Iraq update

The British Army this week is vacating Basra in the south of Iraq, handing over its defence to militias loyal to Moqtada al Sadr, Shia militias mostly aligned with Iran. Meanwhile, the Turkish air force heavily pounded several Kurdish villages hundreds of kilometers inside northern Iraq. And Saudi Arabia stepped up support to Sunnis formerly waging an insurgency in the middle of the country against the US occupation, but no more. So while the US can, with great relief, report progress inside Iraq, the question has shifted dramatically from whether Sunnis, Shias and Kurds can mutually agree on a constitution, to whether Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia can keep from blasting away at each other over the spoils of the wrecked country. US forces on the ground might want to take this opportunity to wipe the sweat from their brow. Keeping various insurgent groups apart was one thing. Keeping national armies apart could be quite another.

Crime syndicates come in from the cold

News arrives from Italy that the protection racket, mainstay of the Mafia, has run headfirst into neo-liberalism, and has come out much worse for the wear. “Racketeering rigs the market,” Enrico Colaianni, chief of a Palermo, Sicily-based group of companies resisting protection rackets by choosing not to pay, told Corriere della Sera, a Milan newspaper, “and if you pay you agree to be part of a system that rejects . . . free competition.”

Though the rise of groups of companies refusing the Mafia’s offers that cannot be refused is celebrated in police and political circles in Europe and North America, as is the rising tide of high-level arrests of dons, it strikes The Republic as premature to conclude that the too-obvious strategy of simply refusing to pay would so easily cripple the Mafia. Wouldn’t that strategy have been thought up earlier?

What seems more likely the case is that the protection rackets and other activities carried on by the mob are being abandoned because the profits available to cut-throat operators are no longer so much higher than what is available in “legitimate” businesses once neo-liberal policies clear away taxation and regulation—the only real difference between black and white economies.

It isn’t the illegality of mob activities per se that make us wish the mob would stop doing them. Rather, there are activities we wish they would stop doing and so we make them illegal. But if companies and their executives no longer need to pay taxes or adhere to environmental or social regulations, all we’ve done is legalize those activities. No wonder the Mafia is on the way out. Dons now do their dirty work in the light of day inside corporate head offices in downtown skyscrapers.

Oh my God, Chevez wanted no limits to terms in office! Horrors!

One of the biggest complaints about Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, leveled by Western leaders and media is that the referendum (which he lost) asked voters to agree to unlimited terms of office for the presidency. This is supposedly his greatest crime, the strongest evidence yet that he is a budding dictator.

If that’s all they got on the guy, he must not be giving them many real reasons to complain. Unlimited terms of office is the norm in most of the Western democracies. There is no limit to how many terms office a Canadian Prime Minister can serve, for example, nor is there in Britain. Chevez’s referendum proposal was only a reform more in line with what has long been acceptable in Canada and much of the West.

America has a limit of two terms for its presidency. But it isn’t in a strong position to complain either. In the entire cabinet, only the President is elected. All the ministries are headed up by appointments, appointments that have no terms and no limits whatsoever (though typically a new president will turf everyone from office and appoint his own friends).

It was America that got Iran to start building nuclear plants in the first place

An interesting side-note to the developing story surrounding Iran’s development of nuclear power capability has it that the two nuclear electricity generating plants, at Bushehr and at Darkhovin, that Iran is trying to manufacture fuel for, were both started previous to 1979, when Iran was brutally ruled by the US-installed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Iran reasonably anticipates that domestic energy needs will exceed its indigenous oil production by 2012, shifting the massive oil exporter onto the oil importer side of global market ledgers—barring any changes. With oil sold domestically at a tiny fraction of what oil fetches on global oil markets, and with the Islamist socialist regime politically unable to raise domestic prices to anywhere near market prices without sparking riots, every drop of oil used domestically costs Iran immensely in lost opportunity costs. Conversely, any drop of oil diverted from domestic consumption to export markets produces enormous net profits for Iran, especially at the new baseline prices for oil globally. So while it is true that for the time being Iran has oil enough for all energy needs, the opportunity for profit by converting some domestic electricity production from oil to nuclear to free oil up for export, is enormous.

The same calculation was made in the late 1970s, when Iran was run (badly) by friends of America. Back then it was okee-dokee for Iran to have access to nuclear fuel and technology, so long as it was American fuel and technology. Any Western capital protesting Iran’s acquisition of nuclear technology today, from Ottawa to London to Paris to Berlin, on the grounds that Iran doesn’t need it and can’t be trusted with it, is blowing smoke. None protested when Iran was run by one of the world’s most unstable, most brutal, most oppressive and most hated regimes; to protest now gives away their duplicitous game too transparently. It looks bad on Canada for Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, to pretend we don’t know or have forgotten this all-too-recent history.

