Ethnic vandals burn French autos for the New Year

New Year's eve across France was very much like its predecessor in 2009, with the exception that there was ten less vehicles turned into charcoal briquettes in the orchestrated mayhem that has become an annual ritual.

The French interior ministry, in anticipation of civil hooliganism from mostly ethnic gangs (made up of Arab and North African youth), mobilised 8,000 police in and around Paris and 45,000 nationally for the night.  To date a total of 1,137 cars were set on fire.   Police in the capital region of Paris said that 171 arrests were made, mainly for burning cars and throwing objects at officers; however, no major clashes with police were reported.

Earlier this year French President Sarkozy proposed tough anti-crime legislation aimed at the more than 200 organized gangs, which operate primarily out of Paris.  "If the thugs want to take on the Republic, then the response of the Republic will be force and justice," he said.  The gang violence reached its apex in 2005 when France endured three weeks of violence that left thousands of cars torched and hundreds of people injured.

It has been argued that the objective of individual gang members, beyond criminality, is the opposite of what Muslim extremists want.  While they share the common traits of  being socially marginalized and poorly educated, with little or no prospects for self-improvement or social mobility, they differ with respect to their desire to integrate with larger French society. 

Overall,  these criminal entities, which are similar to inner-city American gangs composed of  blacks and/or Latinos, represent a hostile and recalcitrant underclass that unless dealt with effectively, will become a permanent fixture of French society.

Niall Ferguson: I've seen the future and it stinks!

Niall Ferguson gives an interview with business journalist Consuelo Mack of the PBS program 'WealthTrack'.  In it Ferguson does his standard song and dance about the origins of the strife between the USA and China or what he ofter refers to as Chi-merica.   He sternly admonishes those who feel that the current recession/depression is over and the classic 'V' shape recovery is occurring.   Paul Krugman, who has been having a public feud with Ferguson, addresses both topics in his NY Times column (respectively here and here).  In both cases, Ferguson and Krugman are basically on the same page in offering both concerns and veiled predictions of weak American economic performance in 2010.

The take home message in my opinion, which comes near the end of the interview, is Ferguson's comparison of the current 'depression' with of the depression of 1873.  This particular event, which is almost never referenced in the press, involved depressions emerging in both America and Europe.  In America, construction work lagged, wages were cut, real estate values fell and corporate profits vanished.  A total of 89 railroad companies went bankrupt, 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875, and unemployment reached 14% by 1876.  Whereas in Europe, the Vienna stock exchange crashed, Viennese banks failed, speculative bubbles collapsed, and industries crashed.  Deflation ensued for the next twenty years and an economic shift from Europe to America occurred.

In Ferguson's analysis, China plays the part which America played in the 1873 crash, in terms of the shift of industrial strength.  He also believes that like the populist backlash that emerged in the first Gilded age, current day populist rage across the Western world arising from severe unemployment, decreasing social amenities, and the realization of the corrupt financial/governmental systems, could pose substantial risk for standing governments.

The second message, despite his early preening in the interview about the rise of the emerging markets and especially China, is in his own words,  "I've been to Chongqing. I've seen the future and it stinks!"  He concludes that China's communist party is incapable of fundamental reform or eliminating the rampant corruption that underlies the fabric of its merchantalist society.  I have written a fair degree on China's corrupt business practices (here, here, and here for example) and believe likewise, that this facet of their culture will be one of the principle agents why the so-called Chinese miracle will not overtake the West.

CIA Screws Up Again?

Two things happened this week that let me return to the central thesis of Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, which states that the agency has a record of gross incompetence and failure, and officials and agents conduct themselves with a "swagger and hubris" that is disproportionate to their actual accomplishments.

The first incidence, was that of the underwear-bomber who set his genitals on fire aboard a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.  According to ABC News, the accused  made a final telephone call to his father, who found the conversation so disturbing that he "approached Nigerian officials who took him directly to the CIA's station chief in the Nigerian capital."  The alert prompted, "Officials to put Abdulmutallab's name into a database of more than half a million others that the U.S. suspects of ties to terrorism, but they did not put him on the country's no-fly list."  On the day of Abdulmutallab’s departure, his $2,800 airline ticket was paid for with cash, with the accused having no luggage except a single backback.  The latter created no red-flags for either the airlines or US security.

