Staying Close to Your Oil and Gas Supplies

The Prime Minister has been in talks with the Secretary General of NATO Rasmussen, who is in Rome for a number of meetings prior to the NATO summit in Chicago in late May.  Senator Monti noted:

"Italy assures a financial and manpower undertaking committed to the training of Afghan forces...until now taken on by Italy in helping the security of that country...in accordance with the agreement signed by me with President Karzai on 26 January last."

It is no surprise that the Italian forces in Afghanistan are centred on Herat.  Where else?  The lovely city, the best carpets...

 
What is surprising (or perhaps more interesting than surprising) is their determination to stay after 2014.

It must be the proximity to all that  oil and gas.
 

Still On the Rocks

The Costa Concordia, now almost wholly submerged and lying on her side off the island of Giglio, is to be removed by a firm from Ravenna.  Tuscany is outraged. 

Not only has the removal contract gone to Emilia-Romagna but the port where repairs will be made after the gash in her side has been closed, the water removed  and  the ship made towable in situ, will not be Livorno but Civitavecchia.  There she will be refloated and will then be taken to Sicily where Fincantieri will sort her out  - probably by dismantling her - in the Palermo shipyards.

Chances are the numbers of  holidaymakers in Giglio will  rise.  There's so much advice to be offered to the salvage workers from the serried ranks of watchers on the quay, so much to discuss about how not to hit a large island with a large boat on a moonlit night with calm seas - Elba must be wondering what attractions it can offer to compete.

Rules of the Game

Rome. Half past five in the morning.  Two jewellers get into their car with the new collection they are taking to Munich for a jewellery fair.  These are the entrepreneurs, the kind of Italian family firm that makes up so much of the Italian economy through thick and thin.  The brothers are armed - as they should be carrying 75 million euros-worth of preziosi.

They note a white van as they drive up the ramp from the garage and are ready when it is rammed into the side of their car.  Before the pistol-waving robbers can wrench open the car doors the brother in the passenger seat has shot two of them - one dead and  another wounded. 

That  jewellers and gold couriers go armed is widely known and wholly accepted; the brothers have not been detained or charged.   The third robber is being hunted by Carabinieri throughout the neighbourhood -  they are even using helicopters over nearby open countryside.  There has merely been an official announcement that the dead robber was a Roman and had a long criminal record.

"Speak as you eat." is the Roman saying.  So they did.

End the Public Funding of Political Parties

Morphing into full vamp-face is as  nothing in effect when compared with the visceral distaste induced by watching Italian political parties justifying their continued drawing upon tax-payer funding.  The last tranche of the more than 2 billion euro payout for this legislature is due.

Without it the Partito Democratico - centre-left, ie. left-over communists and socialists, mixed with triangulating centre opportunists,  will become insolvent.  They seem to have spent their share of our money on travel, hotels, conferences in various more desirable parts of Italy and the world; a steady stream of petty upgradings of their politicians' and apparatchiks' living standards.  The Northern Leagues went for gold ingots, diamonds, villas, central city appartments and supporting the Bossi family and friends with handouts, business start-ups, and jobs all round.  The Partito della Liberta' have a more bunga bunga approach to spending our money.

The Prime Minister now stands accused of running not a 'technical' government backed by a grand coalition in Parliament to straighten out the economy and deal with welfare debt, but a full blown political administration that is taking on the real problems of  the country: an enormous submerged black and grey economy; organised criminality embracing the judiciary and local governance (towns and cities are having their administrations suspended from Ventimiglia to Palermo for mafia involvement); what looks like an entire programme of arrests for clan and family heads of organised criminality - they're hauled up into the daylight from their underground hidey holes at least once a week on the Eight O'Clock News with Carabinieri officers wearing 'at last' expressions and toting submachine guns; bemused-looking diners, shoppers, yacht owners, Ferrari drivers looking for their receipts under the gaze of Financial police (with golden wings on their hats!); and night after night enraged trade union special interest groups join various professional  -well, guilds, I suppose - spitting various kinds of moral high ground venom and demands that their particular interest group's ends and means should continue to deny the rest of the potential workforce a chance of a reasonable job, pension, health service, business start-up.

The population is cheering him on.  He's committed to no more austerity and the use of all his Executive power - which is considerable - to lower taxes once the evaders' revenues are in the kitty, lose the regulations designed to keep economic activity for the privileged and connected, bring Italy's highly-skilled, and largely maintained in functioning groups during the recession, workforce into  productive contact with the European economy (indeed the international economy, given the high propensity to export to the rest of the world).

