She’s a witch!

 

The Arbitrary Morality of Immigration and Citizenship

We normally think it’s unfair when people have poor lots in life because of their ethnicity or their gender. These characteristics are morally arbitrary, and, by and large, we think individuals’ chances at a good life shouldn’t depend on arbitrary characteristics.

Nevertheless, in reality, one of the most important determinants of a person’s quality of life is her place of birth. We understand intuitively that a person born in Norway has much better odds of doing well in life than a person born in Chad. At least part of the reason for the difference is that people aren’t able to freely move across borders to places where their life prospects would be considerably better.

Take the example of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share a Caribbean island. Life expectancy at birth in Haiti is 58 years. In the Dominican Republic, it’s 70. The border between those two countries—justifiably or not—prevents some from improving their life prospects; we know this because many thousands of Haitians cross the border each year illegally, despite harsh sanctions that face them if they are caught.

Yet what could be more arbitrary, morally speaking, than where a person happens to be born? It has long been uncontroversial to say that governments don’t have an absolute sovereign right to do as they wish within their borders. Granted, states still do harass and repress their populations, but we don’t believe that it’s right. It is much more controversial, however, to suggest that states have a less than absolute right to control their borders—to allow or prevent people to come into their territory, and to freely grant or deny citizenship.

The philosopher Joseph Carens has called the control over national borders “the modern equivalent to inherited feudal privilege.” Is this critique accurate? Or can the absolute right to control borders be justified, and form part of a fair international order?

To get a grip on these questions, Christian Barry discussed immigration and citizenship policies with Christopher Heath Wellman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, St. Louis, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre.

Read more: The Arbitrary Morality of Immigration and Citizenship.

La Commune (Paris, 1871). 1ère partie. (with english subtitles)

 

La Commune (Paris, 1871). 2ème partie. (with english subtitles)

 

Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair

If the man who waged an unprovoked war in Iraq gets this job, it could be the chance to hold him to account for his crimes.

Tony Blair’s bid to become president of the European Union has united the left in revulsion. His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?); greases up to wealth and power and lets the poor go to hell; he is ruthless, mendacious, slippery and shameless. But never mind all that. I’m backing Blair.

It’s not his undoubted powers of persuasion that have swayed me, nor the motorcade factor that clinched it for David Miliband – who claims that no one else could stop the traffic in Beijing or Washington or Moscow. I have a different interest. You could argue that I’m placing other considerations above the good of the EU. You’d be right, but this hardly distinguishes me from the rest of Blair’s supporters. I contend that his presidency could do more for world peace than any appointment since the second world war.

Blair has the distinction, which is a source of national pride in some quarters, of being one of the two greatest living mass murderers on earth. That he commissioned a crime of aggression – waging an unprovoked war, described by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime” – looks incontestable. I will explain the case in a moment. This crime has caused the death – depending on whose estimate you believe – of between 100,000 and one million people. As there was no legal justification, these people were murdered. But no one has been brought to justice.

Within the UK, there is no means of prosecuting Blair. In 2006 the law lords decided that the international crime of aggression has not been incorporated into domestic law. But, elsewhere in the world, it has been. In 2006 the professor of international law Philippe Sands warned that “Margaret Thatcher avoids certain countries as a result of the sinking of the Belgrano, and Blair would be advised to do likewise”.

Has he? I don’t know. Blair’s diary and most of his meetings are private. He has no need to travel to countries where he might encounter a little legal difficulty. So he goes about his business untroubled. He seldom faces protests, let alone investigating magistrates. His only punishment for the crime of aggression so far is a multimillion-pound book deal, massive speaking fees, posh directorships and an appointment as Middle East peace envoy, which must rank with Henry Kissinger’s receipt of the Nobel peace prize as the supreme crime against satire.

I have spent the past three days trying to discover, from legal experts all over Europe, where the crime of aggression can be prosecuted. The only certain answer is that the situation is unclear. Everyone agrees that within the EU two states, Estonia and Latvia, have incorporated it into domestic law. In most of the others, the law remains to be tested. In 2005 the German federal administrative court ruled in favour of an army major who had refused to obey an order in case it implicated him in the Iraq war. The court’s justification was that the war was a crime of aggression.

A study of the constitutions of western European nations in 1988 found that if there’s a conflict, most of them would place customary international law above domestic law, suggesting that a prosecution is possible. President Blair would also be obliged to travel to countries outside the EU, including the other states of the former Soviet Union, many of which have now incorporated the crime of aggression. He would have little control over his appointments, and everyone would know when he was coming.

