Monday, February 26, 2024

JULIAN ASSANGE - FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER OF WIKILEAKS - High Court Hearing February 20-21, 2024

The purpose of the hearing was to secure a ruling on the right of Julian Assange to appeal a government order for his extradition to the United States.
    Little doubt exists in the minds of Assange’s supporters that - through Wikileaks - he has performed a courageous and principled service in exposing criminal conduct by the United States and its allies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.  That Wikileaks published classified information obtained from Chelsea Manning - a former US soldier - is not in dispute.  For her role in the affair, Ms Manning was court-martialed in 2013, found guilty of violating the Espionage Act (1917) and sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. Seven years later, President Obama commuted her sentence, but she was jailed for another year in 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury set up to investigate Assange and Wikileaks.
    Prior to the current hearing - the outcome of which will probably be announced in mid to late March - an order to extradite Assange had been approved by a previous British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, against which he has already lost an appeal in a district (lower) court. A victory now would achieve no more than afford him the opportunity to present a full appeal to a higher court. If he loses the hearing he will likely be extradited forthwith to the United States where he could face up to 175 years in jail - effectively a death sentence.
    In her opeing remarks, Victoria Sharp, the senior of the two judges presiding over the hearing, stated that Assange was not present in court either physically or online because he was ill. In reality - it is no secret - he is being kept in solitary confinement in a high security prison and allowed out for exercise solely for one hour in every twenty-four. It is a form of slow torture that has affected him physically and may also have temporarily impaired his mental alertness.
    Courtrooms in the Royal Courts of Justice have galleries open to the public, and where these are fully occupied, a side room with a screen is sometimes made available. Such was the case for Assange’s hearing which had been allocated one of the smallest courtrooms in the building despite widespread public concern for his fate and the many hundreds waiting in the street outside in the hope of gaining entry.. It was also possible to view the proceedings online. However, to attend in any of these ways involved negotiating obstacles designed to discourage all but the most distinguished or the most obstinate. I was one of the latter - granted online access along with eight others. Among those physically present were the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, more than a dozen EU parliamentarians, several members of foreign national parliaments, journalists from Reporter Without Borders, and members of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Assange’s wife, Stella, was also present.
    No matter how serious the issue, English courts operate to a ritual of dress and expressive courtesies derived from an earlier age.  Lawyers wear gowns and wigs in court, and barristers (advocates entitled to represent clients in the high court) address presiding judges as “my lady” or “my lord”,  while barristers refer to each other as “my learned friend”.  This veil of civility ensures that voices are seldom raised. Subtlety of argument supported by knowledge of precedent (previous judgements made on similar cases) and of prevailing statutes and treaties form the substance of what takes place. Submissions by the contending barristers are lengthy and weighted with textual references all of which are gathered in what is known as a”bundle” - the collection of evidential material assembled by opposing legal teams and available to both as well as to the judges

    During the hearing, the essence of the extradition case against Assange remained as it has always been. Lead counsel for the United States, Claire Dobbins, argued that he was neither a publisher nor a journalist - activities under which he might seek legitimate legal protection in England. Instead he had engaged in espionage of US state secrets of a kind that would be expected of an enemy agent. Wikileaks was, in fact “a non-state, hostile intelligence agency”. It had released the names of thousands of individuals, thereby endangering their lives, had conspired with Chelsea Manning to securer secret documents, and had hacked into CIA confidential files.  She spoke without pause - except to answer an  occasional query from the judges,  for the best part of two and a half hours.
Under the terms of the UK-US Extradition Treaty of 2003, no one could be extradited for expressing political opinions. Nevertheless, Ms Dobbins told the hearing, this was not an issue of political opinion but of spying. Moreover, as a foreigner, Assange could not enjoy the free-speech protection afforded by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. This last argument was also employed in Assange’s defence on the grounds that he was, in fact, a journalist and publisher and, if extradited, would not receive the protection available to a US citizen.
    The submission on behalf of the United States came sandwiched between opening submissions by Edward Fitzgerald  and Mark Summers - acting for Assange  - and the latters’ closing arguments in reply to the US case. Much of the argument revolved round the question of whether Assange’s activities via Wikileaks involved the expression of political opinion which is protected under both the Extradition Treaty and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to which the UK is a signatory.
    Even if Assange had engaged in spying (which he had  not), his team argued that espionage is a purely political offence and recognised as such by all legal authorities. Publication of state secrets obtained from a state official - Chelsea Manning - therefore constitutes protected speech. Soliciting such material - a fundamental element of the US case against Assange - was routine journalistic practice. Prosecution of journalists or publishers under the US Espionage Act had never occurred before, despite a long history of US media publishing classified information. The Wikileaks revelations, moreover, had uncovered serious criminal activity by the US government and its agencies. It was not credible to argue that Julian Assange was neither a journalist nor a publisher and then to complain about his journalistic and publishing activities.
    According to Assange’s team, this effectively disposed of seventeen of the eighteen charges against him cited by the United States in its extradition request. The sole remaining charge concerned the attempted hacking of a CIA computer for which the maximum sentence had already been exceeded by Assange’s incarceration in the UK.
        Much discussion on both sides centred on the wording and interpretation of Articles 5 and 10 of the ECHR. Article 5 sets out the rights of persons who have been arrested - which the long incarceration of Assange may suggest have already been breached.  Article 10 addresses freedom of expression. The first paragraph reads as follows:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
    It is possible that this article may prove to be the saviour - for now - not only of Julian Assange’s case - but of his life. Even if he wins this hearing, however, the organisation and scheduling of a subsequent appeal against extradition would certainly take months and probably more than a year. Meanwhile he will remain in solitary confinement in Belmarsh high security prison, bearing on his increasingly fragile shoulders the hopes of many that he will have the strength and health to sustain the ordeal, and that journalism will not effectively be muzzled from carrying out one of its most fundamental responsibilites - that of holding governments to account.

