. If we want these military commissions to say anything good about us, it’s time to take the politics out of military commissions, give the military control over the process and make the proceedings open and transparent.

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

With Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the “emerging Republican majority.” Now, that Republican “majority” finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.

Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things — the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s — does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.

War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.

The Politics of Fear in Reverse

Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there’s no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the “surge,” can, in the end, make a difference — because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.

The fatal impact of the President’s adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration. According to the latest polls, the Democrats who rate national security a key concern has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the statistically irrelevant. Independents display a similar “been there, done that” attitude. Republicans do express significantly greater levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two ago.

In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.

And then there is the war on the Constitution. Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing around the time of World War I, is remembered today for one trenchant observation: that war is the health of the state. Mobilizing for war invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic state apparatus and its power over everyday life. Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne “healthiness” is today visibly morphing into its opposite — what we might call the “sickness of the state.”

The constitutional transgressions of the executive branch and its abrogation of the powers reserved to the other two branches of government are, by now, reasonably well known. Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by the invasion of Iraq. It would be short-sighted to think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a small circle of civil libertarians. There is a long-lived and robust tradition in American political life always resentful of this kind of statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale defections from the Republican Party by those who believe it has been kidnapped by political elites masquerading as down-home, “live free or die” conservatives.

Now, add potential economic collapse to this witches brew. Even the soberest economy watchers, pundits with PhDs — whose dismal record in predicting anything tempts me not to mention this — are prophesying dark times ahead. Depression — or a slump so deep it’s not worth quibbling about the difference — is evidently on the way; indeed is already underway. The economics of militarism have been a mainstay of business stability for more than half century; but now, as in the Vietnam era, deficits incurred to finance invasion only exacerbate a much more embracing dilemma.

Start with the confidence game being run out of Wall Street; after all, the subprime mortgage debacle now occupies newspaper front pages day after outrageous day. Certainly, these tales of greed and financial malfeasance are numbingly familiar. Yet, precisely that sense of déjà vu all over again, of Enron revisited, of an endless cascade of scandalous, irrational behavior affecting the central financial institutions of our world suggests just how dire things have become.

Enronization as Normal Life

Once upon a time, all through the nineteenth century, financial panics — often precipitating more widespread economic slumps — were a commonly accepted, if dreaded, part of “normal” economic life. Then the Crash of 1929, followed by the New Deal Keynesian regulatory state called into being to prevent its recurrence, made these cyclical extremes rare.

Beginning with the stock market crash of 1987, however, they have become ever more common again, most notoriously — until now, that is — with the dot.com implosion of 2000 and the Enronization that followed. Enron seems like only yesterday because, in fact, it was only yesterday, which strongly suggests that the financial sector is now increasingly out of control. At least three factors lurk behind this new reality.

Thanks to the Reagan counterrevolution, there is precious little left of the regulatory state — and what remains is effectively run by those who most need to be regulated. (Despite bitter complaints in the business community, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the dot.com bubble burst, has proven weak tea indeed when it comes to preventing financial high jinks, as the current financial meltdown indicates.)

More significantly, for at least the last quarter-century, the whole U.S. economic system has lived off the speculations generated by the financial sector — sometimes given the acronym FIRE for finance, insurance, and real estate). It has grown exponentially while, in the country’s industrial heartland in particular, much of the rest of the economy has withered away. FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to do great harm. Its growth, moreover, has fed a proliferation of financial activities and assets so complex and arcane that even their designers don’t fully understand how they operate.

One might call this the sorcerer’s apprentice effect. In such an environment, the likelihood and frequency of financial panics grows, so much so that they become “normal accidents” — an oxymoron first applied to highly sophisticated technological systems like nuclear power plants by the sociologist Charles Perrow. Such systems are inherently subject to breakdowns for reasons those operating them can’t fully anticipate, or correctly respond to, once they’re underway. This is so precisely because they never fully understood the labyrinthine intricacies and ramifying effects of the way they worked in the first place.

Likening the current subprime implosion to such a “normal accident” is more than metaphorical. Today’s Wall Street fabricators of avant-garde financial instruments are actually called “financial engineers.” They got their training in “labs,” much like Dr. Frankenstein’s, located at Wharton, Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley. Each time one of their confections goes south, they scratch their heads in bewilderment — always making sure, of course, that they have financial life-rafts handy, while investors, employees, suppliers, and whole communities go down with the ship.

What makes Wall Street’s latest “normal accident” so portentous, however, is the way it is interacting with, and infecting, healthier parts of the economy. When the dot.com bubble burst many innocents were hurt, not just denizens of the Street. Still, its impact turned out to be limited. Now, via the subprime mortgage meltdown, Main Street is under the gun.

It is not only a matter of mass foreclosures. It is not merely a question of collapsing home prices. It is not simply the shutting down of large portions of the construction industry (inspiring some of those doom-and-gloom prognostications). It is not just the born-again skittishness of financial institutions which have, all of sudden, gotten religion, rediscovered the word “prudence,” and won’t lend to anybody. It is all of this, taken together, which points ominously to a general collapse of the credit structure that has shored up consumer capitalism for decades.

Campaigning Through a Perfect Storm of Economic Disaster

The equity built up during the long housing boom has been the main resource for ordinary people financing their big-ticket-item expenses — from college educations to consumer durables, from trading-up on the housing market to vacationing abroad. Much of that equity, that consumer wherewithal, has suddenly vanished, and more of it soon will. So, too, the life-lines of credit that allow all sorts of small and medium-sized businesses to function and hire people are drying up fast. Whole communities, industries, and regional economies are in jeopardy.

