More Blackwater Contractors Than Police In Pakistan's Capital?

Everyone's favourite mercenaries - Blackwater, recently re-branded as XE - are operating in large numbers in Pakistan's capital Islamabad.

One local politician has gone as far as to say that he thinks there are more XE contractors in the capital than local police. Maulana Fazlur Rahman is quoted by UPI as stating that there are around 9,000 XE contractors operating in the capital, compared with 7,000 local police.

Before we dismiss the claims of the leader of the JUI Party (which has pro-Taliban leanings) out of hand, it is worth pondering for a moment what it would feel like if 9,000 foreign military contractors (say, from Russia, or China) were operating in London or New York. I think many westerners would find this an appalling prospect.

The development comes the week that the first known American military deaths were announced inside Pakistan.

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Another Reason to Dispair at the EU

This from the EU-funded Samuri surveillance system - whose aim is to create the "next generation" of CCTV:

Existing systems focus on analysing recorded video. SAMURAI is to develop a real-time adaptive behaviour profiling and abnormality detection system for alarm event alert and prediction.

We aim to develop an abnormal detection system based on a heterogeneous sensor network consisting of both fix-positioned CCTV cameras and mobile wearable cameras with audio and positioning sensors.

These networked heterogeneous sensors will function cooperatively to provide enhanced situation awareness.

I notice that the ever-reliable and ethically impeccable BAA are major players in this monstrous supra-government-funded initiatve, which WE DON'T NEED.

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Is Social Media a Fad?

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#wearethefuture: Small businesses are the new mass market | Media | guardian.co.uk

#wearethefuture: Small businesses are the new mass market | Media | guardian.co.uk



More evidence that increased numbers of small businesses are one of the by-products of the economic downturn.




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Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

Retired Amerian Academic James Petras explains why he thinks the Iranian presidential election of 2009 was not "stolen" as the majority of western media and governments claim.

Meanwhile, Professor Mohamed Mirandi of Tehran University explains (via Al-Jazeera) his perspective on this weekend's executions of two of last summer's protesters against the election result.

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Jobs for the Boys?

In a short article entitled Obama Sells Ambassadorships, Media Freedom Intenational has the following quote:

"President Barack Obama has picked three of his major campaign donors to fill diplomatic posts to Spain, Norway and the European Union. The three new ambassadors bundled more than $1 million combined toward Obama’s election efforts. Overall, they have contributed nearly $2 million to general candidates since 1989.

Alan D. Solomont, nursing home industry entrepreneur and former lobbyist is slated to become the newest U.S. ambassador to Spain. Barry B. White, a partner at the law firm Foley Hoag, will be the new ambassador to Norway. William E. Kennard, Carlyle Group executive and former Federal Communications Commission chairman is Obama’s choice to be U.S. representative to the European Union, a position that carries the rank of ambassador.

Solomont along with his family has donated about $1.8 million since 1989 all of which has gone to Democrats. White has contributed about $103,000 since 1989, of which 98 percent has gone toward Democrats. Kennard has contributed about $67,000 to Democrats since 1989. The president’s ambassadorial announcements come after a relative lull in news of ambassador picks with money-in-politics connections."

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The Homebrew Industrial Revolution

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution

Interesting ebook about the history of manufacturing (no, really, it's fascinating!) in which the author makes a reasonable case for proving that the so-called Industrial Revolution was not a natural development but an example of state-subsidised political action in support of the existing economic elites and against the interests of small scale, local and household-based manufacturers and producers.

In particular, the book argues that the idea of a "national market" was essentially an artificial construct in the C19 sustained by the formation of national transport systems (road, rail and telegraph). Furthermore, the book argues that these systems were (and remain) financed by taxation but disproportionately benefited large manufacturers. The true costs, therefore, of mass production for a national (as opposed to local) market were never felt by the large industrialists. If these costs were paid by the factory owners (as opposed to by the taxpayer via the state), the much-heralded economies of scale of the industrial era would have been non existent.

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Married for Money: The Unnatural Union of Government and Business - LaVonne Neff - God's Politics Blog

Married for Money: The Unnatural Union of Government and Business - LaVonne Neff - God's Politics Blog

I've blogged previously about the problems of the merging of government and large business interests.

Here's another comment on the trend from an Amercan perspective.





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Smaller Banks

I'm watching with interest as the media is focusing this week on the issue of reducing the ability of banks to drag national economies down when/if they fail.

President Obama's provocative statement that he intends to take action in this area has coincided with British ministers making noises about the issue as well.

In Britain, attention seems almost exclusively focused on taxing banks or requiring them to take out insurance against collapse, so that the tax payer does not have to bail them out again. Most of the discussion on the issue at present seems to be about how to get the banks to spend money protecting themselves.