The second incidence, involved a suicide bomber disguised as an Afghan soldier, who managed to kill seven CIA agents at the agency's base in Afghanistan.  The incident represents the agency’s worst loss of publicly-identified personnel since a 1983 attack in Lebanon conducted by Hezbollah guerrillas.  The Times of London reports that:

The bomber, claimed by the Taleban to be one of its members, entered Forward Operating Base Chapman and detonated explosives attached to his body in the compound’s gym. US officials said that the CIA had mounted an internal investigation into the security breach... Four other agents have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, according to the CIA, though the secretive nature of its operations means that there may have been more.

The history of the agency has been noted as a colossal failure-after-failure and an extravagant waste of capital.  Their most recent misadventures involve torturing terrorist suspects across the globe, obtaining useless and counter-factual data from paid Iraqi agents, and their pre-911 intelligence gathering services were determined to be severely compromised by foreign agents.  Little appears to have changed and their gross incompetence, as far as we can discern, is insuring that America's efforts in its 'Global War on Terrorism' remains a fantastic failure.

Canada Suspends Democracy during Olympics!

In general, Canada is a pretty good place to live.  In terms of ease of doing business, global competitiveness, individual liberty, and overall quality of life, it consistently ranks amongst the top ten nations of the world.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister's Office announced that it was seeking proroguing parliament and expanding the traditional Christmas break season for Parliament until March 3rd; until after the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC.  The concept of prorogation, which involves the termination of a legislative period, thus ending all standing committees, closing question period in the House of Commons, and letting all legislation that hasn't received Royal Ascent to be dismissed, is neither novel nor is it illegal.  However, the current context to which it has been utilized by the Conservative Party, is an unprecedented attempt by a minority government to evade public accountability, marginalize the role of the opposition in Parliament, and enhance the party's hold on the instruments of power.

At the begining of 2009, in the face of a potential coalition government forming between the opposition Liberal Party and NDP and shortly after national elections had returned Mr. Harper's Conservatives to power, parliament was prorogued.  This incident was a clear attempt to sow public dissension and confusion over coalition prospects. The officially stated reason for this most recent prorogation, was to allow the Tories to seek a national consensus on Canada's economic policies for the new year.  This becomes the third time in three years that prorogation has been used by the Conservatives.

The Tories, despite having complained endlessly that Liberal Senators were stymieing and slowing down legislation in the upper chamber, have now allowed for dozens of bills, some they claimed critical to their agenda, to fall to the wayside.  The rational provided by the Prime Minister's Office, if taken seriously, essentially would mean that the current government cannot walk and chew gum at the same time; i.e. they are incompetent.

Kady O'Mally, at CBC News' Parliamentary Blog, explains that the December time date for prorogation, which prevents Parliament from reconvening in the face of national necessity, and not late January when MPs return from break, indicates that this action has more to do with stopping Afghan torture investigations and using Machiavellian ploys to gain a majority on Senate committees.

Opposition parties have already warned that prorogation would disrupt the inquiry of a parliamentary committee looking into accusations that the government ignored warnings about the torture of Afghan detainees. Strategically, prorogation also prevents question period criticisms from the opposition parties during the Olympics.

Andrew Coyne, writes on his Maclean's blog, that this is, "An abuse of process, an insult to Parliament, another step on Parliament’s long slide into irrelevance."  Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale called the government's move "beyond arrogant" and its justifications for it "a joke."

In another time and place this type of action would be the exclusive purview of tyrants and kings.  Given that Mr. Harper and his cohorts ran on a platform of delivering accountability, transparency, and efficient government to the people of Canada, this transgression is a telling indictment of their inherent hypocrisy and the corrupting force of power.  To prevent the elected representatives of the people from investigating the actions of the current Conservative government, is an affront to the central democratic principle, that the governing party works to enhance the lives of all its citizens and not merely its own status. This is a corruption of Canadian democracy and if people actually were concerned about such abstractions, they would demand the immediate resignation of the Prime Minster and elections be called to end this fraud of a government.