All of that might be considered enough, but there’s more. Oil, of course. Here, the connection to Iraq is clear; but, arguably, the wild escalation of petroleum prices might have happened anyway. Certainly, the energy price explosion exacerbates the general economic crisis, in part by raising the costs of production all across the economy, and so abetting the forces of economic contraction. In the same way, each increase in the price of oil further contributes to what most now agree is a nearly insupportable level in the U.S. balance of payments deficit. That, in turn, is contributing to the steady withering away of the value of the dollar, a devaluation which then further ratchets up the price of oil (partially to compensate holders of those petrodollars who find themselves in possession of an increasingly worthless currency). As strategic countries in the Middle East and Asia grow increasingly more comfortable converting their holdings into euros or other more reliable — which is to say, more profitable — currencies, a speculative run on the dollar becomes a real, if scary, possibility for everyone.

Finally, it is vital to recall that this tsunami of bad business is about to wash over an already very sick economy. While the old regime, the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, has lived off the heady vapors of the FIRE sector, it has left in its wake a de-industrialized nation, full of super-exploited immigrants and millions of families whose earnings have suffered steady erosion. Two wage-earners, working longer hours, are now needed to (barely) sustain a standard of living once earned by one. And that doesn’t count the melting away of health insurance, pensions, and other forms of protection against the vicissitudes of the free market or natural calamities. This, too, is the enduring hallmark of a political economy about to go belly-up.

This perfect storm will be upon us just as the election season heats up. It will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party, which is the definitive reason 2008 will indeed qualify as a turning-point election. Reports of defections from the conservative ascendancy have been emerging from all points on the political compass. The Congressional elections of 2006 registered the first seismic shock of this change. Since then, independents and moderate Republicans continue to indicate, in growing numbers in the polls, that they are leaving the Grand Old Party. The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing loss of faith among important circles of business and finance. Hard core religious right-wingers are airing their doubts in public. Libertarians delight in the apostate candidacy of Ron Paul. Conservative populist resentment of immigration runs head on into corporate elite determination to enlarge a sizeable pool of cheap labor, while Hispanics head back to the Democratic Party in droves. Even the Republican Party’s own elected officials are engaged in a mass movement to retire.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed — labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don’t think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

Take the presidential campaign of 1932 as an instructive example. The crisis of the Great Depression was systemic, but the response of the Democratic Party and its candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt — though few remember this now — was hardly daring. In many ways, it was not very different from that of Republican President Herbert Hoover; nor was there a great deal of militant opposition in the streets, not in 1932 anyway, hardly more than the woeful degree of organized mass resistance we see today despite all the Bush administration’s provocations.

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open.

Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.

The Gate, Tonoho O’Odham Nation (Arizona)

While Homeland Security announced the forced occupation and takeover of Lipan Apache lands in Texas for the border wall, I was at the Arizona border once again being bullied by the US Border Patrol.

All along the border, Homeland Security’s Border Patrol is intimidating and harassing the people who have lived here all their lives.

The Tohono O’odham have lived here since time immemorial. Now their land has been seized and taken over by the Border Patrol, the contractor Boeing and the invading National Guardsmen, for construction of the border wall. The graves of O’odham ancestors have been dug up, according to the traditional O’odham now speaking out against the militarization and abuse.

All along the border, young people are intimidated and harassed constantly. Tailgating police, excessive force by police and Nazi-style prosecutors push young people into rage and jails.

At the same time in Tucson, a judge has declared peace activities opposing US torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, as a “danger to the community” and jailed them.

The United States government has become the terrorist it claims to oppose.

In Texas, Margo Tamez, Lipan Apache/Jumano Apache, called for immediate support, when Homeland Security announced the occupation of lands where Apache land title holders are refusing to sign NSA waivers for the border wall.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the United States will seize private lands in south Texas for the border wall, using the law of eminent domain.

Tamez said, “We need your help on our continuing efforts to protect and keep safe the elders of our struggle against U.S. tyranny.”

Chertoff announced plans to force occupation of South Texas families who refuse to allow the government access to their lands.

Tamez said, “‘Refusers’ such as the Lipan Apache Land Grant Women Defense, led by my mother, Dr. Eloisa Garcia Tamez (Lipan Apache, Basque-Apache), in the rancheria of El Calaboz, have frustrated the NSA, Border Patrol and Army Corps of Engineers officials for over two years, and increasingly in the last two months.

“Using tactics such as public announcements over the news service, used as intimidation and as psychological warfare — NSA/Chertoff exploits the press to prepare the nation to invade South Texas — and indigenous peoples–who are being ‘architected as the perpetual enemies of the United States.’ This is an old story of genocidal tactics and militarization.

“This scenario played out before, in 19th century, in 20th century. And now the 21st, my mother, the ‘child of lightning ceremony’, is fighting for the vestiges of our traditional lands.

“My mother, and the ancestors of ‘the place where the Lipan pray’, have been critical to our land-based struggle, and they are leaders in an Apache struggle in the Mexico-US International Boundary region. Our elder voices direct us in a huge role that Apache people will play in standing up against tyranny of the settler society. We cannot do this without the support and the solidarity of our indigenous sisters and brothers who are also at the forefront of the 21st century battles for our rights as indigenous people with ancient footprints on this land.

“My mother, at this stage of our community-based struggle, indicates that she is prepared to receive national and international support for our small community on the peripheries of U.S. empire. She wrote a comment on the page of this news story out of Houston, Texas.

“Today we are submitting our comments to the Environmental Impact Statement authorities, and parallel to that we are submitting an in depth case study of our histories under U.S., Mexican, Spanish, Vatican and corporate domination to the International Indian Treaty Council shadow report to be submitted to the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racism and Racial Discrimination in December,” Tamez said.

Meanwhile in Tucson, peace activists opposing US torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were declared a “danger to the community” and jailed. They are the latest prisoners of conscience taking action against the torture training at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. Earlier, Fort Huachuca was also the site of the originator of the torture manuals used by the Schools of the Americas, leading to the murder, rape, torture and disappearance of masses of Indigenous Peoples in Central and South America in the 1980s and 1990s.

At a detention hearing in federal court in Tucson, Betsy Lamb, a retired Catholic lay leader, and Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada were jailed without bail until their trial, according to the support group “Torture on Trial.”

