Brontides

The coalition government is making many of the right noises when it comes to civil liberties in the UK. Unpicking the authoritarian streak that Labour exhibited during its years in power is a worthwhile task that shouldn’t be trivialised, but the debate surrounding civil liberties is still defined by the rigid limits set out by those who enjoy many of the greatest privileges.

The list of areas to be targeted describes a largely positive direction of travel. ID cards and biometric passports are to be scrapped; the fingerprinting of children at schools is to be curtailed. Government databases are to be pruned back. FOI is to be extended; libel laws will be reviewed to protect freedom of speech; CCTV is to be regulated. A “Great Repeal Bill” promises to cut through swathes of redundant and obstructive legislation; in an email to his supporters, Nick Clegg suggested that the bill would

…roll back Labour’s surveillance state, scrapping ID cards, the children’s database and restoring civil liberties.

In areas like education, health and policing people are going to get much greater powers over the services in their area. And we are going to hand more powers to communities and councils.

All very fine and worthy. But the proposals are geared overwhelmingly towards a single section of society as beneficiaries. ID cards and CCTV are middle-class concerns. Freedoms of information and speech can be seen as a stimulus package for Britain’s already over-eager newspaper industries and will result in ever-more salacious stories for their largely middle-class audiences. The power to modify the services offered by schools, hospitals and local police forces are dogwhistle sops to Middle Britain. And while the exact form of the Great Repeal Bill is yet to be revealed, it seems unlikely to tackle such personal infringements as stop-and-search, the Dangerous Dogs Act, control orders, or ASBOs, which tend to target the poorer sections of society disproportionately.

But even the wild class disparity in the conversation is mild compared to the glaring hole that exists when talking about the most disadvantaged groups of all: political and economic migrants, and asylum seekers (the treatment of whom can be particularly inhumane). While the government’s commitment to reversing extended detention without trial is a big, and welcome, improvement, ASBOs in particular continue to be used as a method of suppressing dissent, as in this account from 2006:

Recently, at a demonstration outside Harmondsworth detention centre in solidarity with asylum seekers, I was hemmed in with 50 other protestors when the police used powers under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a blanket Asbo on anyone who tried to get near the buildings.

They then used powers under section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to a police officer who “reasonably suspects” that you have engaged in “anti-social behaviour”. A few people who refused were arrested.

This was no violent protest, and there was no threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety. But the demonstration gave the police an opportunity to use the laws to collect intelligence on “troublemakers”, without having to show that they had actually made any trouble.

This is particularly germane on the day in which the Parliament Square protestors lost their legal right to express their views – thanks to a decidedly illiberal misuse of existing powers.

The discussion on civil liberties in the UK remains too enmired in privilege. Part of this is because libertarians strongly tend to be middle class, white and male; their political preferences tend to reflect their (often unchallenged) social biases and privileges. Part of it, too, is because Labour have consistently chosen not to make social freedom a cause that they would fight for on behalf of the working classes, leaving it as a policy ground for the Lib Dems and the Tories – parties with their roots firmly in the middle classes – to scoop up.

But whatever the reason for the disparity, there is an opportunity now for the civil rights of all sections of society to be strengthened and extended. It requires that we not allow the discussion to be limited to those rights enjoyed by those who already enjoy entrenched rights and securities, whose political access is already entrenched. The work of organisations like Liberty needs greater support and needs to be extended to ensure that human dignity is respected at all levels of society. The rights enjoyed by well-off British citizens, while by no means complete, are some of the most extensive in the history of the world. It behoves us to extend those rights as far through our culture as is conceivably possible.

Nearly 26 years ago, the Bhopal plant of an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide, a massive US corporation, suffered a catastrophic malfunction. The storage containers of the plant – which produced industrial pesticides – leaked highly toxic gas during the night, exposing over 500,000 people to the poisonous fumes. Estimates into the effects vary – the Indian government confirmed nearly two and a half thousand deaths immediately after the leak, and fatalities related to the incident have swelled to over 15,000 since then. The company continues to insist that the disaster was the result of sabotage, but successive studies have pointed to a wide array of internal processes that led to the leak, including a negligent approach to critical equipment and safety standards. Most shockingly, the plant has still not been entirely fixed – 390 tons of toxic chemicals abandoned at the UCIL plant continue to leak and pollute the groundwater in the region.

I’m not going to attempt to replicate the work of the many journalists and academics who have been working to uncover the truth of this case for nearly three decades. The Bhopal Post does outstanding work bringing the unfolding effects of the disaster to a wider audience, while Amnesty has consistently agitated for justice. Unfortunately, the Bhopal victims’ days in court so far have delivered anything but. Union Carbide has so far paid just $470 million in damages and compensation, a criminally small sum in the face of the $3 billion claimed. Those officials who were tried for criminal negligence received small sentences – 2 years each. Warren Anderson, the head of Union Carbide at the time and the figure most widely blamed for the incident, was allowed to escape trial for reasons that remain unclear.