Monday, November 6, 2023

Shakespeare the Revolutionary

 Watching a performance of King Lear at London’s Barbican Theatre, I was struck not for the first time by Shakespeare’s awareness of poverty and inequality. Though his popularity and sheer brilliance during the his lifetime kept him safe from the Tower, he was something of a revolutionary, an egalitarian long before the word or any of its strident political equivalents had found their way into our vocabulary. Passages, not only in Lear but in other plays too, show evidence of a strong social conscience - at times stated quite bluntly and at others more subtly through the treatment and shaping of character.
    In Lear, part of the learning experience forced upon the eponymous hero, and also on the Earl of Gloucester, is recognition of economic injustice and of their own failures to address  it during their long careers as powerful members of the elite - one a monarch, the other an aristocrat. Thus Gloucester, intent on suicide, hands his purse to his son Edgar, whom he believes to be a beggar, with these words:
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

    It is a recipe for progressive taxation, for a generous benefit system, for a National Health Service, for what used to be called the Welfare State.
    King Lear on the heath in the midst of a violent storm goes further, as his sudden material impoverishment brings him awareness of the plight of others so afflicted:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic pomp,
Expose yourself to feel what wretches feel,  
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

    Lear’s reflection on his own lack of concern for the poor - “I have ta’en too little care of this…” could not be other than a contemporary reference. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the acceleration of land enclosures in Tudor England which left many people unemployed, the number of vagrants and vagabonds had mushroomed. In 1594, the Lord Mayor of London estimated the number of beggars in the city at 12,000,  while tens of thousands more roamed the countryside either as smart-assed rogues like Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, or ragged vagabonds such as Edgar pretended to be in Lear. Both would have been familiar figures to an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience.  Altogether at least a third of the entire population of Shakespeare’s time was estimated to  be poor, including those who were nominally in work but badly paid.
    Today, with unnumbered refugees from Africa and the Middle East pressing at Europe’s gates, while homelessness, hunger and distress grow within the European citadel, Lear’s and Gloucester’s cry against inequality seems as shockingly relevant to our own time as it undoubtedly was to Shakespeare’s.
    How did Shakespeare come to write such lines? Whence the extraordinary range of his sympathies?
    We know that he had read Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals” - from which he derived the name of Caliban in The Tempest. In the sixteenth century, the process of discovery and conquest of the New World was in full swing, and stories abounded of the strange creatures who lived there.  Though Shakespeare portrayed Caliban as a savage, he also understood native indignation at having their land and inheritance taken by a ‘colonial’ usurper:
 “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me”, Caliban tells Prospero.
    In the same essay Montaigne writes of an encounter with three natives of Brazil during which the visitors offered a stinging rebuke of the inequality they had observed in France:
…They noticed how some men were replete with every imaginable commodity while others, impoverished and hungry, went begging at the doors of the rich. And they found it strange that the poor tolerated such injustice and wondered why they didn’t seize the wealthy by the throat or set fire to their houses.
    It is a theme that Montaigne goes on to address at length in a subsequent essay - “On Inequality among us” in which he questions why we value people by their “wrapping and packaging …which merely hide the characteristics by which we can truly judge someone”. Here, in one of Hamlet’s exchanges with Claudius, is a Shakespearean dramatisation of the same issue:Hamlet:     A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
King:     What dost thou mean by this?
Hamlet:     Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