The trouble is he's determined not to continue past this year.  The disgraced political parties have been warned to clean themselves up and sort out their relationship with the institutions of the state - you know, Parliament, the Judiciary,  the Constitution, the Law, the People - and stop  setting themselves up as all those things if not more.

So now we can see them as they really are, fighting for their kind of Italy; our country that they nearly bankrupted in their incompetence and corruption; their incorrigible, self-seeking pursuit of personal gain.  By next May there will be elections for the new Legislature  and for the new Head of State.  Both the Prime Minister and the President have stated they are not available again.  And we, the people, will not put up with political parties as they were (and still are trying to remain).

It took four months for the present Prime Minister to pull the economy and public finances into some semblance of order, to get the rules of the game sorted out, to vanquish the vicious vested interests.  But the minute the politicians saw a little room for themselves they are rushing to fill it with their usual poison.  In the end their funding must be cut off.  It's the only way to kill them so we can have parties that depend upon public support and answer to our political choices.

The Colonial Archives and the Art of Concealment

The dismantling of empire is never a pretty sight.  Today the Foreign Office has begun to release some of the files held secretly in Buckinghamshire (where else but Le Carre country?) and the Guardian is up in arms.  So it should be.  Much of what is extant from the files that were held in former colonies is as disgraceful as might be expected.  And much that is worse has been destroyed.

Except that these seem to be just the files from the colonies - those not destroyed in situ.  Savingrams poured into London day after day recounting, analysing, warning, seeking decisions, recording, panicking even; diplomatic bags and deliveries of copies of material arrived by slower routes.  Allies, most particularly the United States, and other decolonising European states, were fully embedded in matters of interest to them.   The destroyed data were not unique documents - merely those copies kept in local archives and offices.

Yet we are led to believe that they are lost, evidence of colonial wrongdoing gone forever.  They are not.  They are merely in another place (another part of Bucks?) and all the more secure because of the misleading emphasis on local destruction.

And if you ever wondered where the arrogance and enormity of the British secret state derived, start by looking at these damaged, partial, redacted archives that have been wrung from your ruling classes.

Lenin's Question Again

Generalised austerity is producing recession; and structural reforms alone are not going to make it better.  Not least because some structural reforms are not necessarily for the better.  Furthermore they are effective over the long term - ten to twenty years.  In the meantime the absolute requirement for fiscal consolidation reinforces lack of demand.  Which is made worse by taxation levels that render the financially competent poor.

Europeans are suffering from social and political parasitism.  Certainly today's economic environment  is competitive, but parasitism as a concept  can be borrowed from Lenin.  Indeed, for our economies too, much can be learned from the experiences of state planning and the centrally planned economy that failed the moment its objectives were not the creation of basic development but the creation of a modern consumer-driven economy.

For our capitalist societies to fail because of income inequality and mal-distribution of wealth is as miserable an end for us as the destruction of the dream of realised socialism.    However, even though the failures of state planning are well-known and well-documented,  the failures of market capitalism are, unfortunately,  in part the result of the economically naive and unaware attempting to use the failed techniques and ideologies of  realised socialism through an antidemocratic take-over of the state, and its enlargement beyond any local, democratic control.

Yet the hyper-liberal response to the ills of market capitalism is creating the gross increases in inequality that are at the root of our recession.  What is to be done?

Happy Easter!

We've made it once more.

Lenin Makes it Through Siberian Winter Cold

The tortoise is eating flowers in the garden.  There were great fears for survival after the February temperatures and deep snow.

When is a Dove Not a Dove?

Imagine calling an Airbus 319 a dove.  No matter what colour you paint it, it's an ugly Airbus. 
(And artists are supposed to have some sense of beauty.  And history.  Aren't they?)

This is a Dove.  From de Havilland.

The UK Needs More Than 'Privacy From State Snooping'

Fresh legislation on surveillance of individual's communications is a red herring when considering what needs to be done or undone or not done to end the United Kingdom's democratic deficit.  This deficit is nothing to do with the UK's membership of the European Union although the EU democratic deficit interacts malignantly with that of the United Kingdom to produce a peculiarly authoritarian and surveillance-ridden European state in the UK.

First to be reformed must be the institution of an hereditary head of state. The feudal governance structures carried in the train of an hereditary monarchy have no rightful place in an advanced capitalist European democratic state.  Crown prerogative and Crown privilege (or Public interest immunity these days) are democratically uncontrolled and their distribution between the Executive, Judiciary, and the Head of State in person are unsettled and shifting to the advantage of secrecy and the manipulation of those parts of the state that are accessible by democratic means.