Lamb, Zawada and Mary Burton Riseley were arrested on November 18 at Fort Huachuca, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, during a protest of military use of torture against war detainees.

Magistrate Hector Estrada was concerned by evidence that both Lamb and Zawada had failed to heed an order of the court in cases pending in other jurisdictions. Betsy Lamb is awaiting trial for a September anti-war protest outside the office of Rep. Greg Walden, in Bend, Oregon.

As a standard condition of release on her own recognizance, Lamb had promised not to commit any other crime while awaiting trial. Fr. Zawada has an outstanding bench warrant for failure to appear for a court date in Washington, D.C., where he has been arrested several times in recent years for anti-war protest.

Army Prosecutor Capt. Evan Seamone came to court with three witnesses in dress uniform, several poster-sized photo enlargements and a videotape of the arrests. But the magistrate said he already knew the defendants’ intent, and would only listen to Seamone’s summation.

Seamone described the defendants’ peaceful passage through police barricades at the gate of Fort Huachuca as a violent act because it had to be met by police, who were forced to go face to face with the unarmed protesters and lift them from a kneeling position. In the eyes of the law and legal precedent, Seamone argued that such violent trespass warranted pretrial detention for the safety of the community.

Were the court to release Zawada and Lamb, “their blatant defiance is likely to happen again” Seamone warned, gravely predicting that “all kinds of chaos” would ensue at the gate to Fort Huachuca.

Attorney Rachel Wilson, representing the defendants, objected repeatedly without success to Seamone’s arguments. Wilson told the court that Ms. Lamb had “learned her lesson” and was willing to post bond along with her promise to return to court for trial. Estrada was unmoved.

He told the defendants he didn’t trust them and that he believed they were right where they wanted to be – before him in chains. Protest is brinkmanship, and the point is to not be arrested; better to organize a conference or seminar, he chided.

Estrada then ordered that Lamb and Zawada be kept in custody until their February 4 trial because they “remain a flight risk, and are a danger to the community.” Not even Capt. Seamone had suggested that the defendants were a “flight risk”.

Responding to the court’s conclusion, Felice Cohen-Joppa said of her friends, “Betsy Lamb and Jerry Zawada are not a danger to the community – they, along with Mary Burton Riseley, are the conscience of the community. They are shining a light on the involvement of military intelligence in torture around the world. Their nonviolent acts are no more a danger to the community than were the nonviolent acts of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Lamb and Zawada are not the only people now in prison for peaceful protest of U.S. torture practices.

On October 17, Magistrate Estrada sent Frs. Steve Kelly and Louie Vitale to prison for five months in prison for a similar protest at Fort Huachuca in November, 2006. They are scheduled to be released in mid-March.

Brenda Norrell can be reached at: brendanorrell@gmail.com

More: www.tortureontrial.org

Please see photo of construction of the border fence on Tohono O’odham land: www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

What has changed in the way we see the world? For as long as I can remember, the relationship of journalists with power has been hidden behind a bogus objectivity and notions of an “apathetic public” that justify a mantra of “giving the public what they want”. What has changed is the public’s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people in western democracies are questioning as never before, particularly via the internet. Why, they ask, is the great majority of news sourced to authority and its vested interests? Why are many journalists the agents of power, not people?

Much of this bracing new thinking can be traced to a remarkable UK website, www.medialens.org. The creators of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, assisted by their webmaster, Olly Maw, have had such an extraordinary influence since they set up the site in 2001 that, without their meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism’s first draft of bad history. Peter Wilby put it well in his review of Guardians of Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media, a drawing-together of Media Lens essays published by Pluto Press, which he described as “mercifully free of academic or political jargon and awesomely well researched. All journalists should read it, because the Davids make a case that demands to be answered.”

That appeared in the New Statesman. Not a single major newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can remember. Take the latest Media Lens essay, “Invasion – a Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance”. Written with Nikolai Lanine, who served in the Soviet army during its 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, it draws on Soviet-era newspaper archives, comparing the propaganda of that time with current western media performance. They are revealed as almost identical.

Like the reported “success” of the US “surge” in Iraq, the Soviet equivalent allowed “poor peasants [to work] the land peacefully”. Like the Americans and British in Iraq and Afghanistan, Soviet troops were liberators who became peacekeepers and always acted in “self-defence”. The BBC’s Mark Urban’s revelation of the “first real evidence that President Bush’s grand design of toppling a dictator and forcing a democracy into the heart of the Middle East could work” (Newsnight, 12 April 2005) is almost word for word that of Soviet commentators claiming benign and noble intent behind Moscow’s actions in Afghanistan. The BBC’s Paul Wood, in thrall to the 101st Airborne, reported that the Americans “must win here if they are to leave Iraq . . . There is much still to do.” That precisely was the Soviet line.

The tone of Media Lens’s questions to journalists is so respectful that personal honesty is never questioned. Perhaps that explains a reaction that can be both outraged and comic. The BBC presenter Gavin Esler, champion of Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan, ranted at Media Lens emailers as “fascistic” and “beyond redemption”. Roger Alton, editor of the London Observer and champion of the invasion of Iraq, replied to one ultra-polite member of the public: “Have you been told to write in by those cunts at Media Lens?” When questioned about her environmental reporting, Fiona Harvey, of the Financial Times, replied: “You’re pathetic . . . Who are you?”

The message is: how dare you challenge us in such a way that might expose us? How dare you do the job of true journalism and keep the record straight? Peter Barron, the editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, took a different approach. “I rather like them. David Edwards and David Cromwell are unfailingly polite, their points are well argued and sometimes they’re plain right.”

For a decade, Australians have been living under a right-wing, semi-fascist and racist Liberal government, led by an egomaniac John Winston Howard. In order to win elections, the Howard’s gang manipulated the public, instilled fear and incited hatred against marginalised communities, including the small community of Arab and Muslim Australians. Racism has been the way that elections have been won in Australia since 1996.