    And here is Lear echoing Montaigne:
    "There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office…… Robes  and furred gowns hide all."
    Socio-political injustice was, therefore,  neither strange nor novel in 16th and 17th century European thought or literature.  However, our playwright did not write didactic dramas, nor build his plays as illustrations of good or evil, right or wrong behaviour, or - as one academic put it to me - to induce salutary reactions in the audience via catharsis or laughter. Had he done so he would have been following a long tradition in which dramatic characters had first and foremost a symbolic or illustrative function, that is they represented an idea, or a set of dispositions or feelings that audiences were expected to approve or reject. Such was the case with both Roman and Medieval drama - the major influences on Elizabethan playwrights. Not even Marlowe, among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, contravened this schematic framework. If we examine Marlowe’s treatment of character in Tamburlaine, or the Jew of Malta, or Faustus, we find that the symbolic role of the protagonists takes priority over their qualities as recognisable individuals - flesh and blood human beings.
    What Shakespeare did was to reverse the conventional procedure by building from character to meaning, from the individual to the universal. The philosophical equivalent would be inductive instead of deductive reasoning. This is why his characters work so powerfully on our imagination, why Marlowe’s Jew remains a stereotype while Shakespeare’s (despite the prejudices of the age) is a full of personality, while we love Falstaff despite and because of his all-too-human failings, why Hamlet  puzzles, angers and frustrates because like us he is insecure, by degrees passionate, cruel, witty, honest, dissembling - a thoroughly human mixture. We meet Shakespeare’s characters in the street, those of his predecessors in our minds. Stage figures of what we might call ‘human complexity’ are a Shakespearean innovation. Only in poetry do we find obvious precedents - for example in Chaucer’s wonderful gallery of portraits and François Villon’s  verse “Testaments” - and there are hints also perhaps in early Spanish picaresque fiction such as the anonymous “Lazarillo de Tormes”. But Chaucer and Villon were solely accessible to a select few - those who could both read and were able to acquire books, while Shakespeare worked in a universal medium of communication where only ears were needed.
    Why was this “inductive” technique revolutionary rather than merely innovative?
    I believe the answer lies in the fact that, for the first time, the individual became a focus of public and artistic attention. Shakespearean drama brought previously unattended elements of human nature and of political and social life to the forefront: the quixotic nature and psychology of motive (Cervantes belongs here, too, of course), the individual validity of the common man, human rights of the kind both Ariel and Caliban demand in the Tempest, and so on. Little of this is to be found in other playwrights of the period.
    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Shakespeare’s plays were criticised for their ‘excesses’, and attempts were made to  improve them by pundits who thought they knew better. What were the objections? Low-life subject-matter (unfit for polite society), lack of taste, improper language - features we might recognise, nowadays, as coming from  ‘East-Enders’   rather than  ‘Yes Minister’. Editors and amenders tried to excise precisely those features that show the commonest citizen as the moral equal of the greatest monarch. They were uncomfortable features. Whoever witnesses the downfall of Angelo (Measure for Measure), or the rise of  Bolingbroke (Richard II) knows that the high and mighty are not necessarily to be trusted. Perhaps not to be trusted at all. And here we are not just speaking of a lust for and abuse of power (a familiar Elizabethan theme) but about corruption of a kind that brings to earth the moral authority of the powerful. Much more important, though, is that the Shakespearean common man is as full of humanity as a monarch.
    Shakespeare wasn’t a pamphleteer aiming to bring about political change. But his view of people was more revolutionary than anything a pamphleteer could achieve. Elizabethan stage convention unthinkingly accepted class values as fixed (as did French classical theatre). Shakespeare did not; though his originality in this respect may sometimes pass unnoticed because it seems so natural. Since the plays deal so powerfully with human emotions and states of consciousness, we can easily overlook the implicit socio-economic and political views that, like scenery, colour their background.
    My argument then is that Shakespeare was a revolutionary in the way he treated the individual - and that is precisely why he forces an attentive reader or playgoer to re-examine the basis of his or her beliefs, prejudices and social attitudes. Whatever Elizabethan England thought about Jews, for example, the import of Shylock’s words in The Merchant of Venice can’t be avoided:
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
     The speech was quietly and firmly revolutionary, and Shakespeare must have known as much.  Revolutionary not because the writer wanted to change contemporary attitudes towards Jews - that would be a crudely anachronistic fallacy - but because no one in Shakespeare is “merely” anything,  not a Jew, nor a peasant, nor a soldier, nor an inn-keeper nor a bawd, nor a king.
    This great idea - that of not being “merely”-  has been the basis of much of the political change that has taken place in Europe, North America and elsewhere since the seventeenth century. It lies at the heart of modern democracy, and forms a backcloth to political movements like marxism and socialism that are founded on ideals of equity and distributive justice. 
What Shakespeare helped to bring about was a fundamental change in European consciousness concerning the human condition in the social and political context. I don’t know if this was his intention; but it is a consequence of his work - of his quiet persistence in giving his characters their head and refusing to censor either them or his own pen.
 
A version of this piece was first published in Opendemocracy.

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

The next UK Prime Minister - Between Scylla and Charybdis?

     Sunak and Starmer share several qualities of which neither may be aware. One of these is their intellectual mediocrity manifest not least in the flatulent dreariness of their rhetoric by means of which they spout hard-line pabulum in the  hope that it will pass through the digestive tract of tabloid editors and discharge into print. In this respect Starmer’s efforts will always be in vain because the tabloids operate on the level of  the Trumpian-Tea-Party-Southern-Baptist-Mississippi-Burning US Republican Party. They cheer for the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage and Hannan - politicians who leave attentive voters unable to tell whether they are playboys  treating the country as a board game or defectives who should be committed to an asylum for the clinically insane.
    Another quality shared by Starmer and Sunak is that neither have much time for the truth. Of the two, Sunak is the more straightforward fabricator. Dependably mendacious, he trots out non-existent triumphs and fantasy commitments from a supermarket bag of bottled nonsense. Starmer by contrast leans less on transparent mendacity than on a faculty of forgetfulness in which previous assertions are set aside and promises broken with the casual nonchalance of a junk-bond spiv.
    In the absence of any discernible charisma, Sunak’s most salient attribute is his ubiquitous grin - on display regardless of whether he is captured on camera pulling a pint at his local  - even though he doesn’t drink - or taking the air in Kiev like a holidaymaker after a good lunch while his host,  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, frowns from a distance. Though Sunak’s displays of contentment are for public consumption - to show that he is in control of events - he nonetheless parries the most innocuous questions from  journalists with falsity and fudge, revealing thereby that he has little of value to say either to his own country or to the world beyond. Without notes he is an ignoramus, a political nonentity who couldn’t even beat the appalling Liz Truss to the party leadership, which he secured in the end by default because no other Tory MP felt up to the job. Sunak differes from them solely in his lack of awareness of his own inadequacy.
    Starmer, for his part, rests his credentials for governing the country on his upbringing by a tool-maker and a nurse in a pebble-dash semi. One wonders about the kind of voter who would interpret  that banal collage as a reason to vote Labour. One of Starmer’s old student friends told me that he used to be “quite a radical”. As he inches ever closer to aping Tory policies on pretty-well everything:  putting asylum seekers in barges, making Brexit work, keeping us out of the single market, lambasting green campaigners, opposing electoral reform and so on, he appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion in reverse. His radicalism has been lobotomised along with the progressive ambitions of the previous leadership about renationalising public services, taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate and replacing the Lords with an elected chamber. If Sunak kindles disbelief Starmer evokes incredulity. Neither are to be taken at face value.  
    Lacking a written constitution, the Westminster parliament has depended for its integrity on the honourable conduct of its members and, above all, on the honesty of political leaders. Now we look back with nostalgia on the days when those values held sway.  Striding the stage of UK politics today, we no longer see the principled - if flawed - men and women of tradition, but instead a gaggle of dissemblers and cheats. For the forseeable future elections will be won by those most adept at presuading citizens to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears; in other words by chancers with second-rate minds and questionable ethics.