Which leads to the lack of a codified constitution.  The UK has no constitution.  A constitution that is capable of taking on almost any form under guise of being 'unwritten' but to be found in many sources accessed by specialist knowledge and interpretation, and whose content is undefined and without criteria for inclusion and which, further, can be wholly altered by legislative or Executive act, is no constitution at all.

There is no readily accessible route to any resolution of conflict between the individual and this monstrously over-powered and ill-defined state.  Without a constitutional court, defined as such and sitting as such any party to a conflict finds themselves without straightforward redress, lost in a fog of interpretation and application of unclear rules and precedents.  Which is precisely how sovereign, Executive and Judiciary want it.

Redress, for UK subjects, sought through the Court of Human Rights is grossly inadequate and it is here that some of the the worst aspects of the malign inter-relationship of European structures and UK structures occur.  If domestic remedies must be exhausted first and there are none or are defective UK subjects are further disadvantaged by the nebulousness of hard to realise possibilities dressed as real opportunities or even rights.  Other European states' citizens know precisely where they stand and how to get from there to somewhere else (so to speak).

It is long past the time that this pernicious, mutually reinforcing State in the UK was reformed to make all of it,  not just parts of legislature and parts of local government, open to democratic vote, scrutiny and  control.  If all the other member-states of the European Union can produce forms of democracy enabled through institutions and constitutions open to democratic control, so can the United Kingdom. 

The UK needs:  an elected head of state; an elected second chamber of Parliament; a codified constitution; a constitutional court; and local level tribunals readily accessible to the population  for early resolution of abuses of power by state officials.

Perhaps then the Union itself will no longer be so noxious to the United Kingdom through the over-zealous and selective application of its practices and policies, which are held in check in other member-states by the proper functioning of their democracies.  

Bradford Goes West

Respect taking more than 55% of the vote in a bog-standard safe Labour seat is bad news for all the main political parties.  Electorates are voting tactically with remarkable outcomes. It takes a long time to convince voters that in first-past-the-post systems the vote should be cast against the target candidate, not for the preferred Party necessarily.  To have a charismatic and highly communicative candidate set against the target candidate is a bonus.

Thoughts turn at once to the elections for the London mayor but this is a very different election; not first-past-the-post, with inner city  and outer suburban electorates voting  markedly differently, and with both parties represented by non-standard candidates who, each in their own way, can be seen as a maverick.  Except the qualities that make Boris a maverick are very much more attractive than the maverick qualities of Ken Livingstone.  Indeed so unpleasant has Livingstone so amply shown himself to be, he has succeeded in losing many of the Party votes that might have accrued to him on party loyalty grounds.

It is the relatively safe seats in constituencies everywhere that are going to be touched by the Bolton West effect.  Harriet Harman has said Labour will be working out what happened and why.  So should the other mainstream parties - hurriedly.  Labour was the first to get the vote-savvy effect in the neck, by 2015 it will  be everywhere.

Unless minds change in a hurry over single constituency, first-past-the-post voting.  It wouldn't be a bit surprising if a brief, all-party supported bill nipped through Parliament in the next 18 months and we had a proportional, party-list system after all for our next expression of 'democracy' .

Eating Ice Cream

Offered an ice cream cornet:  remove your gloves; take one of those teeny, multi-coloured plastic spoons from the assistant and use it to attack your ice cream, do not use your tongue or any other part of your anatomy; help yourself generously to paper napkins from the dispenser, and  stand still.  Do not walk about,  trying to eat ice cream;  least of all leave the ice cream shop and eat your ice cream in the street.

Should there be concern about the Prince of Wales's fingers?

Second Thoughts on the Budget and Showing a Bit of Egalitarian Ankle

"The failure of a disastrous model of economic growth" is the Chancellor's succinct account in his budget speech of what happened to the UK under Labour.  It was matched in Ed Miliband's equally revelatory response that the United States economy was growing under that model, growing under stimulation and 'investment' policies that should have been persisted in by the UK,  even as it was brought down by unsustainable state debt.

The United States is the World power.  It cannot go bankrupt.  It is an enormous economy beside which it is pointless to place the economy of the United Kingdom.  As the government copes with the devastating results of  hubris,  Atlanticist intellectual fawning, and failed policies aimed at the disruption of European integration rather than at the withdrawal of the UK from the Union, Labour displays poverty of understanding, poverty of personnel, poverty of proposals for the sensible pursuit of debt-reduction and economic growth.

