Entangled Alliances

photo credit: MBK (Marjie)

The big political news from America is that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter (not pictured)  has announced he’s leaving the Republican party and joining the Democrats. This came as a bit of  a bombshell to Republicans, since it means there will be 60 Democrats in the Senate. What’s so exciting about 60? Only that it’s the number needed for a filibuster-proof majority. In other words, Senate Democrats now have the votes to cut off debate on any legislation and head straight to a simple majority vote. This means – in theory at least – that Democrats can now pass any bill they want through the Senate and Republicans can’t do anything but sit on the sidelines and moan about it. Of course, in practice it’s not that simple – but then you didn’t think it would be, did you?

The rationale for Specter’s defection was fairly low on the list of honourable reasons to switch parties. Arlen Specter was one of the most moderate Republican Senators. He has a long history of defying the Republican party and voting with the Democrats, the latest example being his February vote in favour of Obama’s stimulus package, which infuriated his party’s base. He is also up for re-election in the 2010 mid-terms and, unsurprisingly, was facing a significant challenge in his state’s Republican primary from the seriously right-wing Pat Toomey, who’s being generously funded by a  conservative political action committee called The Club For Growth. Now, The Club For Growth have a hilarious record of funding right-wing challenges to sitting Republicans, only to see their candidates  failing to beat the incumbent yet still weakening them enough so that that they then go on to lose to a Democrat in the general election.

However, given that most Republicans now despise Arlen Specter as a Democrat in everything but name, the polls showed Toomey beating him heavily in the primary, despite the involvement of the chronically incompetent Club for Growth. Specter’s defection to the Democrats is therefore a matter of simple political survival – he could no longer be re-elected as a Republican. He could’ve gone Independent, but this way he (probably) avoids being challenged by another Democrat.

So the move was great for Specter. But was it good for Democrats?

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photo credit: HM Treasury

Last Wednesday, amidst the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling stood up in the House of Commons and announced the the UK’s budget for 2009. If  the reactions of his fellow MPs are to be believed, it was a bit like watching a horror film; albeit one where the crazed axe murderer has been replaced with a boring Scotsman reading out numbers. The ranks of Labour sat in stunned silence, while the Conservatives reacted with a series of  theatrical shocked gasps that accompanied the announcement of each new gruesome piece of economic news.  Meanwhile the media, who had known most of what was in the budget days in advance, had a lot of fun being shocked all over again by the poor state of the government’s finances and the woeful growth predictions for the UK.

Thanks to the current economic maelstrom, this budget was arguably like no other in living memory. It was certainly like no other in recent living memory. The usual budget questions – “how much do I have to pay for my cigs and beer now?” and “why did my national insurance just go up?” – are out and a new set of much more, uh, exciting questions are in:  “Is Britain going to default on its debt” “now their taxes have gone up, will those rich city bastards find some new ways to avoid paying them?” and “is that the average winter temperature in Iceland, or Britain’s growth estimate for this year?”

But what exactly was in the budget, what does it mean for Britain and can we make an incredibly complicated topic really simple in order to give the Chancellor a pointless high-school style grade? Find out over the fold!

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photo credit: HM Treasury

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling will present the UK’s budget on Wednesday. I think it’s fair to say that in the current depression-era climate this will be a fairly difficult task for Darling, akin to playing Scrabble in Aramaic or amputating a leg with a pair of scissors. As if his problems weren’t bad enough, his challenge is compounded, as we shall see, by the fact that he’s well and truly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, the latest figures on growth make alarming reading.  Despite Darling’s predictions in last November’s pre-budget report of a contraction of Gross Domestic Product this year of 1%, the Bank of England now forecasts contraction of 3-4%. Given that private investment has all but seized up, this means that the case is extremely strong for a significantly large fiscal stimulus – a Keynesian style government spending spree aimed at creating thousands of new jobs and bringing the economy back to life. That’s the rock.

However, along with the latest figures on growth come equally depressing figures on government borrowing. Over the next two years the government is set to borrow around £170 billion, or around 12% of GDP.  The Institute of Fiscal Studies thinks that government debt could be a whopping 82% of GDP by 2015, or about the same amount of debt as your average teenager with a credit card. That’s the hard place. And it’s really, really hard.