What US Generals used to think of Torture

Tom Ricks, over at Foreign Policy, posts a quote made by US Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who in 1902 lambasted all who, at the time, believed water-boarding was not torture and that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were acceptable in the face of international obligations.

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

Corruption in China

One of the enduring attributes of a functioning state, is its ability to operate in an efficient and productive manner for all its citizens.  This isn't a trivial task.  Regardless of the country, great lengths are made by those in authority, both in government and commerce, to conceal their actions, distort public policy, and disseminate propaganda, so that they utilize the resources of the state to their own advantage.  Tolerance for corruption is varied, but is solidly rooted in those nations that are governed by dictatorships, unstable military regimes, and crony-capitalism.  Democracies for all their faults, through transparent legal frameworks, the nature of adversarial and partisan politics, and an open and free press, permit some of the most egregious behavior associated with institutional corruption to be minimized.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China's failure to contain, "Endemic corruption among Chinese officials poses one of the most serious threats to the nation’s future economic and political stability."  This particular study finds that due to the low prosecution rate of corruption, the context is created for even low-level officials to amass an illicit fortune.  As China has moved to a market-driven economy, corruption has exponentially increased.  The report estimates that the direct costs could be as much as $86 billion each year.

The indirect costs of corruption (efficiency losses; waste; and damage to the environment, public health, education, credibility and morale) are incalculable. Corruption both undermines social stability (sparking tens of thousands of protests each year), and contributes to China’s environmental degradation, deterioration of social services, and the rising cost of health care, housing, and education.

The Chinese government has publicly stated its displeasure with this societal manifestation and has made efforts (how successful they are is another question) to rectify the situation.  For example, a mass public trial in Chongqing earlier this year was conducted upon, "9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice."  The trial has exposed to the Chinese public and the world the vast intermingling between organized crime and government.

The New York Times has another interesting article in which the Chinese government itself reports that corruption amongst it's officials is having a serious and negative impact on the country.  How long the country can absorb this activity and what it entails towards China's global aspirations, will dictate the nature of global economics for the next decade. 

NY Times article follows: 

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China Finds Huge Fraud by Officials
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — Chinese officials misused or embezzled about $35 billion in government money in the first 11 months of the year, according to a national audit released this week.

The announcement is the latest indication of how widespread corruption has become among government agencies and how difficult it will be for Beijing to root it out.

The National Audit Office, which carried out the examination, did not disclose the size of the budgets reviewed this year. But the agency, which is based in Beijing, said that it surveyed nearly 100,000 government departments and state-owned companies, and that more than 1,000 officials were facing prosecution or disciplinary action because of the audits.

Auditors said government officials engaged in everything from money laundering and issuing fraudulent loans to cheating the government through the sale or purchase of state land or mining rights.

“Criminals are now more intelligent, and covert,” Liu Jiayi, the director of the National Audit Office, was quoted as saying in the state-run news media.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao hailed the work of the auditors on Tuesday and called on them to monitor government projects and prevent waste.

But analysts say the Communist Party faces significant hurdles in trying to curtail corruption. Every year Beijing announces new anticorruption drives, new laws and new policies aimed at dealing with the problem.

But every year the scale of fraud seems enormous, particularly in a country where the average person earns less than $50 a week.

In 2005, for instance, the National Audit Office reported finding about $35 billion worth of government funds misused or embezzled. That was the last year the office gave a national figure covering its audits, according to its Web site.

Experts say the audits revealed one thing: many in government are finding ways to steal public money.

“The huge crackdown reflects the seriousness of corruption in China’s government,” said Zhu Lijia, a professor of public policy at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing. “Even the National Audit Office should be supervised. In the past few years it was the N.A.O. that decided whether to publish or hide some statistics.”

My Person of the Year: Neda Agha Soltan

Unlike TIME magazine and FT who respectively chose FED Chairman Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein as their "person of the year", the Times of London (UK) newspaper has chosen a very modest person, who gave her life not in the pursuit of capital or saving the financial behemoths of Wall Street from their own self-inflicted greed, but rather for simple measures that we in the West take for granted every day.