The incident has exposed some measure of hypocrisy on behalf of the US government when it comes to corporate crime. Union Carbide paid $470 million to clean up its mess, compensate half a million victims and build hospitals in the region. By contrast, BP have pledged $20 billion to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill.

These two cases bring to mind a proposition, put forward by a British lawyer, that “ecocide” be considered a crime to be tried in the International Criminal Court, on a par with genocide and other crimes against humanity. As described, the suggestion seems whimsical at best:

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

But the idea of a system of corporate responsibility that can be prosecuted at an international level is an intriguing one. It would, sadly, almost certainly be opposed by the US, which would regard it as a hostile mechanism for attacking American corporate interests. Sadly, it’s hard to see how justice can be served to those still suffering in Bhopal.

In the run-up to yesterday’s UK budget, the left wing of the internet – a cocoon that I comfortably inhabit – made merry with its buzzphrase du jour. No shock doctrine for Britain! we hear from such twitterlectuals (and Green Party luminaries – many of the most vocal Green activists have been really going for the Lib Dems of late – but that’s another post) as Sian Berry and Adam Ramsay. Now, look; the budget was painful. We all got hosed, the poor proportionally more than the rich. And the government spin hasn’t been even remotely coherent; even the usually credible Lynne Featherstone came over all loyally dishonest.

But “shock doctrine” is one of those phrases that just annoys me. It annoys me all the more because it comes from the left – a space which I nominally occupy – but yet is such a deeply incoherent piece of intellectual padding.

It was popularised by Naomi Klein in her 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argued that free-market capitalists and their political backers have used, and occasionally manufactured, crises and disasters in order to inflict social change on populations that are unwilling to accept them but unable to resist, due to the aforementioned upheaval. The term gained traction on the left after the Haiti quake, when the US right-wing Heritage Foundation caused an uproar by suggesting that aid be tied to economic reforms. Here’s Adam Ramsay again:

News stories about Haiti are full of tales of looters. There’s less talk of a bigger scale plunder to come. In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ she maps the rise of “disaster capitalism”. She describes how, over 40 years, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pentagon, and various mega-corporations have increasingly used (or created) disasters as an excuse to push through unpopular right wing economic policies, and asset strip vulnerable economies.

I was just finishing this book on Thursday as the scale of Haiti’s earthquake was becoming clear. My immediate fear was an obvious one. So I did what all young lefties do in a time of crisis. I set up a Facebook group: “No Shock Doctrine for Haiti”.

I plucked that quote a little bit selectively but it illustrates my first problem with the term and its use: shock doctrine is a methodology seeking application. Exponents of the theory tend to force this most fashionable of ideas onto situations rather than respond to the unique characteristics of an individual incidents. The book, for example, rests on the idea that the policies of free marketeers tend not to be very popular. For the most part this is unarguable – even Milton Friedman would concede as much – but in her zeal to apply her theory to every possible case Klein makes some dramatic reaches. Apparently, Hurricane Katrina led to the “privatisation” of New Orleans against the will of the population; however, the reforms imposed on New Orleans were structural and mostly welcomed by a population frustrated by lazy and corrupt local government. Haiti is another example of this; although tying catastrophe aid to any kind of condition would have been horrifically wrong, measures to curtail corruption and establish good governance in one of the world’s poorest countries would have enjoyed overwhelming local support. Klein’s depiction of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis as a conflict between grasping capitalists and honourable democrats shows a profound lack of historical understanding, and her claim that the protests crushed in Tiananmen Square were against further market freedom is based on pure ignorance. And those are just the cases that stretch credibility; the claims that Margaret Thatcher fabricated the Falklands War as a way of breaking the unions shatters it irrevocably.

The second problem is to do with the way that the argument is cased. At one level, the problem is that the issue is mischaracterised as being a tool used purely by the right wing to advance their corporatist goals. In truth, the technique of using a crisis to drive policy reform is as popular on the left as it is on the right. The New Deal in America was launched on an unwilling society as a result of the Great Depression; the great social reforms in the UK of the late forties and early fifties, which led to the formation of the NHS, arose off the back of the post-war slump; Barack Obama used the current economic collapse to the same ends. Blair and Brown spent much of their respective times in office extending the powers of the state, evoking the spectre of terrorism and war as justification.