In the past four elections, John Howard skilfully employed deception and scapegoating. With insatiable appetite for racism and bigotry, Australians were largely receptive to an agenda of racism and division, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. In the 2007 elections, Howard’s gang tried to use the same recipe of scaremongering and fear tactics, but failed because most Australians found John Howard to be a dishonest and deceptive politician.

First, it was the Indian-born Doctor, Mohamed Haneef who was employed at the Gold Coast Hospital. Dr Haneef was unfairly and viciously accused of supporting “terrorism”. Although, he was found to be innocent and all charges against him were dropped, he was illegally deported from Australia. The aim was to demonise the Muslim community and use Dr Haneef as a pawn to create fear in the community and garner support for the Liberal Party.

Secondly, the Howard’s government thought to use the conflict in Darfur in its elections’ campaign. With Sudan demonised by inherently racist mainstream media, there could be no better scapegoat to manipulate Australians than the Sudanese refugees in Australia. Despite the violent crimes against the Sudanese community, Howard’s Minister of Immigration Kevin Andrews deliberately accused Sudanese youth of crimes and inability to adapt to “Australian values”. Having had enough of Howard’s and his gang of attack dogs, the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, protested this form of racism. Premier Bligh rightly called Andrews a “racist” and compared his comments with the Deep South in the U.S. in the 1950s. She provided police statistics that show the opposite of what Andrews alleged. The Queensland Premier said: “It has been a long time since I have heard such a pure form of racism out of the mouth of any Australian politician”, let alone the immigration minister of a country made entirely of immigrants and old stock of convicts.

Finally, just few days before the 2007 elections’ day, the Liberal Party desperately used racism against Muslim Australians to tap into the anti-Muslims sentiment which has become a daily diet, particularly in Sydney’s western and southern suburbs, where the “Howard’s battlers” and many of the State hardcore racists congregated. Pamphlets, allegedly from a fictitious ‘Islamic Australia Organisation’, were printed and distributed in the electorate of Lindsay from the home of the New Zealand-born Liberal MP Jackie Kelly by her husband Gary Clark and two other high profiles senior officials of the Liberal Party, Jeff Egan (New South Wales Liberal executive), and Tony Craig. The aim was not only to discredit the Labor Party, but to spread fear and incite hatred against Muslim and Arab Australians. It is part of the wider fascist-Zionist campaign that plagued the minds of most Western societies today.

On the economy, the Howard’s government often bragged about its legacy of ‘managing’ Australian economy. But, a glance into the Howard’s government ‘achievements’ shows it is a myth. In 1996, the Howard’s government inherited a well-managed economy at an average inflation rate of 2.5 per cent. During the Howard government, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The top 20 per cent of Australian household have an average annual income of $225,000 while the bottom 20 per cent average just $22, 000, with over a million “working poor” with some work but not enough to live a decent way of life. A report by the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) reveals that, “the number of Australian living in poverty rose from 7.6 per cent to 9.9 percent between 1994 and 2004”. The report compared Australia with the rest of the developed world on issues, including education, health and housing [1].

Howard legacy is also marked by the following: 1) the introduction of the GST (Howard pledged that he would “never, ever” introduce); 2) the anti-Muslims “terrorism Law” legalising discrimination and police harassment against Muslim and Arab Australians; 3) the anti-workers law (WorkChoices) and; 4) the introduction of the racially and ideologically motivated National Emergency Response Bill to take-over Aboriginal land in Northern Territory. (See: Axis of Logic, Sep 1, 2007).

During his term of prime minister, Howard developed a hatred for democracy. As media commentator David Marr noted: “Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers” , is evident of an authoritarian government fuelled by social exclusion and division.

That is said; the 2007 elections were as usual, an all Anglo-Celtic elections affair. The elections ritual and the results provided a glimpse into a shallow “multicultural” Australia. The newly-elected Labor (Right) government is just another group of white Anglo-Celtic elites. They won government because they were able to neutralise Howard’s agenda by identifying the Labor Party agenda with the Liberal Party agenda. The “Me Too” campaign was crucial factor. In addition, Labor capitalised on pledges to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to abolish the draconian laws known as WorkChoices. Further, the Australian Green Party preferences to Labor were also key factor in Labor’s win.

To suggest the new government of Kevin Rudd will be different from any Liberal government post John Howard is grossly misleading. The Labor Party is a lite Liberal party dominated by the Right faction. Take a look at some of the states Labor governments. For example, the NSW State Government is Labor, but ‘Labor’ is always a misnomer. It is a Liberal right-wing government, with an agenda not dissimilar from that of the Howard’s agenda. The same goes for Western Australia – the country’s cesspool of racism and political corruption. The State Labor government there is an extreme right-wing government. It is also the only state where Liberals outvoted Labor in the 2007 elections. In sum, the Rudd’s Labor Government is void of what a truly Labor government stands for. It remains to be seen whether Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd is a Tony Blair or a John Howard or cross between the two in sheep’s clothing.

Kevin Rudd’s pledge to start “stage withdrawal” of some 500 Australian soldiers has nothing to do with Labor’s concern for the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians. It is political opportunism designed for public consumption. Australia’s complicity in the Iraq’s massacre is opposed by the majority of Australians. Some 1000 soldiers, including navy and air force units will continue supporting the U.S. murderous Occupation. Rudd’s aim is ‘to implement an exit strategy’ for troops who are ‘needed much closer to home’, enforcing Australia’s role as imperialism’s “Deputy Sheriff” in East Timor and the Pacific.

If Rudd is serious, the Labor Government should bring John Howard before an Australian court or the International Court of Justice to face war crimes charges for knowingly misleading the Australian public about Iraq and sending Australian troops to take part in the mass slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians.

The Howard’s legacy will be remembered as a decade of right-wing, semi-fascist and racist government characterised by one egomaniac leader whose first priority has been his re-election, rather than doing anything for Australia. Under Howard, Australia has become a meaner and more divided country. Howard will be remembered (if ever) by most Australians as a divisive and deceptive prime minister. Good riddance.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

Endnote

“Political language has to consist largely of euphemisms . . . and sheer cloudy vagueness.” – George Orwell –

H.R 1955: the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 recently passed by the House—a companion bill is in the Senate—is barely one sentence old before its Orwellian moment:

It begins, “AN ACT – To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.”

Those whose pulse did not quicken at “other purposes” have probably not read George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” or they voted for the other George both times.

Orwell’s jeremiad on the corruption of the English language and its corrosive effect on a democracy was written two years before his novel 1984 spelled out in chilling detail the danger of Newspeak, which renders citizens incapable of independent thought by depriving them of the words necessary to form ideas other than those promulgated by the state.

After its opening “tribute” to Orwell, H.R 1955 is strategically peppered with Newspeak regarding the establishment of a National Commission and university-based Centers of Excellence to “examine and report upon the fact and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States” and to make legislative recommendations for combating it.

The “sheer cloudy vagueness” of H.R 1955, as well as its terror factor, may account for its bipartisan 404-6 House vote but how, in an era informed by the Bush-Cheney administration’s egregious assault on the Bill of Rights, can the phrase “other purposes” fail to raise the “National Terror Alert” from its current threat level of “elevated” to “severe.”

Future “other purposes” will undoubtedly be justified by the Act’s use of the term “violent radicalization,” which it defines as “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence . . .” or by the folksy, Lake Wobegonesque “homegrown terrorism,” defined as “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born [or] raised . . . within the United States . . . to intimidate or coerce the United States, the civilian population . . . or any segment thereof . . . [italics added].”

In the service of some self-serving “other purposes,” will “extremist beliefs” become any belief the temporary occupants of the White House consider antithetical and threatening to their political agenda?

Will “ideologically based violence” or the use of “force” become little more than the mayhem resulting after a peaceful protest, daring to move beyond the barbed wire of the free speech zone, is attacked by a truncheon-wielding riot squad armed with tear gas, German Sheppard dogs and water cannons?

Will the unarmed, constitutionally protected dissenters who are fending off blows or dog bites, or who are striking back in self-defense become “homegrown terrorists” and suffer draconian sentences for their attempt to “intimidate or coerce” the state with free thought and free speech?

A clue to future “other purposes” may lie in the Act’s parentage. The proud House “mother” of the Patriot Act’s evil twin is Rep. Jane Harmon (D-CA), chair of the Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee. Rep. Harmon has admitted to a long and productive relationship with the RAND Corporation, a California based think-tank with close ties to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. RAND’s 2005 study, “Trends in Terrorism,” contains a chapter titled, “Homegrown Terrorist Threats to the United States.” Is this Act a bastard child?

Keep in mind that the RAND Corporation was set up in 1946 by Army Air Force General Henry “Hap” Arnold as “Project RAND” sponsored by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Keep in mind also that Donald Rumsfeld was its chairman from 1981 to 1986 and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s felonious former chief of staff, and Condoleezza Rice were trustees. Enough said!

RAND maintains that “homegrown terrorism” will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who “challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.”

Further, RAND claims that anti-globalists and radical environmentalists “exist in much the same operational environment as al-Qaida” and pose “a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business.” Therein lies the real “other purposes.”

Predictably then, H.R. 1955 is not about protecting homegrown Americans. That protection is only incidental to its “other purposes” of protecting homegrown corporate interest and its unconscionable manipulation of the American political process to fill its coffers. Any thought or speech or action— however protected it might be by the Bill of Rights—that threatens corporate hegemony and profit will no doubt suffer the “other purposes” clause of the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.

Anyone doubting the Orwellian nature of a “bastard child” that equates anti-globalists and environmentalists with al-Qaida terrorists will do well to read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and to acquaint themselves with the fate of Winston Smith in 1984.

(Click here for PART 1: A structural link)

The long-range consequence of the Carter deregulation policies and practices that had begun during 1978-1982 was magnified during the Reagan period of 1980-88, with greater emphasis on changing the tax regime to favor the rich, industry deregulation to lower prices by lowering quality, and a shift of power from unions to management.

Carter took the first steps towards dismantling the post-World War II social safety net and retirement/pension system, and encouraging job market restructuring in the name of freedom and efficiency. Reagan’s conservatism was merely skin-deep and rhetorical, being the president with the largest federal deficit in history, whose policies were outright antagonistic towards the interests of the poor whose rank was constantly enlarged by the steady decline of the middle class. Reagan’s rhetoric labeled government as the enemy, not the protector of the people. Ironically, his policies made his rhetoric ring true. The Reagan government had been the ruthless enemy of the US middle class.

Bush Sr lost to Clinton: It’s the economy, stupid!

During the presidency of George Bush senior, 1988-1992, the emphasis shifted to policies promoting US corporate investment overseas, trade, and on implementing neo-liberal policies in emerging offshore economies and markets. The Bush policies produced a prosperous corporate state while the nation fell into a domestic recession to which Bush was personally oblivious and which caused him to lose the White House to an unknown challenger from a minor Southern state, despite victory at war in Iraq. The slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid!” entered US political nomenclature and dominated the entire Clinton presidency.

Under Clinton, 1992-2000, the policy focus centered largely on promoting and expanding neo-liberal “free trade” under dollar hegemony. Additionally, the Clinton period was characterized by the introduction of new formulas for enabling health care cost shifting from corporations to workers, by accelerating the diversion of social security payroll taxes to the US general budget to create the false appearance of declining federal budget deficits and by-passing government rules, encouraging the further decline of the traditional private pension system. The Clinton surplus was largely funded from the pockets of US workers. Clinton deregulated world trade and introduced dollar hegemony to put the US middle class in debt in order to feed corporate global profit. The Clinton prosperity was built on debt addiction, otherwise known as “Rubinnomics”, after Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin.