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

In Iran Neda has become the face of the revolution against the aging, sclerotic, and corrupt Mullahs.  Vigils and shrines were established across the country to commemorate her murder by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle as she protested and chanted, "Death to the dictator!"  The Times elaborates:

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The cowardice of the Mullahs and their police apparatus reached new heights in the months that followed her death.  The regime banned public displays of mourning, intimidated and jailed witnesses who observed her death, harassed Neda's family to prevent them from talking in public, and blamed foreign journalists for her death.

The corporate yes-men who have bankrupted our states, the war-mongers intent on justifying torture and genocide, and the shifty immoral politicans who run our governments and collectively represent the very worst of humanity, deserve nothing but contempt.  We however, as individuals can look through the veil fashioned by the corporate media and find virtue and human decency even in the darkest corners of this world.  This is why I too, even though her life was short and her contribution an accident, feel that Neha Soltan deserves to be known by us all; because her struggles and the ideals of the Green Revolution are our struggles.

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For more information on Neda and the international response to her death, PBS's Frontline has an excellent documentary that is viewable online and also has a set of links on the subject.

Iran's Green Revolution Continues

Six months ago I started this blog to document the indolence of the mainstream press and the vast hypocrisy and duncery that masquerades as civil society across the world.  At the moment of this blog's inception the theft of the Iranian election by the Mullahs was presenting itself. The clerics terrified at their own dwindling domestic support, handed their lackey Ahmadinejad the election and brutally suppressed student protesters, reform minded civilians, and even former colleagues of the 1979 Iranian revolution, who disagreed with the Mullahs maniacal objectives.

Today I return to Iran, where thousands of people have rallied together in the face of certain prosecution, incarceration, torture, and possible death via the police forces that serve the criminal theocrats in Tehran.  Again, the slothful mainstream press have done a stupendous job at not providing coverage, insightful commentary, or acknowledging the seriousness that this revolution may portend to global politics.  Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who in this particular case have replaced the MSM, has an excellent on-the-ground compilation of twitter, you-tube, and individual first-hand accounts by protesters from across Iran.

To contextualize this uprising further, one should first remind oneself that if the neo-conservatives of America and their belligerent and bellicose accomplices in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon had had their way, these very protesters -who are striving for Western ideals of freedom and liberty- would lay bloody and bleeding, not from the truncheon or pistol of the Iranian stormtroopers, but from American heavy armaments.  The nascent struggle for individual liberty against the corrupt and incompetent rule of the Mullahs would have been aborted, leaving the Islamic regime even more powerful.  Instead, the theocrats are now deprived of the old canard that the evil Satan, in the form of the Americans, the British, and the BBC, are stirring dissent and chaos within their borders.

In addition, it should be understood that the moral vacuousness and intellectual dishonesty of the neo-cons, which has been apparent for all to observe since the Iraq fiasco detonated in their collective faces, has an equivalent in the autocratic and murderous actions of the Iranian theocrats.  The leaders of the American war machine and the murderous Mullahs are the same: greedy, pugnacious old-men bereft of civil decency, who are dedicated to maintaining their own power at the cost of innocent lives.

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I have a series of earlier blog posts that explain the origins of dictatorships, outline the original rationals about the election fraud committed by the Mullahs (here and here), and the propaganda model as it relates to Western media (here).

"A Seamless Transition" on the Afghanistan War

Ralph Nader gives an antiwar speech in front of the White House on December 12 2009. In it he succinctly summarizes a number of the inconsistencies and obvious logical fallacies made by president Obama in pursuit of his current Afghan policy.

I would add, it is getting a bit tiresome to hear propagandists, including Mr. Obama in his West Point speech, lecturing us about the necessity of having to contain illiterate Afghan tribesmen, who live in mud huts and reside in a country that has been undergoing civil war for thirty years and which has no air force, navy, or army, because they somehow pose an existential threat to Western civilization. The Taliban are outnumbered 10:1 by NATO troops and Al Qaida abandoned Afghanistan in 2001 for Pakistan, which is the central nexus of Islamist and Jihadi activity. If America was serious about eradicating Islamist terrorism it would have attacked Pakistan and overthrown the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.