Saturday, January 8, 2022

Lesson from Luanda


Peace had come to Angola by the time I checked into the hotel in Luanda. Independent since 1975 when the Portuguese had abandoned the struggle to keep its grip on a country thirteen times Portugal's size, Angola had celebrated her liberation by plunging into a civil war: MPLA vs UNITA1, the United States and apartheid South Africa vs the USSR and Cuba, with the great powers contending for a stake in Angola's fabulous store of natural resources.

Cuban forces played a seminal role in the eventual triumph of the revolutionary left, the critical moment being the strategic failure of the South African advance at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Military strength played its part in this war as in all others, but what mattered more was a yearning in the hearts of Angolans to shake off the foreign yoke and to breathe the air of freedom, a yearning their Cuban colleagues knew well because they bore in their hearts the Revolution of 1959 and the victory over US mercenaries at Playa Girón in 1961. The US embargo on Cuba was in place then as it is today.

I had walked the streets of Havana, chatted to students, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, carpenters, and agricultural workers in the countryside. Long before then, I had imbibed with my mother's milk a sense of solidarity with the class from which I came, the working class. And so I arrived in Luanda with every good feeling towards the regime. Revolutionary by reputation and rhetoric, I expected it to stand for everything I believed in politically: justice, equality of opportunity, a sharing of resources and of power, public ownership of the things that mattered - education, health, transportation, energy, water...

On the other hand, I wasn't sure what I was doing there. A friend had invited me to work with him on a proposal to the Angolan government to privatise a state-owned bank. Gilberto and I met up in Paris and travelled together to the capital, Luanda, where we joined Gilberto's boss, Miguel Algarrabia Onetti, a Uruguayan who had lived in Angola for many years. Gilberto told me something of Miguel's story. Like Uruguay's former president, José Mujica, Miguel had been a Tupamaro, a left-wing guerrilla fighter in his home country. After the coup in 1973, and the junta's savage campaign to rid itself of opposition, the Uruguayan communist party had spirited some of the prominent Tupamaros out of the country to places where their revolutionary credentials would not be unwelcome. They sent Miguel to Angola and there he had remained.

Gilberto told me that Miguel was now a significant player in the Angolan business world and was also 'in' with the government. He had done well: a fine apartment in Luanda, a house in Geneva and another in Vienna. His children were studying at a private school in England. Nothing Gilberto told me of Miguel coincided with my image of a revolutionary so I filled in the lacunae myself, supposing that a man who had fled the fascist military of his own country must have credentials of which Fidel Castro himself would approve. Nor did I question (was it self-interest?) the purpose of our mission. Privatisation of state-owned enterprises seemed a bit too Thatcherite for a government that had fought for years against the highest representatives of neoliberal capitalism. Still I played down the implicit message. In short, I gave everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. History couldn't deceive and the MPLA government couldn't betray its principles.

Miguel joined us for dinner on our second evening and I put the question to him. Short, energetic, voluble, he lacked the traditional beard of the guerrilla fighter but retained the casual manner, addressing me as compañero and greeting me with a fraternal embrace.

"We don't know how to run banks," he explained. " And internationally, who would trust an Angolan bank? Privatisation is our only recourse."

He left the next day on a business trip to Europe and I didn’t see him again for several years. But he placed his offices in Luanda at our disposal and gave us a car, a driver and a secretary. We wrote a proposal in clumsy Portuguese and presented it at a meeting with a government minister that Miguel had arranged for us.

The minister worked from a shiny government building patrolled by armed guards and decorated with young women in tight clothes. Small and dapper, he sat behind a polished wooden desk bare except for a telephone and a tortoise-shell ashtray. A large gold watch on his wrist matched thick gold rings on the third finger of each hand. There was no filing cabinet, and the bookcase behind his chair was empty. He showed no interest in anything we had to say and the meeting barely lasted half of its allotted fifteen minutes.

Afterwards, as we waited outside the building for our driver, we saw the minister on his way out. He was seated in the back of a limousine, a young woman close by his side.