But this gap masks a deeper problem with the argument, which is the assumption that governments should not use crises as a way of driving social change. It’s predicated on a somewhat condescending lack of faith in populations; it assumes that electorates, struck numb by catastrophe, are unable to resist the snake-oil of perfidious political salesmen. In fact, crises inspire rare moments of national unity; often these moments arise because the crisis in question has exposed a policy failing or fault that simply needs to be corrected, and the correction of which is obvious. Thatcher had to break the power of the unions; whether she needed to do so quite so thoroughly is an open question, but most even on the left now assume that the unions were too powerful, and that to persist in allowing them to run entire industries was a path to economic and social ruin. New Zealand, Chile and Brazil abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren’t working well and induced economic crises.

There is some limited value to some of the ideas contained within the term “shock doctrine”. Attaching conditions to Haiti aid, for example, would clearly have been grossly wrong, and those who suggested it were rightly excoriated. The term itself, however, masks deep intellectual failings that continue to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing economic arguments. There is plenty to debate in the new UK budget; the rise in VAT, for example, will be economically and politically unpopular for some time to come. Branding it as “shock doctrine” is ludicrous and shrill, and will neither advance the debate nor grow the left-wing base in opposition.

Naomi Klein, meanwhile, remains an extremely poor role model for the left, and in an ideal world would join Michael Moore on the island of left-wing intellectual rejects. Honestly, we can be much better than this.

Intrigue, as the New York Times popped up this morning with a story about how Afghanistan is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of mineral wealth, including massive deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium.

There’s a few different aspects to this story. Michael Cohen is peeved by the somewhat cynical exploitation of the story by the Pentagon, and he has a point – there’s nothing new about this haul. The US found charts detailing the country’s mineral wealth in 2004, and even put the details online in 2007, but these charts had been drawn up during the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. The reason why this story is in the paper today is because the Pentagon needs a good news cycle or two. There’s may be a little bit more to it than that; it may be that the US needs a way to strongarm co-operation out of the Karzai government in Kabul. But either way, this is pretty transparent.

Afghanistan has been a rough war almost since its inception, but the last few months have been particularly bad:

First, let’s talk about Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Remember the chatter earlier this year about how he’d gone crazy, threatening to join the Taliban and all that? That discussion died down a little after Karzai checked all the right boxes during his May visit to Washington.

Then came the “peace jirga” — after which Karzai abruptly fired his intelligence and interior ministers, reputed to be two of the most competent members of his cabinet (technically, they resigned). The intelligence minister, Amrullah Saleh, told his side of the Friday in a jaw-dropping interview with the Times. According to Saleh, Karzai no longer believes the West can win the war and is looking to cast his lot with Pakistan and the Taliban, and an unnamed source told the paper that Karzai had suggested that the Americans had carried out a rocket attack on the peace jirga. Karzai has apparently also asked the United Nations to remove Mullah Omar from a key U.N. blacklist.

Next came revelations that Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, is still deeply involved with the Afghan Taliban (yeah, blow me over with a feather) despite heated denials to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the drive for Kandahar looks to be stalled in the face of questionable local support for Karzai’s government, the Taliban is killing local authorities left and right, and the corruption situation has apparently gotten so bad that the U.S. intelligence community is now keeping tabs on which Afghan officials are stealing what.

So the article is a piece of empty puff, right? Well, yes, actually – the US can’t develop those resources now for the same reason that it hasn’t been able to for the last 6 years, and for much the same reasons as why Russia didn’t bother in the 1980s: there’s a war, there’s no infrastructure, and the local government is so corrupt that it would have next to no real economic effect. The worst-case outcome, as advanced by Cohen, is a situation analogous to Congo or Angola – both of which are resource-rich but economically poor. The best case seems to be that Afghanistan becomes a “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, which comes from a Pentagon memo that asserts the possibility like it’s a good thing. Personally, I’d prefer it if Saudi Arabia stopped being the Saudi Arabia of oil, rather than inspiring a glut of new Saudi Arabias for the rest of the periodic table.

It’s nice to hear that Afghanistan has an economic future, if it ever gets to the point where it has a government that is capable of managing it for the good of the country as a whole. But it’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, for now; I’d be amazed if it gets to that stage in our lifetimes, and it certainly won’t get to that point while American boots are still on the ground. Meanwhile, public opinion, both at home and in Afghanistan itself, won’t shift behind the occupiers until real, tangible benefits to their presence start being felt. The US military should be focusing on doing what it has to do rather than indulging in this kind flippancy.

I’m posting this, an article about an economist with some unusual ideas about poor world economic alleviation, relatively uncritically.

The central conceit of the article is the work of Paul Romer, a Senior Fellow at Stanford and successful software entrepreneur. Mr. Romer wants to build a series of what he calls “charter cities” – cities run by rich-world governments on land loaned to them by poor-world countries. The article invokes two models – Hong Kong under the British and Lübeck under Henry III of Saxony. If you think that the idea sounds wacky, then you’re not alone. It is a decidedly odd proposition, but for all that it inspires a certain sense of moral abhorrence, it’s an interesting thought experiment, and deserves to be examined for its merits.