A trillion dollars is spent every year by the American government, more than all other nations combined, to sustain their Imperial ambitions across the planet. Nearly 60% of discretionary spending in the US goes to the Pentagon, intelligence gathering, nuclear weapons development, the Veterans Administration, and other military operations. America has spent more time and money than it did in either Vietnam or the Second World War to date and is still unable to defeat fifth-rate insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism, says the obvious:

The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to [America's] anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.

Global Arsonist named TIME's man of the year!

For the majority of the year the managers of America's economic news have been issuing headline-after-headline declaring that 'green shoots' were upon us, jobs growth was around the corner, consumer confidence was returning, the banks were once again sound, and corporate profits are once again booming. To date, none of these exaggerations have been remotely correct; including the statement by Ben Bernanke, "that the recession is very likely over."

In terms of understanding propaganda, 2009 has been another boom year. Much like the Bush years, where government lackeys bemoaned the fact that little good-news was being reported about the Iraq war, the Obama administration has likewise, with the collusion of mainstream media (MSM), produced voluminous statements to create the public perception that the global economy was on the mend. This week Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was named TIME magazine's man of the year. To the glee of media bobble-heads everywhere, Mr. Bernanke has single-handily prevented America from sliding into a depression. Endless articles have now been written about how in the darkest moments after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bernanke marshaled all the power of his office to save capitalism and right the debt-laden banks from implosion. It's a compelling narrative, but one that is completely false.

Bernanke, Greenspan, and the rest of the laissez-faire economists of the Federal Reserve not only ignored regulating the housing bubble and the "shadow economy" that included the toxic assets that brought down Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, but encouraged the expansion of these bubbles. Bernanke served as one of the Fed's governors from 2002 to 2005, and then did a brief stint as head of the Council of Economic Advisers before taking over as Fed chair in early 2006. There were few people in government who were better situated to correct the "irrational exuberance" in the markets than this man.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, Bernanke repeated to congress and the media that there was no need to cut interest rates and that there was no recession on the horizon. Weeks later, he cut interest rates. He remained steadfast afterwards that the economy in 2008 would be "strengthening as the effects of tighter credit and the housing credit began to wane." However, his actions and private statements belied the opposite was occurring. Two months after he gave his prepared statements to Congress, the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression began December 2007.

When the September Crisis of 2008 unfolded, the FED loaned at least $2 Trillion dollars to both US and foreign banks. Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, elaborates on Bernanke's perfidy at this critical juncture:

[Bernanke] has refused to provide the public, or even the relevant congressional committees, with information on the trillions of dollars in loans that were made through the Fed's special lending facilities. While anyone can go to the Treasury's website and see how much each bank received through Tarp and under what terms, Bernanke refuses to share any information on the loans that banks and other institutions received from the Fed.

Where we do have information, it is not encouraging. At the peak of the financial crisis in October, Goldman Sachs converted itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company, in part so that it could tap an FDIC loan guarantee programme. Remarkably, Bernanke allowed Goldman to continue to act as an investment bank, taking highly speculative positions even after it had borrowed $28bn with the FDIC's guarantee.

The rational in naming Ben Bernanke as the most important person of the year, is simply to provide him with official credibility in the face of the ruinous laissez-faire ideology that has held sway over Washington for the past thirty years. Wall Street has given the MSM its orders to present the fiction that Mr. Bernanke is the man who saved the world and who must naturally be given another term as FED chairman. The financial world that existed pre-Lehman Brothers no longer exists and the elites who destroyed the world economy, do not wish anyone to understand the scope of their mismanagement in hyping casino-capitalism, while destroying the American dream.

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Additional blog postings and links of interest:

Eliot Spitzer has "Nine Questions for Ben Bernanke," which to date, none have been adequately addressed by either Mr. Bernanke, the FED, or the feckless MSM.

Critics who said Bernanke should not be re-appointed: Nassim Taleb, Anna Jacobson-Schwartz, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Ron Paul (R-TX) to name a few.

People who have advocated Bernanke's reappointment in the media with reservations are Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman.