I Couldn't Have Put it Better Myself

“Citibank, the nation’s largest bank, has received a $20 billion bailout, along with government guarantees for $300 billion of shaky assets; in addition to giving the bank an enormous amount of money, the public assumes all of the risks of being a banker, while Citibank gets to keep all the profits. That is to say, the profits are privatized, but the risks are socialized, combining the worst features of capitalism and socialism in a toxic combination."

John Medaille

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War Crime Evidence Against Rumsfeld?

The UN has an "obligation" to investigate whether government officals serving under the Bush administration ordered torture, says United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak.

Former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is a particular focus of attention: "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, ‘Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.’ So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture.”

A cross party Senate report released in December found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody. It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at Guantanamo Bay.

Source: CNN

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2012 Olympic Free Speech Threat

Well done to IOC (that's Index on Censorship, by the way) for this alarming story on the draconian powers that have been passed into law through the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006.

Among the more penicious clauses in the Act are the following:

• dedicated road lanes in London for government ministers, games officials and sponsors
• fines of up to £5,000 for motorists who use these dedicated lanes
• regulation of advertising in and around the Olympic area by the executive (not Parliament)
• restrictions to extend to "non-commercial" advertising and "announcements or notices of any kind"
• advertising to be defined as including the "distribution or provision of documents or articles...the display or projection of words, images, lights or sounds..."
• unlimited fines as punishment for breaches of the above regulations
  
• permission for the police to forcibly enter property to "remove, destroy, conceal or erase" anything deemed inconsistent with the advertising regulations

You get the picture.

Essentially, the Act codifies the legal basis for the executive branch of government to create a sponsor-friendly zone around the Olympic venues (possibly including those outside London) within which citizens may not be permittted to advertise non-sponsor companies.

Of even greater concern, however, is the legal basis for restricting speech of any kind which might be regarded as harmful to the commercial sponsors of the Games. This could include, among other possible actions, protests about employment practices of sponsors, even posters in private house windows expressing views critical of sponsors.

Let's imagine a possible scenario. Imagine you were on your way to the Velodrome to see Britain's finest cycle their way to glory and gold. On your way, you pass a row of houses whose enlightened citizens have decided to let the world know how angry they are about the hundreds of abductions, tortures and kidnappings of trades union officials at Coca Cola bottling plants in Columbia and how these crimes, plus numerous murders of union leaders at Coca Cola factories, are alleged to be the work of paramilitary units with links to managers within Coca Cola in these same factories.

Imagine as you passsed these houses, whose residents had displayed posters highlighting these crimes, how outraged you would be to see police raiding these houses and "removing, destroying or erasing" these posters before your very eyes so that senior managers at Coca Cola would not have their commercial hegemony of the 2012 Olympics challenged.

Wouldn't you think that such actions were:

• un-just: all the force of the law is placed in defence of powerful commercial interests at the expense of the rights of the ordinary citizen
• un-British: we are essentially a people who believe in free speech, unhindered by the agents of the state
• un-Olympic: Olympism is defined in the opening statements of its charter, as a philosophy which seeks to create "a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles" and further states that a key goal of Olympism is to promote "a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."

Of course, it will be argued that in the end the courts will not pass heavy penalties for peaceful protestors who happen to fall foul of this Law.

The fact is that peaceful protestors should not even be brouight before the courts in the first place and should not be required to face the intimidation of arrest, charge and trial just for exercing their ancient right to speak and stick up posters, even if they do offend Coca Cola, Visa, General Electric or McDonalds.

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Labour Revolt Over Heathrow Expansion

The 28 Labour MPs who voted on Wednsday night against the government's planned expansion of Heathrow Airport to include a third runway have sent a strong message to Gordon Brown about the political opposition that awaits this project.

The vote was the largest rebellion on a motion tabled by opposition parties since the Labour government came to power in 1997.

Rebels included three former Labour party environment ministers - Michael Meacher, Chris Mullin and Nick Raysnford.

The building of a third runway may also cost Labour votes. An ICM poll conducted in December suggested that 23% of respondants would be "less likely to vote Labour" if the third runway was built. Of those who said that they intended to vote for Labour at the next eletion, 13% declared themselves "less likely" to do so if the expansion were to go ahead.