All they offer is those worn-out faces with their worn-out policies.  "Be like America.  The economists we cite have won Nobel prizes."  While all around them the people of the UK are hanging on like grim death to their housing and their jobs  and their shrinking public services because of vile experiments practised on their economy by those incompetent, bamboozled, economic idiots with a nasty line in state and Party control.

And as for the poor pensioners: pensioners are not a homogenous group.  Of course  the final salary, comfy house bought for small multiples of annual income on endowment mortgages that actually returned a profit,  university free-at-the-point-of-use, free travel pass toting generation should cough up.  They  are the 'rich' and many are 'rich' on state employee unfunded pension payments.  We are all in this together, particularly those who retired at 60 or even earlier and have quarter of a century of largesse yet to finish consuming.  If a pensioner hasn't a large enough income they won't be paying more tax.  There is a certain schadenfreude in reading of their shock at discovering that this time the gate came down in front of them, and not behind their cohort.   

What pension 'raid'?  Income is income and tax is tax.  Everyone should be handing over for agreed outgoings - the wider the tax base the more government expenditure can be controlled by interested tax-payers.  Something on the lines of that old, progressive chestnut 'everyone should use state educational and health services so that they benefit from the sharp elbows of the middle classes'.

Pity there wasn't a wealth tax introduced; inter-generational inequalities are far too embedded.

First Budget Reaction

It had been said many times that Ed Miliband is more than inadequate, he is nuts, but I had assumed it was a weakish expression of distaste for a fratricidal, union puppet.

On the evidence of Miliband's response to the Chancellor of Exchequer's budget speech it can be considered a kind evaluation.   There was no response to the 2012 budget; most of the detailed response was to what had been announced in the 2011 budget.  It was a response that displayed no intellectual capacity to speak to the arguments and information just laid out in the Chancellor's speech. 

It had the kind of refrain that occurs in  dreadful English folk songs - a sort of hey nonny no about same old wicked Tories - which he chanted every couple of sentences.

The man is stupid. 

Cameron Gets It

"... our post-war predecessors had the right idea, embodied in the visionary plan prepared by Patrick Abercrombie in 1944.  His plan underpinned the Southeast’s economic success by proposing well planned and well located new towns, which would in time become new engines of economic growth.  And he twinned that vision with proposals for a new London green belt to prevent sprawl. Now, while everyone celebrates the success of the green belt, far fewer people celebrate the contribution that the new towns made to maintaining it intact.  Some people feel we’ve lost the art of creating great places with the right social and environmental infrastructure.   .... in the last century private and social enterprises also created places like Hampstead Garden Suburb, Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, not perfect, but popular, green,...."

And there are schools like this too:

 

At this time of year we would be singing, 

'There  is a green hill far away'  in Assembly.

Not so grandly as these chaps 30 miles up the road perhaps;  we did  'enthusiastic attack' in our Hall.

Narrowing the Field for the Presidency of the World Bank

Under the pretence of widening the field for the presidency of the World Bank the usual pseudo-keynesian, 'progressive'  suspects are pushing for choice to be narrowed.  The FT publishes what is effectively a letter posing as a multi-authored article  calling for a President who is: not necessarily American; not necessarily from the developing economies; is a proponent of a particular economic (read political) ideology; and their arguments are made with the usual holier-than-thou moral and ethical stance that only the 'left' is capable of achieving the Good.

Let us thank Goodness, then, that 'diplomatic and managerial skills' make the criteria cut.
 
A  'distinguished record as an economic policymaker, outstanding professional background, familiarity with banking and finance, ... [and] solid knowledge and experience of development policy' might be claimed by some lacking self-awareness, repentance, intellectual humility, and currently seeking a new World role.    Be afraid.
     

Drought

Widespread reports that south and southeast England are suffering a drought of 1976 proportions raise interesting problems, not least: who owns the water delivered to a consumer?  Quite draconian limitations upon water  use have been published: no garden-watering, car-washing etc;  even our windows are to maintain a steadily increasing layer of dirt.  But are there unspoken limitations on what we do with our water after we have used it?