It’s just possible that an investigating magistrate, like Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who issued a warrant for the arrest of General Pinochet, would set the police on him. But our best chance of putting pressure on reluctant authorities lies in a citizen’s arrest. To stimulate this process, I will put up the first £100 of a bounty (to which, if he gets the job, I will ask readers to subscribe), payable to the first person to attempt a non-violent arrest of President Blair. It shouldn’t be hard to raise several thousand pounds. I will help set up a network of national arrest committees, exchanging information and preparing for the great man’s visits. President Blair would have no hiding place: we will be with him wherever he goes.

Here is the case against him. The Downing Street memo, a record of a meeting in July 2002, reveals that Sir Richard Dearlove, director of the UK’s foreign intelligence service MI6, told Blair that in Washington: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The foreign secretary (Jack Straw) then told Blair that “the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”. He suggested that “we should work up a plan” to produce “legal justification for the use of force”. The attorney general told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [security council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Bush and Blair later failed to obtain security council authorisation.

This short memo, which should be learned by heart by every citizen of the United Kingdom, reveals that Blair knew that the decision to attack Iraq had already been made; that it preceded the justification, which was being retrofitted to an act of aggression; that the only legal reasons for an attack didn’t apply, and that the war couldn’t be launched without UN authorisation.

The legal status of Bush’s decision had already been explained to Blair. In March 2002, as another leaked memo shows, Jack Straw had reminded him of the conditions required to launch a legal war: “i) There must be an armed attack upon a State or such an attack must be imminent; ii) The use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) The acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.”

Straw explained that the development or possession of weapons of mass destruction “does not in itself amount to an armed attack; what would be needed would be clear evidence of an imminent attack.” A third memo, from the Cabinet Office, explained that “there is no greater threat now than in recent years that Saddam will use WMD … A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”

It’s just a matter of getting him in front of a judge. The crazy plan to make this mass murderer president could be the chance that many of us have been waiting for.

via Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Cameron is gaining ground because Labour can’t admit it fell for free-market ideology

The opinion polls seem clear enough. In six months Britain will have a Conservative government armed with a mandate to scale back the state with immediate effect and all Labour can do between now and next spring is prevent heavy defeat becoming a wipeout.

While this may prove to be true, it is curious nonetheless. David Cameron has been amazingly successful at shifting the political battle onto his own ground; he has disguised a strategically weak position with tactical elan. Labour has done the opposite; it has allowed a strong strategic position to be nullified by the darts and feints of the opposition.

Let me explain. Cameron’s main argument – that the economic mess we are in is the result of the failing of big government – is the precise opposite of the truth. The reason for the crisis was not that the state was too active, but that it was too passive. For three decades, from the mid-1970s onwards, regulations on finance were relaxed, markets were unshackled, taxes were cut.

Paul Davidson, in his new book The Keynes Solution, puts it this way: “During almost all of the last four decades the public debate over economic policy has been dominated by the belief that if self-interested individuals are permitted to operate in a free market without government interference and regulation, and without worrying about other members of the community, the resulting free market will bring the economy to nirvana.”

Keynesian schadenfreude

Market fundamentalism has been found wanting these past two years. The economics profession has stood aghast as, one by one, its sacred cows – self-correcting markets, rational expectations, efficient markets hypothesis – have been slaughtered. Keynesians (and Marxists, to be fair) haven’t had so much fun in years; far from waiting for the invisible hand to work its magic, governments stepped in to prevent banks from failing, the financial system from imploding and the global economy from collapsing.

Only once in the entire crisis has a government opted for a “nature’s cure”, and when Hank Paulson let Lehman Brothers go to the wall in September last year, he unleashed four weeks of mayhem in the financial markets that only started to abate when governments took stakes in tottering banks in return for capital injections.

Even so, the near-death experience for the banks had an immediate and profound impact on the real economy. Credit lines dried up and confidence collapsed. Output and trade contracted at rates last seen in the 1930s. Policy makers responded by cutting interest rates to historically low levels, loosening fiscal policy and pumping new electronic money into the banking system through quantitative easing. This was not activist macro-economic policy, it was hyper-activist. Credit creation by the state compensated for credit rationing by the banks; spending by the state filled the breach left by the squeeze on private spending.

By the spring there were signs of the policy beginning to work. Output stabilised and financial markets rallied. While there are legitimate doubts – voiced by the IMF among others – as to whether the recovery is for real, the immediate threat of a 1930s-style slump has passed.

Only by the most convoluted reasoning can the crisis of the past two years, and the events that led up it, be described as a failure of big government. On the contrary, it was the deregulation of financial markets championed initially by governments of the right that allowed finance to strip away the prudential controls on its activities.

That’s why Cameron’s position is strategically vulnerable. Making the case for interventionist social democracy has never been easier: the mess was caused by a weak state allowing a free rein to a cadre of irresponsible financiers; only a newly emboldened state could clear the mess up.