Director of Greenpeace John Sauven suggested that the commons vote "will have alarm bells ringing in No 10. Gordon Brown has got a problem on his hands."

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Straw Bale Houses go Public - at Last

News that a local authority is to build Britian's first social housing out of straw bales is good news as it marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this proven technology being left out to pasture (boom, boom).

Modern straw bale houses have been in existence for decades and represent a viable form of low cost, low impact and sustainable housing - in an indstry that desperately needs to move beyond lagging and double glazing if it is to contribute significantly to reducing greenouse gases.

Sadly, the emergence of straw bale housing into the mainstream in the UK has been painfully slow. In case you want a go, here's a helpful video from America.

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More of This Please

Why don't governments pour billions into lots of projects like this one?

Huh?










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The Dude's Got Style

Wow! What is that I'm suddenly breathing?

Oh yeah, it's the breath of fresh air blowing from America.

I am liking day two:

The man is

• closing Guantanamo
• banning torture
  
• affirming trial by jury and the rule of law
  
• stopping waterboarding
• closing CIA secret prisons

And what's that squeaking noise I can hear?

It must be Dick Cheney riding round in angry circles in his wheelchair.

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Climate Change - it hasn't gone away

While the world has been focused on events in Washington, the following climate-related events have been playing out around the world in the last week:

• 30,000 people have been caught up in severe flooding in the southern Phillipines, described by many as "the worst in living memory." Local bloggers are blaming deforestation, over-development and global warming as contributory causes.
• Madagascar has been caught between Tropical Storm Eric and Cyclone Fenale, with areas of the country being lashed by winds of up to 250 km/hour. Over 60,000 houses in one region alone have lost their roofs. Although an annual occurance, the storms of 2008 were particularly devestating, producing up to 6,000 casualties.
  
• Brunei has experienced monsoon rains and flooding this month. One blogger states in imperfect English: funny that we never seem to encounter these problem a decade ago. Either we are sinking or that global warming is taking its toll.
• 8,000 people have been evacuated in Sarawak (Malaysia) as a result of severe flooding.
• 50,000 people have been evacuated in Indonesia as flooding has hit 13 provinces and claimed the lives of 14 people. Jakarta has been under up to two metres of water. Bali has also been flooded.
  
• Eight people have died and 10,000 made homeless in a week of flooding in Fiji.
  

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John Cleese Charges for his Video Casts

It's a different but understandable take on the "self-as-brand-and-media-generator-and -publisher-and-entertainment-entrepreneur" story.

It's just that I hadn't come across it before. Charging for video casts, that is. One dollar a cast is the going rate on John Cleese's home page.

Fair enough, I suppose.

There is also a "best of" free version available once a week with ads (for toothpaste and property in Florida, allegedly). You can follow the great man for free on Twitter, of course.

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Obama Re-Takes Oath

BNO News is reporting that President Obama re-took the oath of office around 7.00 pm on inauguration day, in response to the fluffed lines which characterised the public oath taking in Washington earlier in the day.

Although the Constitution does not require an oath to be taken, White House Counsel, Greg Craig, is quoted as saying that the re-run was made out of "an abundance of caution" following one word spoken out of sequence by the President in the morning.

The Presidential oath of office traditionally runs as follows: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

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Heathrow, Human Rights and Peru

Opposition to the third runway at Heathrow is not merely about local traffic and noise pollution or even the flattening of the nearby village of Sipson to make way for the planned expansion.

More fundamental than this is the fact that our culture's "addiction to oil" (President Bush's words, not mine) is being met at an increasing cost not only to the physical environment but also to some of the planet's most vulnerable tribal peoples.

Latest to face the risk of the world's expanding thirst for oil are previously un-contacted tribes living in the remote Peruvian Amazon. Anglo-French oil company Perenco have recently been granted permission by the Peruvian government to drill for oil in the region.

Peru’s national indigenous organization, AIDESEP, is opposed to Perenco’s plans as is Survival International who have several videos on the issue on their site. Perenco itself intends to send in over 1,000 workers to the region and to build 14 oil wells.

When Shell began oil extraction among the Yora people in South East Peru in the 1980s, approximately half of the tribal population died over the coming decade, often as a result of contracting diseases for which they had no immune system.