So the Chancellor is caught between the need for a stimulus and the need to avoid adding to the current levels of government borrowing. Now, many economists would argue that the need for a significant stimulus is more important than the risk of growing government debt. After all, if you don’t get the economy growing again then public borrowing will increase anyway. This argument  is fairly sound, especially when you consider that when compared to other major countries Britain’s current debt level isn’t quite as scary as many like to claim (while ours is 48% of GDP, Germany’s is 65% and Japan’s is a stunning 170% of GDP, which is approaching two teenagers with a credit card).  In fairness, however, it’s worth pointing out  that Britain can’t afford to do the massive, pile-on-the-deficits stimulus package of the United States, who are able to sell endless amounts of their debt to China.

Indeed, Britain’s problem is this:  in order to sustain its borrowing levels, it needs investors to keep buying government debt. If borrowing gets too high – or to be more accurate, if it appears to investors that it might get too high, then those same investors get scared and stop buying the government’s debt, which then has the knock on effect of raising the interest rate (or yield) which has to be paid on the debt it’s already sold. So the government ends up paying more for their debt they have and unable to sell any more. Bummer.

As far as I can see, this leaves the Chancellor with three options, none of them safe and none of them pleasant:

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photo credit: zawtowers

When it comes to reporting the news, everyone wants to be seen as impartial. Ask someone what that means, however, and they’ll probably just offer you a synonym – unbiased, objective, neutral. But dig deeper into the meaning of impartiality and two things become clear. One is that you can be impartial in very different ways. The other is that when it comes to the quest to remain objective, most major media outlets are suffering from serious – arguably disabling – misconceptions as to how the news should be reported. As recent events have once again highlighted, the globally admired British Broadcasting Corporation is no exception.

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Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manager, offers some  harsh truths for the Republican party.

photo credit: TheLawleys

“If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party,” Schmidt declared. “And in a free country, a political party cannot be viable in the long term if it is seen as a sectarian party.”…….

Schmidt warned, particularly, that losses among Hispanic voters threatened to “cost the Republicans the entire southwest,” a development that would make winning 270 electoral votes a near impossibility. “Had Sen. McCain not been the nominee in 2008,” he said, “I am convinced we would have lost the state of Arizona.”

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This week, two memos were released by the Obama Adminsitration, detailing torture techniques used under Bush. This is Sullivan’s response

photo credit: Nils Geylen

I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years.

As Sullivan argues, it’s the bureacratic element that is the most chilling, a faceless largely unaccountable bureaucracy clinically eliminating civil liberties and perpetrating brutalities.  It makes it so much harder to rally against this than against a visible leader such as Bush or Cheney. Although less grave, in the UK the recent story of a council spying on a family for three weeks, because they didn’t believe the family was in the right school zone is actually terrifying, in its sheer pointlessness and in the capacity for something we consider so benign to be spying.

About two years ago, I remember debating with Ed, whether the UK should have a constitution and subsequently a supreme court, at the time I felt we’d done fine without one, but now a full means of redress beyond a mini-media storm seems more than reasonable. Perhaps more critically it’s time we started,  shining the light on bureacracies and demanding transparency from them.

A round-up of the crazy-end of the Right wing media by the Daily Show.

And I’m going to include this nugget from Sarah Palin

I know the truth about my family. I know details about whether Levi Johnston was allowed to live with my teenage daughter or not. By the way, it would be over my dead body that a kid would live with my teenage daughter.

What are the chances this comes back to bite her?

Some transatlantic comparison from Charlie Brooker:

Gathering at Bethnal Green police station

I went to the demonstration for justice for Ian Tomlinson, as I mentioned in this post yesterday. I just felt like, you know, I had to do something. And I guessed in that sense it would be rather more cathartic – for my own benefit, to set my mind at rest – than because I thought it would actually achieve anything in particular.

The statement by the family at Bethnal Green police station, the start of the march, really was very moving, and I’m glad I took part. We needed to make a statement.

However, I think I was right on the second part – the demonstration measured (I guess) 500-600 people at most. Thankfully it got a fairly good (brief) report on the BBC News website.

But on the first part, I was wrong. It didn’t lead to a sense of catharsis for me, just a sense of hopelessness, as the demo was hijacked by various people trying to push their respective political agendas. In this case it was largely the SWP who plastered their logo and website across their banners stating “Who killed Ian Tomlinson?”. There were plenty of others there hawking their Socialist Workers and various other hard left newspapers, and several large banners were on the march for the Union of Servicemen (?), the Socialist Workers and the Stop The War Coalition.