In a country with hot, dry summers, not to mention a reasonable if needs-driven level of eco-consciousness,   everyone has installed, or will instal at the next refurbishment,   means to collect the acque chiare - rain water, kitchen run-off, shower and basin waste.  This water is theirs to use as they choose.  Bought and paid for at an ever higher price the greater the consumption.  In an eco-house the water system is almost enclosed; much of the water coming in stays.  It does not set off down the drains to be recycled by the water company and resold.

Is that the case in England? Or are we paying our bills to rent the use of water which is then mostly returned to the companies for re-renting after clean-up?   It's difficult to tell from the media announcements but they do take the form of specific prohibitions  - 'banned'  activities rather than banned mains water usage (you can leave your kitchen tap running and there's no  penalty).

Somehow it is all reminiscent of the television license fee:pay to own the set even if  BBC-watching enters the 'cruel and unusual punishment' category.  Pay for the water but you can't do what you like with it and you might as well hand it back as all the activities you would use recycled water for are banned.

Get Your Glad Rags On.....

Or at least your desert, cover-up garb.

'International politicans have thrown their weight behind Kuwait’s bid to move its economy forward, with former British prime minister Gordon Brown giving the country his backing to host the World Economic Forum in 2013, according to the Kuwait News Agency.

Perhaps they don't know; but Angels could have sworn  that the concept of  jettatore is carried,  is profoundly understood,  in Arab cultures.

World Bank Race

And they're off...names (cf the FT) are circulating,  opinions are being given on who may or may not stand, rules - spoken and unspoken - are being dusted off, while that old local authority recruitment injunction 'canvassing will disqualify' might never have existed.

Angels are for Condoleeza Rice.

Such a clever woman:  civilised, pragmatic, competent, successful yet discreet.  Ideally qualified as a political scientist with a profound understanding of the former Soviet Union  (more underdeveloped than that is hard to beat);  there are enough economists in the World Bank to sink a battleship and it's politics that matter in the world right now, not economics when we all know what needs to be done and where.   It's the doing  it that needs outstanding expertise.

Condoleeza for President of the World Bank!

UPDATE
The Bloomberg editorialist is calling for non-Americans to be in the running:

 "... it should go without saying that many extremely able candidates are available for the World Bank  job [Job?  This isn't a job - it's the presidency  of an institution wielding American power.  Why on Earth (seeing as we're coming over all global) should America have to find and nurture a suitable poodle?  Go for the real thing.]   who don’t happen to be American. To exclude them at the outset is indefensible. Obama should see this as an opportunity not just to appoint an excellent new leader of the World Bank but also to start a new chapter in global economic governance."

And  'a new chapter in global economic governance' wouldn't start from the World Bank now, would it?  And if it could then America is not going to have a non-American in charge, are they?

Further Update

The Observer seriously puts forward the candidacy of Geoffrey Sachs.

It doesn't happen often, but words fail me.  Conceited, superficial, boastful, intellectually under-powered....... as I said - words fail me.  

Moody Judges

Florence has been down-graded by Moody's.    The city, its citizens, its region of Tuscany have been found guilty of spending that which does not belong to them: guilty of spending on beauty, truth, history, politics, the Renaissance; guilty of banking  offences.

Their representatives, appearing before the Moody judges, caused instant protest.

"The guy over there is naked,  and the boy in the little boots with the tip of his hat-feather up his ass is little better.  Actually the women are half-naked, at best, too - Cover them up!  Officer".

"Tried that, Sir.  The clothes make them look- well, more suggestive - They go about like this all the time, everyone knows what they look like, so covering-up makes people  kind of look more."

"They're part of this PIGS movement I expect.  OK. Moving along - Is that a lion they've brought in?"

"Listen up.  You are here for sentencing.  (Can they understand? Speak American? We need translators here?)".

"Couldn't say, Sir.   The one in the long skirt with the dark curly hair - he's a man, Sir,  name of Machiavelli, - he's told them to be realistic and to lie to advantage  when asked anything by the court."

"Don't want to get into questions of gender, or ethnicity or morals here - they wouldn't grasp it anyway.  We'll just go straight to the sentencing.  Are these the ones who burned our agent Savanorola   after he tried to get them to cut their spending? Those terrorists? There's no statute of limitations on terrorism, 1498 or no.  Right.

You will be taken from here to a place where your children will receive a good, moral American  education.  There they will learn to wear clothes and sing the national anthem with their hands on their hearts. 

(Do they sing?  Can they hold a tune?) 

There you will learn that you must give to the world as well as take; that you must balance the books; and you will learn the meaning of debt.

You are condemned to spend the rest of your lives in Florence, Oregon.

And may God have mercy on your souls."