With time on our hands, we asked our driver to show us the city. He told us there was nothing to see, but I insisted.

"There must be a bookstore. I'd like to buy a book on your country."

"There used to be bookstore, sir. Not sure it's still there."

We drove through the old downtown area. On the kerbsides, vendors sold clothing, plastic goods, vegetables, furniture, lamps, pots and pans that had seen better days and had doubtless been left behind by the departing Portuguese. Abandoned stores lined the streets, their entrances piled with garbage. Pedestrians strolled aimlessly. Old men with bloodshot eyes squatted on sidewalks.

The bookstore was open but the shelves were empty save for a scattering of magazines. A painfully thin attendant shrugged his shoulders when I asked him why the store had no books. He probably considered it a stupid question.

Outside, a gang of ragged teenagers had gathered round our vehicle. They begged us for money and our driver waved them away with angry words. Before we pulled away, one of the gang engaged me with his eyes. Something in them drew my sympathy. I wound down my window, and felt for my wallet.

"Don't give him anything," Gilberto warned. "It's bad for them. They get into the habit of begging from strangers."

I let the wallet fall back into my pocket. Seeing my gesture and change of mind, the youngster gave me a look that has haunted me to this day. It reflected pain, abandonment, hatred of the foreigner and of the rich who live well and know nothing of deprivation. It spoke of the cruelty of the world and its disregard for the weak and vulnerable; and above all it conveyed hunger, the relentless hunger that gnaws without hope in the heart of the innocent.

Angola is a land of oil and diamonds. Merchants, speculators and oilmen occupy the capital’s luxury hotels and take the first-class seats on flights to and from Europe and America. An old, familiar drama plays out there of a rich country filled with poverty and despair. Nothing can ever excuse my failure - which is also our failure - to give succour to a hungry child. No lesson should come at such cost.

Note: Two names in this piece have been changed for security reasons.

1 MPLA - People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA - National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

Saturday, September 5, 2020

Inequality

  (From my book "The Cauldron")

 The systematic heart of capitalism.  Wealth creation in a capitalist world is a private business; and human progress is supposed to be dependent on everyone’s desire to get rich.
    If property and income were equally distributed, it would make no difference whether someone described themselves as well-off, of modest means, or poor because such terms would cease to have meaning. To pursue individual wealth, therefore, is to seek inequality.
    Other arrangements for distributing wealth are imaginable, like Marx’s classless  society (government-controlled distribution on the basis of need and entitlement) or Kropotkin’s mutual aid (we help each other and share as necessary); but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first has been widely discredited while the second has been generally ignored.  Grimelstein thought “only coercion or superhuman powers of persuasion could steer humanity from its addiction to greed,” and dismissed other versions of economic life  as “..romantic illusions, superficially attractive but fundamentally unworkable”. Few would disagree.
    We’re not talking here about natural inequality. That we are born with unequal abilities is a truism too trivial to merit discussion. To complain  because Shakespeare or Tolstoy are better writers than - say -  me is to sit alone, like Anthony "...in the market place, whistling to the air...”
    More than half of humanity, however, lacks sufficient means to secure a healthy diet, let alone buy enough  paper and ink to produce a masterpiece. And since nobody’s managed to come up with a theory of natural economic inequality,  chances are it’s man-made.
    Theft has much to do with it.  Village communities in medieval Europe worked common land and made common wealth. In the sixteenth century, aristocrats decided they needed large estates for themselves and simply threw the peasants out before reemploying them as serfs. “...No longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives which do no good to society, (the nobles and gentlemen) must actively do it harm by enclosing all the land they can for pasture and leaving none for cultivation,“ objected Thomas More’s hero Rafael Hythloday.  
    Later on, governments got in on the act. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they dispossessed common villagers of their best remaining acreage and awarded that also to the aristocracy. In England, between 1760 and 1844, almost four thousand Enclosure Acts were shoveled through parliament, each designed to legalize a land seizure. Louis the Fourteenth, the great Sun King and flower of French nobility, followed the pattern, allowing communal village property to be confiscated in payment of fabricated debts.  America North and South was likewise built on grand larceny of territory from the people who lived there before the arrival of the Europeans. Ditto Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.
    Sad stories, but the price of progress ... industrialization would never have occurred without enclosure at home, territorial seizure overseas... so run the excuses.
    Let’s pause here for a moment to ask how anyone ever had a legitimate claim to own land. Hugo Grotius, the 17th century Dutch jurist thought God bestowed it on the people for their common use and enjoyment, and that powerful individuals acquired ownership by mutual agreement with the poor. Mutual agreement?  A contemporary, Sir Robert Filmer, spotted the flaw:  why would anybody (including succeeding generations) freely agree to hand over a gift from God to someone else?
    “The first man to enclose a piece of land, claim ownership and find people simple enough to accept what he did was the true founder of civil society,” wrote Rousseau, and then added “How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors would have been avoided if someone had pulled up the fence posts or filled in the ditch and advised his companions to take no notice.”
    Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers and theatres and museums and schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its dwellings. Why was it legitimate, therefore, for anyone to own such a property? .
    So much for real estate. Theft of labour, effort and intelligence probably outweighs even that of land in the development of inequality.  Attributing  to one person the work of many allows senior executives to earn salaries of mythic proportions. Yet the administration of even a modest company requires a knowledge of so much detail that one person could hardly begin to retain it. Business and political leaders alike depend on subordinates - preferably ones who are ideologically wedded to their boss’s prejudices.  If the president wants to rough up a competing country - or company - he will order up advice that justifies his wish in the same way that he orders a meal in a restaurant. Even information is served up to suit him. He orders whatever takes his fancy and seldom bothers with the menu. No legendary eastern potentate could command discourse as completely as a chief executive officer. But that’s all he does. The cooking is performed by others - the unremarked operatives who toil in the kitchen for a tenth maybe a hundredth of the CEO’s income.  If all goes well, the boss is applauded; if ill, a few heads roll; if very ill, he will probably sail off into the sunset with a shipload of pension rights, share options and golden handshakes.
    Do leaders deserve such inequality of reward? According to a study by the Chandigarh Institute, the higher the disparity between average company salaries and the pay of the Chief Executive and his cronies, the worse the company’s performance.  Executive compensation, , the study concludes, “possesses one universal characteristic: it advances only in an upward direction and at a faster rate than anyone else’s.”
    Moreover, despite the trumpeted advantages of market economies, “...inequality increases wherever capitalism takes root.” In the United States, the richest five percent control sixty percent of the  wealth - and their share is growing. Half the assets of Latin America are in the hands of one per cent of the people. At the same time, and despite official propaganda to the contrary, social mobility in both regions, and in Europe too, continues to decrease - which means that if you’re born poor chances are you’ll stay poor.
    What do the statistics mean for individuals? Take the film industry. A famous film star recently earned US$5 million for a four-minute advertising slot. Celebrity actors or directors can net tens of millions in a year. Oligarchs, oil barons, hedge-fund managers and hi-tec moghuls can go even higher - with earnings of $100 million and more. That’s more than the annual income of a quarter of a million Haitians, or Ethiopians, or Sudanese, or Nepalese or Madagascans or Bangladeshis; more than the lifetime earnings of 99.99% of the global population; more - 97% more - than  someone on an annual salary of $100,000 will earn in thirty years of work.
    How can individuals - even famous ones - garner such obscene sums? Because we worship at the altar of Mammon, billionaires and media stars are God’s messengers on earth, and their churches charge  inflated entrance fees. We - the flock - make them rich, buying their celebrity and smiling at their condescension, and in return we receive our regular fix of stupefying drivel, grovel at the sound of their name, and vote for them at the polling booth.
     How can we bear to live with such iniquitous nonsense? Might just as well ask how we can bear to live with ourselves.