Using this event – a solemn march to demand justice for a man who had died – to push any sort of other agenda just seems to me to be incredibly tasteless.

Marching towards Bank

This wasn’t about “the system”, or about capitalism. It was about a man who died, at least partly due to police tactics. How is that partisan? How could anyone think it appropriate to make it exclusive to their political creed?

Perhaps I am just expecting too precise a message than is possible in a group of several hundred people, and perhaps this protest was extraordinary. But it at least made me reconsider the final paragraph of this comment I wrote on Ed’s G20 post. Do protests work? (Obviously, they do sometimes.)

I’m now watching Persepolis, a really brilliant film – the original French version – apparently the English version isn’t as good (Marjane really can’t sing though.). In the Iranian Revolution, protests against the Shah’s pretty awful regime, only partly down to religious concerns, were hijacked and used to justify wholehearted support for the new theocracy.

Obviously the parallels aren’t direct (er, at all), but it’s an interesting contrast, perhaps.

Maybe I’ll feel better about it all tomorrow.

(Penny Red has another report from a different perspective and highlights an incident I had forgotten)

When did “Law and Order” become just “Order”?

Nine days have now passed since the death of Ian Tomlinson, and in that time, one thing has become very clear: he did not simply die of ‘natural causes’, as the police at the time suggested. In fact, his death was a very unnatural one indeed – and the police are directly responsible.

It’s easy to get very angry about this sort of thing and descend into hyperbole. But two things have become clear:

1) Police tactics are at fault

The police tactic of ‘kettling’ is unnecessary, counter-productive, and unacceptable. Last year the House of Lords ruled that the practice of ‘kettling’, deployed in the May Day protests of 2001 (where thousands of protesters were held for SEVEN HOURS at Oxford Circus) was compatible with the ECHR Article 5(1), as “the sole purpose of the cordon was to maintain public order, that it was proportionate to that need and that those within the cordon were not deprived of their freedom of movement arbitrarily”.

Let’s hope this senseless policy gets overturned at the European Court of Human Rights. When 3000 people are held in an area of less than 2000 square metres for 7 hours, until 21:30, with no food, water, or sanitary provisions, how can that possibly be justified?

Similarly, with the G20 protests, how can it be justified to hold people for such a long period of time, and only allow them to leave if they agree to provide their details and be photographed?

And how can the police get away with smacking people on the head with truncheons, cordoning off and then baton-charging peaceful climate camp demonstrators (who hours earlier had been pitching tents, playing music, and selling flapjack) and setting dogs on people who had been posing no threat at all?

If there’s one video you watch today – assuming you’ve watched the videos of the police beating Ian Tomlinson (1, 2)- watch this one. Riot police march in to beat unarmed, peaceful protesters, with their hands in the air. Then watch this one from the film Goodbye Lenin, which depicts the Stasi’s tactics of violently breaking up demonstrations. That there is any resemblance between the two at all is appalling.

How can these things not be seen as a deterrent to future protest, and a breach of Article 5?

2) The policeman responsible for Ian Tomlinson’s death should go to prison – and for a long time. But he’s not the only one.

I’m afraid, not for the first time, that I am going to have to disagree with the charming commentator on this (very good) Daily Mail article (via) who said:

“Ian Tomlinson, drunk and out for trouble, decided to deliberately walk into a riot situation and blatantly obstruct the police. He was pushed out of the way. He died because he was a chronic alcoholic and was likely on his last legs anyway. The police did nothing wrong and, compared to other European countries, acted in a very restrained manner. This whole media frenzy is pathetic, transparent and more to the point, very boring. Nobody cared about this man when he was alive, not the media, not the readers of this column and certainly not his family, so let’s have less of the crocodile tears and public lamenting now he’s dead. If people want to criticise the police then do so, but don’t assume everyone is of such low intelligence that putting a bit of spin about a story of a drunk having a heart attack will prompt any right-thinking person into outrage and anarchy.”

- Dom, UK, 10/4/2009 10:40

Ian Tomlinson wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was a bystander, making his way home from selling newspapers. The video clearly shows him shuffling away from the police with his hands in his pockets.