There is an alternative approach, which I have not heard many explore publicly so far. It is that the actual size of banks be dramatically reduced through legislation. Although this does not, of course, guarantee that a bank will never fail (small banks can overreach themselves), it does at least, by distributing the power of the banks much more widely, reduce the prospect of any one of them being able to hold a national economy to ransom in the way that the large banks did in 2008.

Imagine, for instance, instead of the government owning 84% of RBS, if this bank were broken up into very small units - some as small as single local branches - that were sold off as going concerns. The tax payer would be repaid, the bank(s) would emerge as viable businesses and the national debt would be reduced.

Just a thought.

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Does CCTV Reduce Crime?

In 2005 the Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate published an extensive review, ‘Assessing the impact of CCTV’.5 It set out to evaluate 13 of the 352 CCTV projects set up under the 1999-2003 round of the Prevention Budget, and it found that CCTV had a negligible effect on crime rates in the areas they monitored.



In August 2009, in an internal report written by [Detective Chief Inspector] Neville and released by the Metropolitan Police under a Freedom of Information request, it was revealed that for every 1,000 cameras in London, less than one crime is solved per year.

source



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Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America | Books | The Guardian

Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America | Books | The Guardian

Great stuff.

Read it all.

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Can Gordon Build a Society of All the Talents?

"Social Mobility for All" was a central theme in the Prime Minister's keynote speech at the Fabian Society New Year Conference on Saturday, held at Imperial College London.

"I believe in an aspirational Britain. Opportunity and reward cannot be hoarded at the top, and it is not enough just to protect people at the bottom. I want to see the talents and potential of all the British people fulfilled: social mobility for the majority.....

"So let me be explicit today; social mobility will be our theme for the coming election and the coming parliamentary term. Social mobility will be our focus not instead of social justice, but because social mobility is modern social justice."

The Prime Minister's vision of what he called an "aspirational society" rests, if I have understood the speech correctly, on three principle actions:

1) a government-backed job creation strategy

2) continued investment in education and training

3) maintaining well-funded public services


The full text of the speech can be found here.


Although I share many of the PM's aspirations for a society where there is genuine social mobility, I am doubtful that merely "inputting" in the ways outlined above will achieve this outcome. This is because such actions leave many of the essential structures that hinder social mobility in place.

Specifically

1. the dominance of global firms - run by elite professionals who wield significant economic and (indirectly) political power - whose size enables them to dominate markets rather than compete within them (except with other global firms).

2. the employer-employee relationship as the primary model of paid work - with the attendant insecurity this brings as workers' wages are seen as an expense to be cut in times of downturn.



As a self-employed small business owner, I have been increasingly looking in the last year or so into the distributist theory of economics. My own preliminary thoughts on distributism are here.

Simply put, distributism envisages a society in which the vast majority of members own private , productive property. Ideally, in the distributist world, as many as possible would pursue individual owner-operated trades which intimately link production with ownership.

In his speech, Mr Brown asserts the need for markets to exist within a moral framework. Jay Griffths argues that part of what defines the morality of an organisation is its size.

"We speak of economies of scale, and I would suggest that there are also moralities of scale."

In my opinion, inputting at the bottom will not create genuine social mobility unless these is forced restraint and limitation at the top. The rules that govern the economy we have - which allow businesses the possibility of unrestrained growth and periodic collapse - are man made. Other economic rules, which not only broaden opportunity but also restrain greed, are necessary if the Prime Minister's aspirational society is to become a reality.

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Good News from Google

Google's decision to end its censorship of China's branch of the Internet is a welcome development.

The original decision to launch the Great Firewall of China was widely criticised back in 2006, including on this blog.

Robert Peston, meanwhile, moves outside the financial sector to raise questions about the nature and logic of Google's announcement, here. And Global Voices has some views on Google's announcement from bloggers inside China here.

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50 Things We Know Now Which We Didn't Know This Time Last Year

There are some gems in this list.

Here's a favourite:

9. Babies pick up their parents' accents from the womb, and infants are born crying in their native dialect. Researchers found that French newborns cry in a rising French accent, and German babies cry with a characteristic falling inflection.

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2010: A golden age for micro-business? | Marketing Donut

2010: A golden age for micro-business? | Marketing Donut

"In a post-recession economy characterised by slow recruitment, there are a lot of talented people who are either unemployed or underemployed. It’s entirely feasible for them to start their own business without taking considerable financial risks - or even to do so alongside flexible working options."

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Car Scrappage Scheme

£900 million has been set aside by the UK government, apparently, to subsidise the car scrappage which pays owners £2,000 to trade in old cars when they buy new ones.

What a missed opportunity. Imagine if that amount of public money had been invested in green, local, micro-businesses rather than in an industry which is in serious decline anyway.

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John H Armstrong : Oral Roberts: A True Pioneer

John H Armstrong : Oral Roberts: A True Pioneer

John Armstrong reflects on the life of American Pentecostal televangelist Oral Roberts, who died last week aged 91.




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Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa Claus

Classic.





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More on Police and Photographers

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