Perenco officially denies the existence of uncontacted tribes in the area, despite confirmation of their existence by the governments of Peru and Ecuador and by Barrett Resources who formerly carried out exploration work in the area. Survival names some of these groups as the Cacataibos, Isconahua, Matsigenka, Mashco-Piro, Mastanahua, Murunahua and Nanti.

Oil exploration is often a human rights issue and by advocating a way of life, personally and in terms of public policy, that actively moves away from carbon-dependency, we have more chance of reducing the demand for fresh oil exploration of the kind currently being carried out by Perenco.

Building a third runway at Heathrow because "If we don't, someone else will" is a dishonest approach when the need is for far more radical action that significantly reduces air travel globally.

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The Plot Thickens: Greens Buy Land at Heathrow

Environmental activists, including some members of the Green Party, have completed the purchase of a plot of land adjacent to London's Heathrow Airport as a way of hindering attempts by the British Airport Authority to extend the airport through the construction of an additional runway.

Purchasers, who completed the transaction on Monday, include impressionist Alastair McGowen and actor Emma Thompson.

The move seems to caught the imagination of many green sympathisers, with the UK Green Party reporting over 5,000 individuals signing up online to support the initiative by Wednesday morning.


View Larger Map

The plot is located just to the south of the proposed runway and within the proposed area that the airport would expand into if a third runway were to be constructed and is represented on the map by a spanner (get it??)

The new land owners have announced their plans to use every legal means to oppose the airport expansion, including giving evidence at the planning inquiry, resisting the compulsory purchase of the land and "if necessary, we will stand with the community of Sipson and stop the bulldozers." The village of Sipson consists of 700 houses plus schools and businesses that would be demolished if the expansion were to go ahead.

The move follows a "Climate Rush" event at Heathrow's Terminal One on Monday when up to 1,000 activists entered the terminal and staged a 96-minute protest, highlighting the view that there are only that many months left before climate change becomes irreversible and cataclysmic.

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This Guy's Been, You Know, Reading My Mail

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Thinking About Land Tax

Don't worry. I find tax boring and inscrutable as well. The arrival of any correspondence from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue inevitably causes me to want to throw myself under a train at the prospect of (a) having to fill in yet another tax form or (b) having to phone up my local office (located in Scotland for some reason) and explain for the 400th time why I do not in fact owe them any money, despite regular letters to the contrary.

Tax doesn't have to be taxing? Phaw!

Against that backdrop, I have found myself rather surprisingly drawn in recent weeks to the issue of Land Value Taxation, an idea espoused by (among others) the imaginatively named Land Value Taxation Campaign. The basic idea is that taxation should be levied annually on the rental value of land, replacing existing taxes on income and business.

I first stumbled upon the idea when a friend sent a link to a podcast by the "Renegade Economist" Fred Harrison, who in 1983 predicted the 1992 slump and who in 1997 predicted that the property price high point would be 2007 and would collapse in 2008 followed by recession in 2009/10.

My interest then took me to related sites, notably The Distributist Review and the Mutualist, the latter describing itself as espousing "free market anti-capitalism".

After that, I came across a piece by a former Sussex University friend Edward Rhodes on the pamphleteer Thomas Spence (1750-1814) who, along with his calls for universal adult suffrage (including voting rights for women) was an advocate of a system of taxation based on the value of land linked to the corresponding abolition of taxation on income and trade.

Time and inclination permitting, I may explore the theme in future posts. For now, I commend the links if interested in exploring the idea further.

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Rich Follies

Three stories which caught my eye this week - no doubt because they were all placed on the same page on The Metro in an attempt to convey the message that many rich people are, in fact, capable of stupid acts.

The message clearly got through to me. Here are the stories, all involving cars:

• Ronaldo, aged 23 and earning £120,000 a week, wrote off his brand new Ferrari while driving it for the first time to the Manchester United training ground. He crashed the £200,000 car into a crash barrier.
• Rugby international Mike Tindall was banned from driving for three years and fined £500 for driving while over the legal limit. Tindall was pulled over in March 2008 as his Range Rover Sport was seen swerving on the M4 near Newbury.
  
• Princess Beatrice, fifth in line to the throne, had her £17,000 BMW stolen from central London. Word from the parking space is that the car was left unlocked with the keys in the ignition.

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