It is a mistake to underestimate the opposition leader. There are those on the left who think that because he went to Eton he is, by definition, an upper-class twit. But Eton churns out lots of smart people (Keynes included). The current economic debate is not about the right’s responsibility for the crisis. Nor is it about the opposition’s own uncertain response to it. Instead, it is about which party has the most blood-curdling plans for spending cuts. That’s some achievement.

There’s enough sense in what Cameron says to make it politically potent; hence his cleverness. But it is still a flawed analysis. He is right, certainly, to argue that governments cannot run budget deficits of £175bn a year permanently. He is also right when he says that Britain was running a structural deficit of 2-3% of GDP going into the downturn.

But the deficit is the symptom of an economic problem, not its cause. The bulk of the deficit is accounted for by the contraction in the economy since the start of 2008, which has sharply eroded tax revenues and pushed up the cost of welfare spending. Only a small part of the deficit increase has been caused by discretionary tax and spending decisions by the chancellor, Alistair Darling. If the public finances had been in better shape in 2007, Labour would have been in a position to provide a bigger fiscal boost, but the upshot would have been broadly the same – a deficit this year in excess of 10% of GDP.

Scary proposals

If the lion’s share of the deficit was caused by the recession then, logically, the priority now should be to get the economy back on its feet as quickly as possible. Conjuring up the ghost of Stafford Cripps is more likely to hinder this process – by scaring the pants off consumers and small businesses – than it is to help.

Cutting back too soon could drive the economy into a depression, warned David Blanchflower, respected economist and a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, in Saturday’s Guardian. “The Tory economic proposals have the potential to push the British economy into a death spiral of decline that would be almost impossible to reverse for a generation,” he wrote.

So what is Labour’s problem? Faced with the most propitious economic circumstances for a party of the centre-left for decades why is it so comprehensively failing to seize the moment? There are plenty of suggestions flying about. Some say it is all about Gordon Brown; the prime minister, it is said, simply does not cut it with the public and has been a liability since the election that never was in the autumn of 2007.

Some say it is a combination of a deep recession and being in power for too long; the electorate is bored with Labour and rising unemployment provides a convenient pretext for changing allegiance. Some put it down to the foreign wars, or the private finance initiative or the fact that the gap between rich and poor is wider than it was in 1997.

While all part of the story, none of these theories is entirely convincing. Labour has handled the crisis well; in the most trying of circumstances, it has got the big decisions right.

The government’s failure has been its inability to use the crisis to articulate a broader critique of market fundamentalism. And the reason for that is that from 1997 to 2007 Labour was complicit in the excesses of the market. It was too weak or too bedazzled to control the City, but not so reticent when it came to plans for DNA testing and ID cards. The supine approach to finance coupled with creeping social authoritarianism explains why Cameron’s attack on the big state resonates.

With anger at the banks still running high, it is still possible to seize the social democratic moment. What’s lacking is an intellectual argument that challenges the orthodoxy of the past three decades. That, though, requires an admission that much of what the government has believed these past 12 years was wrong. As things stand, that looks unlikely.

Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Monday 12 October 2009

este tipo foi governo no meu país. e ameaça regressar.

Loic Wacquant – BBC – Podcasts – Thinking Allowed

American prisons and classification

BBC – Podcasts – Thinking Allowed

Laurie Taylor talks to Loic Wacquant, one of America’s leading sociologists about why he believes America’s social state is withering at the expense of its expanding prison system and why the UK could also be heading in the same direction. Nicola Lacey, Professor of Criminal Law at the London School of Economics joins to discuss whether the UK at risk of becoming overly dependent on prisons while eroding its welfare system? Also are your books filed alphabetically; colour coded, or strictly Dewey decimal? Or just in no particular order at all? Laurie is joined by philosopher Anthony Grayling to discuss classification. Why do it and what limits does applying order to our knowledge impose?

Propaganda assassina

Box of leaflets dropped from RAF plane kills Afghan girl

Ministry of Defence says box should have broken up mid-air but instead fell in one piece

A box of leaflets dropped by an RAF plane in Afghanistan landed on and killed a young girl, the Ministry of Defence said.

The box should have broken apart in mid-air but struck the young girl intact. She was taken to a hospital in Kandahar where she died. The leaflets were dropped over a rural area of Helmand province by an RAF C130 Hercules on June 23.

“It is a matter of deep regret that one of the boxes failed to fully open and on landing caused serious injuries to an Afghan child,” said a spokesman.

“The child was treated at a local medical facility in Kandahar where, despite the best efforts of staff, she died as a result of her injuries. An investigation into the incident is under way.”