The Bush tax cut for the rich

Under George W Bush, once again tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy become the pre-eminent policy focus and are hailed as the indispensable dynamo of prosperity while further expanding “free trade” to advance democracy. Bush tax and trade policies contribute to a new wave of income shift toward income disparity, combining the worst aspects of both the Reagan and Clinton eras, the former being an inequitable tax policy and the latter being a anti-labor trade policy. Not surprisingly, the income inequality gap accelerated at the fastest rate during the Bush period of 2000-2006, but the stage had been set by Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton. In addition to tax and trade-driven income inequality, under George W Bush other new income-shifting policy initiatives were launched as well in health care cost shifting, retirement system restructuring, and legislated wage compression by government edict, targeting overtime pay for millions of hourly paid workers.

US workers squeezed by government and employers

While the tax, trade, wage and benefits policies were being implemented top down during the two decade between 1980-2006 under four presidents from both parties, deregulated corporate policies and practices that further contributing to the growing income inequality gap were being simultaneously overhauled from the bottom up, shifting from full-time, permanent jobs to part-time, temporary, and independent contract work. Growing consistently since the 1980s, more than 44 million of the 137 million employed workforce in the US, close to one third, are now part time, temporary, and contract workers earning 60-70% of the pay of full-time workers and typically 20% of the benefits.

Management-promoted de-unionization policies launched in the 1980s resulted in the decline of union membership from 22% of the workforce in 1980 to barely 7% in the private sector in 2006. Two decades of corporate job outsourcing policies sent millions of high-paying, liberal benefit jobs in manufacturing, technology, and business professional services overseas, a loss filled with lower paying domestic service jobs – frequently part-time, temporary, and contract jobs. Corporate fringe benefits policies shifted fundamentally during the same period, resulting in the dismantling of more than 100,000 traditional pension plans and their replacement with cheaper cost 401-K plans; the discontinuance and/or shifting of costs of health insurance plan coverage; widespread unilateral corporate elimination of retiree health benefits; reduction of paid vacation and other paid time off; and other similar company-driven cost reduction measures.

The two approaches – corporate policy changes at the company-industry level and government policy changes – worked in close concert with each other. Government tax, depreciation, and free trade policies provided significant financial incentives to corporations for expanding offshoring jobs and consequently dismantling and transferring abroad much of the manufacturing sector in the US.

Health care and pensions

Government agency rule changes allowed corporations to extract pension fund surpluses for general business use and/or to delay properly funding pension plans. Government bodies like the National Labor Relations Board directly aided corporate efforts to de-unionize while government deregulation and privatization of entire industries further decimated union membership ranks and undermined union bargaining effectiveness.

LONDON – Skiers, fire-eaters and an ice sculptor joined in worldwide demonstrations Saturday to draw attention to climate change and push their governments to take stronger action to fight global warming.

From costume parades in the Philippines to a cyclist’s protest in London, marches were held in more than 50 cities around the world to coincide with the two-week U.N. Climate Change Conference, which runs through Friday in Bali, Indonesia.

Hundreds of people rallied in the Philippine capital, Manila, wearing miniature windmills atop hats, or framing their faces in cardboard cutouts of the sun.

“We are trying to send a message that we are going to have to use renewable energy sometime, because the environment, we need to really preserve it,” high school student Samantha Gonzales said. “We have to act now.”

In Taipei, Taiwan, about 1,500 people marched through the streets holding banners and placards saying “No to carbon dioxide.” Hundreds marched outside the conference center in Bali. At a Climate Rescue Carnival held in a park in Auckland, New Zealand, more than 350 people lay on the grass to spell out “Climate SOS.”

At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, ice sculpture artist Christian Funk carved a polar bear out of 15 tons of ice as a memorial to climate protection.

Christmas markets throughout Germany were switching off the lights for five minutes, and British cyclists pedaled into Parliament Square in London. In Helsinki, Finland, about 50 demonstrators ground their skis across the asphalt along the main shopping street, calling for decision makers to give them their snowy winters back.

Fire-eaters blew billowing clouds of flames at a rally in Athens, Greece.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who is in Oslo, Norway, to attend the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony on Monday, did not plan to take part in a protest there, his spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told the Associated Press.

Protesters single out Bush

In London, demonstrators braved the cold, rainy December weather to descend on Parliament Square, wielding signs marked: “There is no Planet B.” Bikers circled the square earlier in the morning to protest the city’s traffic and its effect on global warming, organizers said.

12/07/07 “New York Times” — — Most of the time we pretend it’s not there: The staggering financial cost of the war in Iraq, which continues to soar, unchecked, like a rocket headed toward the moon and beyond.

Early last year, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the “true” cost of the war would ultimately exceed $1 trillion, and maybe even $2 trillion.

Incredibly, that estimate may have been low.

A report prepared for the Democratic majority on the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate warns that without a significant change of course in Iraq, the long-term cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could head into the vicinity of $3.5 trillion. The vast majority of those expenses would be for Iraq.

Priorities don’t get much more twisted. A country that can’t find the money to provide health coverage for its children, or to rebuild the city of New Orleans, or to create a first-class public school system, is flushing whole generations worth of cash into the bottomless pit of a failed and endless war.

“The No. 1 reason that the war in Iraq should end,” said Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the joint committee, “is the loss of life that is occurring without accomplishing any of the goals that even President Bush put forward.”

But “right below that,” he said, is the need to stop squandering incredible amounts of money that could be put to better use — helping to “make people’s lives better” — here at home. That colossal and continuing waste, he said, “should cause anxiety in anyone who cares about the future of this country. I know it causes me anxiety.”

President Bush’s formal funding requests for Iraq have already exceeded $600 billion. In addition to that, the report offers estimates of the war’s “hidden costs” from its beginning to 2017: the long-term costs of treating the wounded and disabled; interest and other costs associated with borrowing to finance the war; the money needed to repair or replace military equipment; the increased costs of military recruitment and retention; and such difficult to gauge but very real costs as the loss of productivity from those who have been killed or wounded.

What matters more than the precision of these estimates (Republicans are not happy with them) is the undeniable fact that the costs associated with the Iraq war are huge and carry with them enormous societal consequences.