His solution may be unconventional, but his diagnosis is complex and mostly rings true. Although an awful lot of poverty can be traced back to underlying causes – corruption, a lack of resources, an unskilled workforce, rich world privilege or weak distribution networks – one feature that is common to almost all poor societies is weak governance.

To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.

The Atlantic’s article is subject to the usual sloppy editorialism – the reason why many poor-world homes lack access to electricity cannot solely be reduced to rules, as it will also have roots in infrastructural weakness, high energy generation costs and old-fashioned sleaze. But Romer’s charter cities are more nuanced than that; not only are they intended to provide governance models that will have a pervasive effect throughout localities, they are also intended to act as mediums through which richer countries can funnel defensive stability, money and expertise into a populace.

So the idea has some merit, to the extent that it attacks some of the problems that it sets out to solve in a way that traditional aid does not. Frustratingly, the Atlantic’s article is a puff-piece, and makes very little attempt to examine the further problems that it potentially raises:

1. What country would willingly allow a project like this to take place on their land? Forget the problems implied by corruption – countries with poor governance tend to have poor governors, and western cities on the doorsteps of corrupt officials would cause unwanted scrutiny, provide a safe haven for anti-government sentiment and act as a drain on public purses intended for skimming. The colonial period demonstrated that local populations resent foreign dominance immensely. The anger and distrust that the example of Hong Kong engendered cannot be understated.
2. So if willing assent can be discounted, can it be assumed that charter cities will be imposed by force? Hong Kong was seized; Lübeck was rescued from anonymity and anarchy in the troubled times preceding the rise of the Hanseatic League. Neither example is entirely happy. Even in troubled times, Henry III’s presumption made him no friends, and his possessions were eventually taken from him. Fondness for Britain in her former colonies is in short supply. Furthermore, these were both isolated incidents. At a time when America has earned the ill will of much of the Middle East, it can be seen that no power in the modern world has the capacity to hold several such properties against the will of local populations.
3. The commitment for rich countries would be significant and long-term. This post assumes that the scheme would be undertaken as a philanthropic venture, and that the client cities would not be subject to rapacious profit-seeking – a long assumption at best, but the scheme is posited as philanthropic so that seems like the best basis upon which to judge it. Britain held Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years and sunk huge amounts of its extensive resourced into it; by the time that Britain was a shrunken homunculus of a power. Would rich governments or populations be prepared to risk so much for such intangible rewards?
4. There is evidence that Hong Kong was exceptional, and reasons why it was exceptional have not been fully examined. Hong Kong was the only part of the British Empire to such achieve gains under the British. The rest of the Empire had mixed results. The benefits conferred upon India are debatable; developmentally it garnered advantages, but the economic gains were weak and confined to a ruling class, deepening and entrenching inequalities already in place thanks to the local caste system. Southern Africa was left with an even more extreme inequality in the form of apartheid. Egypt was left almost entirely undeveloped as its domination was purely strategic; Britain wanted control of Suez. British presence in Mesopotamia led to the formation of the state of Israel; good for Israel, but the local population received fringe benefits at best. The West Indies… so on, so on. Hong Kong was made rich for strategic reasons; it was Britain’s entrepôt and the economic capital of the region. The circumstances in which it existed were unusual.
5. Finally, there exists a problem with the fungibility of governance systems. A British system of patent, competition and bankruptcy laws, for example, may not be the most appropriate in all situations; some countries will respond, for reasons of existing legal traditions and social expectations, to a French of German system. However, this is a decision that will always be subject to political interference and historical influence.

So there are good reasons to discount the actual manifestation of the idea. But that shouldn’t be taken to undermine the perspective that it takes when considering the problems that traditional aid faces when addressing questions of global poverty. The idea exposes some real problems with the assumptions that we make when attempting to confront inequality and these problems deserve to be examined.

Full credit to Kevan for the link.

Since 2005, BP has seen an explosition in a Texas refinary, a big leak in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, numerous allegations of price fixing, 19 employee fatalities in unrelated incidents and, of course, Deepwater Horizon. In 2000, the company was forced to pay a $10 million fine for its mismanagement of its US properties. According to PIRG, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills in just one year, and in 1991 the EPA cited it as the single company responsible for the largest output of US pollution.

BP is also leading the building of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Despite the fact that the pipleline crosses no fewer than fourteen active earthquake zones, it has not been earthquake engineered. Land required for the building of the pipeline has been seized under hastily dwarn-up eminent domain laws.

BP is a genuinely awful organisation, and I would suggest boycotting them if funnelling your money towards Exxon and Shell weren’t just as bad.