Defence sources said the girl was taken to a local hospital in Kandahar instead of to an International Security Assistance Force hospital, which may have been better equipped.

The MoD would not comment on what type of leaflet was involved but said the air drops were common and in the past had included public information on the presidential elections and basic warnings about explosives.

The news of the death came as Gordon Brown told Sky News that where the military wants new equipment “they have got it” and refused to rule out sending more troops to Afghanistan.

“I can say that we will do whatever is necessary and that does not rule out doing what is necessary for our troops,” Brown said.

“Where they want new equipment – and there have been a thousand new vehicles gone into the defence department costing a billion pounds – where they need refurbishment or new helicopters, where they need new equipment like night vision equipment, they have got it.

“I defy you to say that any urgent operational requirement that is needed by the military has been turned down by the Treasury.”

A UN report published on Saturday said August was the deadliest month of the year for civilians in Afghanistan because of violence from the insurgency. About 1,500 civilians died from January through August this year, up from 1,145 for the same period of 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/30/leaflet-box-kills-afghan-girl

A cool look at the current deficit hysteria

The British political classes are going through one of their occasional bouts of masochism, with party leaders vying with each other on the theme of who can cut public spending faster and more effectively. Spice is added by talk of leaks and secret plans; and ideology by arguing about the balance between tax increases and spending curbs. My own bottom line is that all this is in response to a largely imaginary budget crisis. If we have a normal economic recovery the red ink will diminish remarkably quickly. If we don’t, it won’t and won’t need to.

All the secrecy and conspiracy-mongering is quite unnecessary and would soon disappear if ministers read the documents to which they attach their names and if opposition leaders, instead of searching in rubbish bins, did the same thing.

I hope readers will forgive me if I follow the official practice of talking in terms of percentages of gross domestic product. Even the most inveterate number-crunchers must have become dizzy with all the figures in billions and trillions of pounds and dollars launched on the world since the credit crunch.

The key document is the 260-page Treasury publication with the sensational title Budget 2009 (popularly known as “the Red Book”). The key table – surprise, surprise – is Table 1.1. You will see here the famous or infamous pledge to halve the Budget deficit in four years. Public sector net borrowing is projected to reach a peak of 12.4 per cent of GDP in the current financial year, declining gradually to 5.5 per cent by 2013-14. This is based on the assumption that GDP itself recovers by a modest 1 per cent next year but returns to an above-trend rise of 3¼ per cent by 2011. The Red Book even shows the tax take (defined as net taxes and national insurance contributions) rising over the period by 2.3 percentage points of GDP, of which 1 percentage point is accounted for by an increase in the income tax take. This is before the slash and burn offensive hinted at by one opposition party or the “progressive austerity” by another.

The Treasury is understandably coy about giving more details about how the fiscal tightening is to be achieved. The Institute of Fiscal Studies estimates that, allowing for expenditure not under immediate government control, departmental spending would have to be cut by an average of 2.9 per cent a year in real terms to achieve official objectives; and in practice the axe would fall particularly severely on Labour’s beloved public investment.

Suppose we turn our attention from annual deficits to public sector debt. The Red Book shows it rising from about 30 per cent of GDP at the beginning of this decade to 65 per cent in the current financial year. The pace of increase begins to slow down in the coming decade; but debt is put at 76 per cent and still rising slowly in 2013-14. The Treasury is of course well aware of the hazardous nature of these projections and how they depend on all sorts of guesses about interest payments, social security spending and many more unknowables. But it believes that is erring on the side of caution in what it presents to ministers. The debt projections look horrifying internationally only if we look at rates of increase. The ratios themselves, as projected by the International Monetary Fund, show Britain well below the US and only slightly above France and Germany. UK official estimates will change slightly in the pre-Budget report, due out in a couple of months, but are unlikely to be radically different from those in the last Budget.

Debt ratios of this size are historically far from unprecedented. In the early Victorian period the ratio was nearly 200 per cent and almost reached that level again in the early 1920s. In 1956 it was just under 150 per cent. Harold Macmillan, who was chancellor at the time, quoted the historian Lord Macaulay: “At every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand; yet still the debt kept on growing, and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever.” In fact the debt was gradually reduced from the peaks mentioned above without any heroic gestures.

The danger of premature tightening was illustrated in the US in 1936-37, when the ending of a war veterans’ bonus and the introduction of social security taxes helped push the US back into recession when recovery from the Great Depression was far from complete.

The big error of the current discussion is to confuse the budget balances of individuals and companies with the government budget balance, which needs to be in deficit so long as attempted savings exceed perceived investment opportunities. Gordon Brown more or less understands this, and I wish he would use his talents to explain such fundamentals instead of stirring up an outdated class war.

FT.com / Columnists / Samuel Brittan