From dot.com mania to housing bubbles to the next stupid thing

“Many [US Federal Reserve] officials counted on the housing boom to prop up the economy after the stock market collapse of 2000,” says The New York Times in a front page article this week. Therein lies the nugget. Despite severe warnings of a massive housing bubble that would someday soon collapse, issued by lesser officials under him, then Fed Chair Alan Greenspan carried blithely on refusing to tighten rules for dubious mortgage lenders offering loans to home buyers who could never afford to repay them. Broadened home ownership worked to prop up the American economy by allowing new mortgage holders to, in turn, ramp up credit card purchases and, as Red Robinson used to say in advertisements that played across British Columbia, “borrow the money in the walls of your own home!”

The Republic warned as early as 2003 that excessive levels of new mortgages to tie more people into home ownership so that they would borrow more credit card debt and continue making purchases beyond their means to help restore a consumer-generated economy wounded by the dot-com bubble would all end badly. It is ending now very badly.

Vancouver has thus far been spared the ravages of repossession sweeping cities and country side throughout the US. But an acknowledgement of what lead to the housing bubble continent wide might prepare us better to deal with it when it does strike here, as inevitably it must. Bankers at both private banks and the national Bank of Canada intentionally invented the housing bubble fully knowing the risks in order to save the skin of the investor class who had grossly oversubscribed to dot.com mania. (Rich hardly ever coincides with smart.) What they will do now is try hard to find another false bubble to inflate to stave off losses for yet another half decade. (And it will be a false bubble because there is nothing truly innovative on which to rebuild foundations to a stable economy—hence the dot.com mania built on hot air, and the housing bubble built on bog land).

What will it be? Whatever it is, it will be something all your neighbours will rush headlong into without listening to a word of warning from such dour party-poopers like The Republic, because they will be once again madly encouraged by the government, the media, and the whole edifice of the economy. And it will be something even more stupid and dangerous than dot.coms and sub-prime mortgages.

Bring on the demagoguery attacks

Ron Paul, the libertarian anti-war Republican candidate for president in elections due next fall, has again raised a record amount of campaign donations in one day. On the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, December 16th, the Paul campaign raised over $6 million, mostly through small online credit card donations. Still polling in single digits in state and national surveys, the Paul campaign funds now top a significant $18 million. The huge cash reserve is expected to enable Paul to remain in the race past the do-or-die dates of many other candidates. When that happens, Paul campaigners figure they can round up a large number of those freed up votes.

Other candidates, as well as partisan mainstream media, has so far largely ignored Ron Paul probably out of a desire to avoid shining light good or bad on an underdog. Attacking Paul would only draw attention to him. But he will be attacked and soon if his drive keeps gaining momentum. The shape and content of those attacks will likely take the form of dire warnings about the risks of populist demagogues, warnings that will likely resonate with a lot of Americans who still think of Hitler and the ravages of World War II when they hear the words “populism” and “demagoguery.”

On the other hand, corporate head offices always align with any libertarianism on offer out there, for the simple reason that it means less regulation and taxation. If Paul gains the legitimacy of significant middle-American voter support, look for corporate money to jump on board. Once that happens, we’ll just see how committed Paul really is to the little guy who got him this far. At this juncture, it’s hard to see how a revolutionary like him is going to be allowed any closer to the White House than he is already.

One thing is clear though: the popularity of Paul will pull all other candidates, including the winners of the party nominations and eventually the winner of the White House, in his direction, a fact that will isolate Stephen Harper who has too closely identified with the Bush presidency. Either that or Canada will have a national election sometime next year, one that is bound to be influenced by the content and methods of the Paul phenomenon south of the border.

Food is getting scarce

Peak food? Both The New York Times and The Economist have picked up on alarms sounding from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The organization monitors global stores of important grains. Wheat, for example, is usually stored up at volumes averaging 18 weeks worth of global consumption. Stores have recently fallen to just 12 weeks. “There are only eight weeks of corn, down from 11 weeks,” the long term average in years past, The New York Times reports. Consequently, food prices are rising dramatically around the world.

At blame is climate change, which is making traditionally big producers like Australia, Ukraine, and the American mid-west, fail, and rising oil prices—oil being used intensively in all stages of farming, including most obviously the shipping of food from farms to global markets. But also, the US is moving heavily into ethanol production to offset rising demand and falling supplies of fossil-based energy. Ethanol in the US is produced from corn, a favorite cheap staple for poor the world over. One single fuel fill-up of an American SUV using ethanol-enhanced gasoline uses the corn that would be consumed by one adult with a corn-based diet, like in Mexico, in one year. But the SUV-bound American can outbid the hungry jobless Mexican for that heap of corn, so guess who gets to drive in air-conditioned comfort up to Whistler to helicopter ski another weekend, and who gets to raid an already picked-over dumpster to stay alive another day?