Monday, March 30, 2020

Net Economic Outcome (NETCO)

During recent conversation about Brexit, Trump, and widespread public dissatisfaction with the status quo in the US , Europe and elsewhere, I was reminded of a piece I wrote some years ago as part of a short book of essays and observations.  It was an attempt to spear some of the nonsense perpetrated both in academia and government about how large-scale economic activity is interpreted and “sold” to the public; and why that interpretation is wholly inadequate.  Although framed around two fictional characters and deliberately tongue-in-cheek, the essential details of the piece are as historically and factually accurate as I could make them. 

    Net Economic Outcome as a concept was introduced by Sandra Mendoza and Veliama Sivaganamin a joint paper presented to the Third Women’s Econo-Solidarity Conference in Porbandar . Despite initial ridicule by academics and dismissal by policy-makers, radicals soon latched onto NETCO as a weapon in their war against capitalism; although it is far from certain that this was the authors’ original intention.
    The aim of the Porbandar paper was to elucidate what Mendoza and Sivaganam considered to be a universal confusion between “national or regional economic efficiency”, and the “efficiency of the firm”. Conventional wisdom held (as in many quarters it still does) that the two ideas went hand in hand: in other words, that an efficient private sector offered the best route to the welfare of the people and therefore to the success of the nation or the region in which it operated.
    Mendoza and Sivaganam suggested, instead, that private and public efficiency were not only different but, in many cases, mutually exclusive. In a capitalist economy, they claimed, an efficient firm endeavoured to maximise sales, while minimising labour costs and leaving the state with as many associated burdens as possible: pollution, waste, environmental degradation, road maintenance, worker training, social security, unemployment insurance, and so on. But was it economically efficient at national level, they asked, for people to buy superfluities (and create the resultant waste), or for a state to cope with employment instability caused by  downsizing or outsourcing, the displacement of small farmers and entrepreneurs by multinationals, the ravages of industrial pollution, and the societal disruptions that accompany extremes of inequality? The prospect of exceptional wealth might well be a spur to enterprise, but wasn’t it too often also a charge on the social fabric? Currency and commodity markets could net handsome rewards for a handful of businesses and individuals, but often by devastating countless numbers of impoverished people in stricken areas of the world.
    And what about natural and environmental disasters? Earthquakes, tsunamis, chemical spills, shipwrecked oil tankers could ravish the human environment and cause untold human misery - even though they usually resulted in greater economic activity and an increase in GDP as producers geared up to repair the damage. In economic terms, few things could be better than a catastrophe or a conflict fought in some distant territory where the loss of many lives would be counterbalanced by the enticing prospect of corporate super profits and unprecedented economic growth, first in arms sales, and then in rebuilding towns and industries.
    Mendoza’s and Sivaganam’s paper offered some provocative examples of how private sector efficiency could, and often did, mean “screwing the taxpayer”: overcharging on government contracts, bribing officials, blackmailing governments into awarding investment subsidies, circumventing environmental regulations, failing to compensate victims of industrial blight and so on.
    They went on to propose a different, more sophisticated analytical vocabulary for assessing economic efficiency and assigning financial responsibility, which would allow the social, environmental and infrastructural impact of corporate activities to be costed and charged.
    In a subsequent monograph “Owning up - Investors and the Invested”, the authors argued that so-called private investment is in reality a joint venture in which public goods - roads, railways, airports, an educated workforce etc. are joined to private capital. Ownership should, therefore reflect the participation of all investors. Terms such as “Socio-environmental Cost Analysis”,  “Input Distribution”,  “Capital (Stock) Equivalence”, “Subvention Equity” and “Context Sensitive Accounting”, made their first appearance in this little book.
    The personal histories of both Mendoza and Sivaganam bear some relevance to the conclusions they reached about the nature of economic life.
    Sandra Mendoza was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras into a wealthy land-owning family. At seventeen, she began an affair with one of the gardeners at the family hacienda, by whom she became pregnant. When the affair came to light, the gardener was arrested on a rape charge and was never seen again - a not untypical fate in those days for a man who dared to bed above his station.
    Mendoza fled to Tuxla Gutierrez in Mexico where she lived for some time in deep poverty. The child - a daughter - died in infancy from a lung infection - Mendoza’s pleas to her family in Honduras for money to buy antibiotics having gone unheeded. 
    By the age of nineteen, she was in Mexico City working behind the counter in a pharmacy and studying for a degree in Economics at UNAM.  After graduating with distinction, she landed a job with Verduras y Aceites de Mexico S.A. - a subsidiary of a large US agroindustrial company. There she played a key role in developing an investment in the far western state of Baja California Sur where the company leased a stretch of semi-desert on the outskirts of the town of Santamaría and collared the local water supply to grow tomatoes for export. The project proved highly profitable, and Mendoza received a substantial salary increase on the strength of her contribution.
    On the other side of town, however, where farmers had cultivated the rich soil since the town’s foundation in the late eighteenth century, traditional irrigation channels ran dry and crops failed for lack of water. Proud horticulturists, accustomed to a dignified independence, began sinking into poverty.  A few of them found low-paid jobs with the company; many sold their fields as building plots to wealthy newcomers for whom they ended up working as servants, chauffeurs, or even gardeners digging patches of the same soil that had once been theirs. The gap between rich and poor widened, social cohesion weakened; burglary and petty theft - formerly unknown - became commonplace. Beggars appeared on street corners. 