Far from seeking a halt to the war, the Bush administration has been considering a significant U.S. military presence in Iraq that would last for many years, if not decades. There has been very little public discussion and no thorough analysis of the overall implications of such a policy.

What is indisputable, however, is that everything associated with the Iraq war has cost vastly more than the administration’s absurdly sunny forecasts. The direct appropriations are already roughly 10 times the amount of the administration’s original estimates of the entire cost of the war.

Senator Schumer and other Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee have been trying (not very successfully, so far) to get other policy makers and the public at large to focus on the sheer insanity of pumping hundreds of billions — if not trillions — of public dollars into a failed venture with no end even remotely in view.

There are myriad better ways to use the many millions of dollars that the U.S. spends on Iraq every day. Two important long-term investments that come to mind — and that would put large numbers of Americans to work — are the development of a serious strategy for achieving energy independence over the next several years and the creation of a large-scale program for rebuilding the aging American infrastructure.

To get to those, or any number of other important initiatives, the country’s leaders will have to somehow get past their bizarre reluctance to end this debilitating war.

I asked Senator Schumer how soon he thought U.S. forces should leave Iraq. He said: “You start withdrawing in three months and be out in a year. In my view, there would be a small force left — 10,000 or 15,000 — to deal with any Al Qaeda camps that might be set up. But that’s it.”

His words were echoed in another context by Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat (and also a member of the Joint Economic Committee), who said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “it’s not in the strategic interest of the United States” to have a long-term military presence in Iraq.

Youngsters who were just starting high school when the U.S. invaded Iraq are in college now. Their children, yet unborn, will be called on to fork over tax money to continue paying for the war.

Seriously. How long do we want this madness to last?

WASHINGTON — Embattled State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard submitted his resignation Friday, forced out for allegedly impeding ongoing criminal investigations into the construction of a new, $740 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and security firm Blackwater Worldwide.

A State Department official said that Krongard had become a political liability, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, through aides, asked him this week to leave. The official insisted on anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak about personnel matters.

An abrasive attorney who once reportedly referred to himself as an “equal-opportunity abuser,” Krongard came under fire from his own investigators and from a congressional panel for allegedly blocking probes into serious claims of wrongdoing in Iraq.

Those allegations include contract fraud and shoddy workmanship in the troubled Baghdad embassy and arms smuggling by North Carolina-based Blackwater.

Krongard initially vowed to fight the accusations against him. But his position collapsed at a House of Representatives hearing last month when he was asked whether his brother, former top CIA official Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, had accepted a position on a Blackwater advisory board. Krongard first denounced what he said were “ugly rumors,” then, after telephoning his brother, reversed himself.

Only then did he recuse himself from any further supervision of the growing Blackwater investigation. (His brother subsequently resigned from the Blackwater post.) Krongard had also been asked by the Justice Department to withdraw from the investigation into the embassy construction scandal.

In a 2 1/2 page letter to President Bush, Krongard portrayed the decision to leave as his own and said he was departing with “a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment,” but he also suggested that he was the victim of partisan politics.

He spoke of “the grave threat to public service posed by the current rancor and distrust between and among political parties, the legislative and executive branches of government, the media, and various interest groups.”

In a separate statement, he declined comment on the charges that have swirled around him since mid-September.

Krongard, according to officials and documents, stopped his agents from assisting in the Justice Department’s Blackwater probe; met individually with a State Department official and a contractor implicated in the embassy investigation, despite pleas that he not do so; and belittled underlings, causing many to leave or resign.

Krongard said he’d step down on Jan. 15, after the opening of a permanent State Department inspector general’s office in the Middle East.

“We thank him for his dedication to public service,” said State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos.

Krongard is the second major casualty in the spreading controversy over Rice’s management of department activities in Iraq.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, quit in late October amid a furor over a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad by Blackwater employees which left 17 Iraqis dead.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement: “Mr. Krongard’s decision removes an enormous distraction from the Inspector General’s office and will allow the office to focus on its important oversight responsibilities.”

The State Department’s inspector general is supposed to investigate criminal wrongdoing, audit contracts and inspect the agency’s embassies and missions worldwide.

But current and former investigators told Waxman’s committee that Krongard repeatedly blocked them from doing their jobs aggressively.

In an e-mail to his staff sent Friday and obtained by McClatchy, Krongard referred to the turmoil in his office. “I . . . ask you, frankly, to make an effort to reduce the static that interferes with the harmony we would like to achieve,” he wrote.

In July 2007, Krongard ordered aides to halt work on an investigation of Blackwater arms smuggling to Iraq and demanded a meeting with Justice Department prosecutors. At that meeting, he disparaged the probe and ordered a close personal aide to keep tabs on it, according to e-mails obtained by the committee and U.S. officials.

Five days before Krongard met with Justice, Buzzy Krongard was offered the position on the Blackwater advisory board.

As of last week, Justice Department investigators still haven’t received the State Department contract documents they requested, the officials said.

I am not sure what the climate change discussions in Bali are expected to achieve, besides imposing unnecessary hardships on Australians looking for cheap booze before the Christmas break. (I am usually inclined to accommodate such wishes with respect to the antipodeans, and their ejection of prime minister John Howard in recent elections has made them quite popular in Asia.)

If the intent of the conference was to reshape the global economy, then the assembled delegates have started completely the wrong way. Then again, these left-leaning do-gooders cannot be expected to get things right anyway.

Where I propose they start is in the halls of global central banks instead, for the biggest culprits of the global warming debate lie right there. To explain why I believe that is the case, readers can look at the following topics – consumption, negative goods and innovation. Once these are explained, it becomes easy to see what global central bankers should do.

Consumption

By and large, the world economy thrives on consumption and especially the American kind. The US economy supplies one in five dollars of global consumption. This, added to the second dollar supplied by Europe, is what pushes global warming.