But oh no, the free market always has the answer to all that ails us, doesn’t it Fraser Institute?

Another conspiracy too big to believe?

The Soviets and the Americans actively shot each other down in skies over North Korea in the early 1950s, the PBS series Nova revealed last week. The fact was covered up by both American and Soviet authorities to avoid an escalation of the Cold War into World War III.

It’s a pretty big fact to have remained concealed for some 55 years, especially as the fact was known to countless US pilots, commanders, Air Force generals and presumably members of Congressional military committees and presidents, not to mention Russian pilots, generals, and leaders, many of whom would have lost good reason to keep it concealed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Though it is often called “The Forgotten War,” there are library shelves groaning under the weight of thick histories written about the period, produced by generation after generation of career historians and academics who have been focused their whole professional life long on questions to do solely with the Korean conflict. The need for the public to know that Soviets and Americans actively and directly engaged each other in overt acts of war in the 1950s surely would have been heightened during other following cataclysmic conflicts involving both adversaries, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to mention only two. And yet, the fact remained concealed through it all, concealed from the public, concealed from the media, and concealed from schools full of historians, and concealed by countless pilots, generals, and leaders from different sides of the world.

And you want to tell me that conspiracies to obscure the truth about certain events unfolding today are impossible because too many people would be too tempted to blow the whistle on too many crucial facts? Sure, whatever.

Wente’s a weirdo

Margaret Wente, columnist in The Globe and Mail, says: “We Canadians are a pampered lot. We’re accustomed to ease and entitlement.” For examples, she says our students study film theory instead of “hard stuff,” are encouraged to feel good about themselves, believe no effort should be required for achievement and reward, don’t acknowledge their parent’s sacrifice, are not motivated to repay debts, want to become documentary film makers living in Vancouver instead of molecular biologists “living in the lab,” try to lobby professors to raise a B grade to an A instead of striving for As, complain that employers won’t let them take three months off to backpack around New Zealand, spend only three months at a food-bank to gain community service credit instead of eating at food-banks, take French immersion but can’t read Proust, and believe that hardship is not going away for Spring Break.

One gets the distinct impression, given some of the specifics in her bitter complaints about young people, that it’s her own children she is talking about. And what a life her poor children must be living: is there something so terribly wrong in the Wente household about studying film, aspiring to make documentaries and living in Vancouver, backpacking for a few months around New Zealand, and feeling good about yourself?

This is the same writer who, enjoying lunch with a US Colonel in a basement in the Green Zone, reported that all coverage of the war in Iraq was a bunch of negative lies propagated by ideologically-inspired blind anti-Americans: everything seemed perfectly fine to her from the heights of her vantage point. That was around the spring of 2005, if memory serves, about 300,000 Iraqi deaths, and 3,000 US Army deaths, ago. She sounded to me then like the typical Arbutus Club afternoon tennis playing drunk smiling cheerfully through gritted teeth when asked how things were going in the matrimonial home.

The Globe and Mail is not a paper bereft of value and merit. What in the world is nervous-breakdown Queen Wente doing in its pages? It’s embarrassing to watch.

Black and Radler’s real crimes

Conrad Black and David Radler, his erstwhile henchman/sidekick, are now convicted felons off to jail for significant time—six-and-a-half years in Lord Black of Crossharbour’s case, and two-and-a-half years in The Black Lord David Radler’s case. Their convictions stemmed from fraud they perpetrated against Hollinger International, a shell company to which they attached many community and daily papers they bought up over the duration of their reign of error. Specifically, they conspired to line their own pockets by flipping the community papers they stripped and hollowed out back to other buyers, who were then extorted to pay the men protection money in the form of “non-compete agreements”—a promise by Black and Radler not to come back and start up new papers across the street and run the buyers of their old papers out of business.

Meanwhile, has anyone inquired into the lasting damage the two jail-bird convicts imparted not just to Hollinger investors but to communities across Canada and the local media they depend upon? Media is like air: you can’t see it get thinner, you can’t touch it, you can’t hear it and you can’t compare it to other street corners to know that it is thinning. You just find, if you pay attention, that your breathing is slowly getting harder and harder, until you simply fall peacefully asleep never to awaken again. Such is the state of media in Canada after years of having the likes of convicted criminals like Radler and Black hold the pillow hard down over its face for so long.