    This was Mendoza’s first experience of the double-edged sword of western-style industrial investment. Government statisticians registered an increase in local employment and GDP; but who, Mendoza asked herself, were the beneficiaries? And who bore the costs? She wondered if a way could not be found of recognising recipient communities as co-investors and  decision-making participants in new projects.
    Back in Mexico City, Mendoza met Carlos Restrepo Robles, the exiled Colombian human rights lawyer who was later gunned down at the airport on his return to his homeland. From him, she learned of the notorious El Cerrejón strip coal mine in the north of Colombia owned by a consortium of multinational mining companies. The mine had brought profits to the owners, but despair to local communities whose homes had been razed, fields destroyed, burial grounds desecrated and environment polluted beyond recovery. After Restrepo’s death, she visited the mine and saw for herself the devastation it had wrought on the locality and the indigence into which the former residents of the demolished village of Tabaco had fallen as a result.
    Determined to study the issues raised by what she had witnessed in Santamaría and Tabaco, Mendoza resigned from her job and, after turning down offers of scholarships from several western universities, she chose to read for a doctorate at the University of Porbandar.  “I didn’t need western professors telling me how people in countries like mine think and feel,” she explained to a colleague who questioned her choice. It was at the university in Porbandar that she met Veliama Sivaganam.
    Ms Sivaganam came from a very different background. Born into a poor family in Pudukkottai, a rural district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she and her mother learned to read and write together - thanks to a literacy drive funded by an enlightened local charity. Sivaganam’s father made scant effort to follow suit. Like many men of the district - he had given himself over to the consumption of arrack - a locally-brewed liquor - on which he spent whatever funds he could lay hands on. Officially, private distilleries were forbidden in Tamil Nadu - the local government having awarded licences to a couple of large national distillers that produced IMFL (Indian Made Foreign Liquor). Sales of IMFL through recognised brandy shops provided the government with tax revenues, thus ensuring - as is so often the case - an alliance of interests between government and big business. But that didn’t stop the illegal distilling of cheap arrack for which the demand proved insatiable and the rewards substantial.  “In Pudukottai, Tamil Nadu’s least urbanised district,” wrote Palagummi Sainath in 1995 when Sivaganam was still a teenager, “official data show that an arrack distiller is arrested every 45 minutes; and one is convicted every two hours.” 
    Illegal distillers  happily paid their fines - the amounts were derisory compared with their profits from the trade. Then they moved their equipment to another location and carried on as before. Arrack consumption, meanwhile, had become a source of grief and conflict within families. Husbands commonly financed their drinking habit from an already meagre household budget and then under its influence abused wives who had the temerity to complain. Children grew to dread their fathers’ drunken outbursts and the parental disputes they occasioned.
    On her twentieth birthday, Sivaganam joined a women’s group formed with the aim of declaring Pudukottai a dry region. They succeeded in having most of the illegal distilleries closed down - but only to find the brandy shops taking their place - backed by the state government and the big liquor companies. IMFL came to dominate the market and since it was more expensive than arrack, drinkers paid for the increase not by reducing their consumption, but by appropriating more of the household income. Children went hungry, but like whales feeding on plankton, big business and government got a little fatter.
    The protest movement intensified. Campaigners petitioned the authorities, organised protest marches, bombarded the local media with demands to be heard and read. Scandals came to light: a senior government official was found to be in the pay of a liquor multinational; another was discovered running an arrack distillery of his own. Some of the women suffered beatings and ostracism in their village. All the leaders received threats. The campaign continues to this day - partially successful but never completely so - as is invariably the case with human effort.
    Sivaganam received repeated beatings at her father’s hands and narrowly escaped death when he returned home drunk one night, doused her with kerosene and tried to set her on fire. The poor quality of the fuel saved her: it had been adulterated with water. After this, she fled to Madras where she found employment - coincidentally also in a pharmacy - and took night classes in economics and political science at the university.
    Two years later, she published a paper - “Profit and Losses” the first of many on the social costs of large-scale corporate enterprise. In it she argued that Adam Smith’s ideal of business serving the people (even if unwittingly) had been reversed. The effect of western capitalism had not been to make the market serve the people, but to bend the people to the needs of the market. The paper was not especially original, but it contained useful references to Sivaganam’s experience in Pudukottai where the campaign against illegal arrack distilling had handed much of the market to external suppliers, allowing them to suck funds out of the area.
    For her degree dissertation, she conducted a study of two large-scale industrial investments: the infamous Union Carbide plant in Bhopal where, on 2nd and 3rd of December 1984, a cloud of toxic vinyl chloride gas leaked into the air, killing 3,000 people in the first 24 hours and tens of thousands of others in the weeks, months and years that followed; and the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in Madya Pradesh where countless villages have been submerged, and upwards of half a million people uprooted and left with little provision for their livelihoods. In the course of this study, she began to form her theory of “default economics”, the  term she coined for the failure of corporations and governments to account for the full social costs of their operations. “Only those expenses from which they can’t hide are counted,” she concluded in an oft-quoted peroration. “And these are considered solely in relation to the business or the project itself. Responsibility for the human costs of Bhopal or Sardar Sarovar accrue to some other entity: to the state perhaps or charity, to history or to God.” 