But even if he was doing something wrong, that is obviously no excuse for smacking him in the legs and violently throwing him to the ground. The policeman actually lunged at his back. The only threat to public order was from that policeman himself.

As others have pointed out, this particular piece of brutality which led to Ian Tomlinson’s death was not exceptional; there were countless examples of this on the day. So yes, this stupid thug should go to prison, and for a very long time, both for what he did and to set an example to others thinking of going the same way. But this goes much higher than that.

The Met is not only responsible for the police tactics, it’s also responsible for the disgraceful way that it responded to Ian Tomlinson’s death, briefing that it was “of natural causes” and that demonstrators threw bricks, bottles, etc. while police were trying to save his life. And the media’s responsible for unquestioningly lapping it up. It’s since “emerged” that he was an alcoholic Milwall fan staying in a bail hostel. Oh, well that’s ok then.

So what’s going to happen now?

Well it’s clear that IPCC inquiry is not going to be sufficient. As the Guardian’s editorial on Thursday noted,

“And what kind of independent body is it whose first reaction to the Guardian’s evidence on Tuesday night was to call at our offices (accompanied by a City of London policeman) and ask for it to be taken off the website?”

Surprise! The CCTV cameras “weren’t working”. Sorry, that must have come as a shock. And from that Channel 4 News interview, the chairman of the IPCC is clearly an idiot.

We need a full judicial inquiry, and the only way we’re going to get that is if sufficient pressure is placed on those who can make it happen. Protests might not help much, but it’s better than nothing.

Join the protest against police brutality, tomorrow (Saturday 11th April) at 11:30, at Bethnal Green police station.

I want to have confidence in my police service again. I want to trust them, and to believe that they’re there to protect me. How can I do that when nine days ago, a man died at their hands, and they don’t seem all that bothered?

Some more coverage:

• Liberal Conspiracy: Who’s to blame for this accidental death?
• Liberal Conspiracy: So who will excuse police brutality now? (includes lots of other links)
• Liberal Conspiracy: I still blame police brutality (2nd April)
• Chicken Yoghurt: Ian Tomlinson: video reveals G20 police assault on man who died
• Bloggerheads – Why aren’t these people working to protect us?
• Laurie Penny – Fuck.
  

It’s perhaps a truism that if you want to understand a country, you need look no further than the way it teaches history.  Most countries are engaged in subtle yet constant processes of constructing a meta-narrative which legitimates the regime and institutions of the present.  In France, for example, the Revolution (of 1789) is appropriated as good solid secular republicanism (which is a hazy proposition at best), while the socialist Paris Commune is excluded, remembered only in the “group memory” (rather than the national, or “collective” memory) of a few pilgrims who trudge defiantly each May to the tombs of the fédérés in the Père Lacahise cemetery.  Equally, the German notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has been a crucial one in the post-war generational evolution of the nation’s self-image and has had implications for Germany’s affinity for European identity, the generational conflict of ‘68 and resurgent nationalism around the time of the 2006 World Cup.  Drawing on history lessons, the tempting contrast is, of course, between a Germany racked with “guilt” and a Japan defiant about its wartime actions until very recently.  The way in which collective memory treats events in a country’s history is, then, an enlightening insight into the way in which it is evolving in the present.

Take a fascinating and often harrowing account in this week’s New York Times about modern-day Cambodia:

As it struggles to leave its past behind, Cambodia today suffers from a particularly painful generation gap: those who survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and their children and grandchildren, who know very little about it.

photo credit: Strevo

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed around a fifth (most likely around 1.8 million) of the Cambodian population, engaging in radical social engineering which, in its persecution of anyone with the slightest education and its emphasis on a purely agrarian social model, not only had a massive human cost, but also social, economic and cultural consequences which will be felt for decades to come.  That, as the NYT article reports, 80% of under-30 year olds (who make up 70% of Cambodia’s population) know “little or nothing” about this period clearly has massive implications, generationally and in terms of an historical healing process.  Despite the ongoing trials of Khmer Rouge figures, under UN pressure, the Prime Minister, Hun Sen is clearly a proponent of historical oblivion: “[he] once proposed that Cambodia “dig a hole and bury the past.”*

[...] the Khmer Rouge period has not been taught in school, causing some teachers who are survivors to feel orphaned by their students.

A new high school text book that discusses the Khmer Rouge years has been prepared, but it will reach only a portion of the country’s students

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