The US economy doesn’t produce as much as it consumes, hence its significant current account deficit. The other deficit, namely budget, is merely a function of Dick Cheney lying through his teeth (dentures?) about pretty much everything the government does.

Going back to the current account deficit though, it represents the ”dream” target of any Green. In actual carbon terms, the import of Asian products for example represents the carbon emissions of Asian countries as well as those of the global shipping industry. All told, various publications cite different figures but it would not be hazardous to assign some 30% of global emissions to the US current account deficit.

This is what the Greens miss completely – they count the emissions of China and India in the same league as those of the US and Europe, and that is wrong because a substantial portion of Asian emissions goes to the manufacture of goods consumed in the US.

In turn, what gets consumed in the US is also financed by Asia because Americans stopped saving from the time Carter stepped down. This is the billions of dollars in Asian central banks devoted to the purchase of US treasury bonds, as well as various ”highly rated” securities. I have written often enough about how much money will be lost in Asia because of these bonds, and there is no need to repeat my arguments here.

To a large extent, the twin forces of a disingenuous Fed (euphemism for outright liars) and harmony-seeking Asian central banks (euphemism for dumb no-gooders who wouldn’t get a job flipping burgers if their uncles hadn’t made them the governors of the People’s Bank of China or Bank of Japan or whatever) allow this circle of deficit-financed consumption to persist.

At the moment, with US consumer loans looking very risky indeed – this week for example reports showed sharply increased delinquency rates on auto loans in addition to the continued defaults on housing loans – Asian bankers are panicking about what to do with the billions of US securities on their books.

They have urged the US Fed to become more aggressive on interest rate cuts to help the US economy recover, in effect helping to perpetuate the cycle of global warming described above. In the face of rampant inflation, it makes sense for the US Fed to hike rates now and engineer a hard landing for the US economy. A few million Americans will be thrown out of work, but so what – they weren’t necessarily working on anything except selling each other inflated housing anyway.

A hard landing for the US economy will help cut global carbon emissions, by a factor of over 10%, so why not engineer it? This will also force Asian central banks to abandon their US dollar pegs (which is the main reason their incompetence can never be seen by the public) and actually try to manage inflation and growth in their own countries.

With a bulk of the world’s manufacturing now in Asia, a shift in consumption to the region would not be a bad thing, and anyway overall shipping emissions will decline because goods will be consumed closer to the point of manufacture.

Negative economic goods

The second aspect that the Greens miss out is the pricing of negative economic goods. The Greenspan Fed introduced some innovations in the calculation of inflation (and here I use the word innovation in the sense of lying) wherein the pricing of goods was adjusted for improvements in the product.

Thus, a medium-sized family car could well cost a couple of thousand dollars more than the last year’s model, but by incorporating metrics such as improved safety, higher engine capacity and bigger boot, the Fed could say that the price of the car actually fell for the year. This in turn meant that inflation was negative, which in turn allowed them to cut interest rates, boost consumption and all the stuff described above.

Think back though – if the world’s central banks can be urged to price negative economic goods into their calculation of inflation, they would have a completely different picture. In practice, the price of an average supermarket widget would have to be pushed up to highlight the effect of shipping it over from China, to the detriment of the global climate.

That alone can add some 10 percentage points to inflation calculations in the US and Europe, which should be sufficient to push these central banks from accommodative to restrictive in one step. The idea is hardly new as the US pioneered the pricing of negative economic goods with the tobacco industry. Just as smoking is bad for the lungs, driving cars and shipping dolls from China is bad for the environment. The reduction in living standards thus entailed should be reflected in the price of the product.

Innovation

There is an old joke from the dot-com era, wherein the computer industry makes light of the automobile industry. The computer nerds point out that if cars had evolved as quickly as computers in the nineties, the average automobile would drive like a Rolls Royce, be priced like a Hyundai and have the fuel economy of an electric car. The joke of course was in the response from the car industry, which said – yes, all that is technically possible, but if cars performed like computers, you would need to change your models every time the road markers were repainted, among other quibbles.

Whichever way you lean on the joke above, ie, sympathetic to the computer nerds or the automobile engineers, the fact of the matter is that innovation in the car industry has been extremely slow by the standards of modern science. I have written previously about the economics of the car industry, with the main point being that the intervention in the automobile industries of Europe and Japan by local governments is one of the main factors limiting innovation in the industry.

There are other industries, such as carbon capture, where the right dose of pricing – see the argument on negative economic goods above – would help push innovation that is currently stalled. Promising new technologies such as fuel cell stacks for homes, wind power for large industries and electric cars on the road are all stalled due to the limits on the economics of innovation.

Much as the global pharmaceutical industry refuses to research drugs for diseases that do not affect Americans and Europeans, research and development of alternative energy technologies will not take off until underlying economics are addressed. This is the most significant force that humanity possesses to offset global emissions, and yet there has been little to no progress.

Pricing money correctly

The price of money, much like anything else, can induce behavioral shifts. The problem of global warming is linked closely to the excessive deficit-financed consumption of the US, but equally the thoughtless pricing of negative economic goods in the process.

Global central banks have the responsibility as well as the ability to make a difference. The major central banks such as the US Fed, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Bank of England should be urged to change their inflation calculations to incorporate the effect of environmental damage wrought by various activities. This will help countries to change the mix of domestic production and consumption, through the rather blunt instrument of interest rate changes. These banks would for example look to raise rather than cut interest rates now, if these adjustments were made.

That would necessarily push the world into recession, but it will be a short one as innovation takes over and new products and technologies that come to the forefront will help reduce the carbon footprint of global industry.

The second aspect is to ensure that unnecessary restrictions on the pricing of currency rates are removed. China’s peg is not just bad for the global environment; it also encourages other countries in Asia and Latin America to maintain currency intervention well past anything required realistically.

The last change that is required is for the Greens to stop assembling in various exotic locations. Available technologies such as video conferencing and internet blogging are more than sufficient to get their points across to various government officials. Plus it would leave the cheap booze for the Australians, as demanded by nature.