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Free Trade Bunkum







A free-for-all advocated by powerful countries and corporations in their drive to dominate world markets. 

Free trade is underpinned by the theory of “comparative advantage”, a primitive set of suppositions dreamed up by David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. Essentially it says that if the United States can produce roses more efficiently than guns, whilst Iceland can produce guns more efficiently than roses, the US should stick to roses and Iceland to guns. That way each country concentrates on what it can do most efficiently (its “comparative advantage”) and sells its speciality to the other.
 What happens to dislocated workers - the ones who were formerly producing the “less efficient” product?
 Labour is just a factor of production like money, machinery and raw materials, so it can be shifted around according to need. US employees in gun factories can become gardeners on rose farms, whilst Iceland trains rose-growers for a new life in explosives. The happy consequence is that everyone gets richer.
 What if the US is more efficient in both products? Answer: it gives up the making the less efficient of the two so as to make more of the more profitable product.
 To make this a little clearer, let’s suppose Europe has a comparative advantage in software over the US, but a comparative disadvantage in aircraft. According to trade theory, the solution is for Europe to stop making planes and to turn redundant aerospace engineers into computer whizzes. Meanwhile, the US should abandon software development and concentrate on jets. It goes without saying that neither Airbus nor Microsoft would want to stand in the way of trade theory and would happily retire from the market.
 Readers will doubtless spot the cloud of flies in this ointment. David Ricardo with some support from John Stuart Mill hatched up trade theory as a simplistic mind-game in which two imaginary countries produced two identical products. Having satisfied themselves that the game worked in their heads, this pair of benighted geniuses - and countless economists after them - blithely applied it to the world. Incredibly, this balderdash - for that’s what it is - remains the core argument used by the powerful to force “Free Trade” upon the weak, even though, once forced, it paradoxically ceases to be free.
 There are about 190 countries in the world. Here’s how the process might look for just a handful of them:
 
 Note that under the theory of comparative advantage, every one of these countries would produce only the product in which it specializes and would import all the others. Trouble is, we all know that’s not how the world works - or is ever likely to work (See Ha-Joon Chang, “Kicking Away the Ladder, London 2002).
 Far from being irrevocably fixed, “comparative advantage” changes. Hence why centres of production move incessantly around the world in pursuit of cheap labour, cheap raw materials, local subsidies, lax regulations, and low taxes. What about people? Free Trade chews them up and spits them out again when their relative price goes up.
 How then do we distribute income-earning activities?
 World demand for most products could be satisfied by a handful of countries; or, in a globalized world, by a handful of corporations. Industry concentration (fewer and fewer companies producing the same goods) has been increasing in all major sectors. Fifty years ago, there were more manufacturers of cars, farm equipment, bicycles, pharmaceuticals, beer, refrigerators, processed food etc. More major banks too. And they employed more people. Job insecurity has increased with the march of international trade; and the average wage bill of multinational corporations in proportion to their revenues has fallen (except for senior executives whose pay shows evidence of titanic greed).
 So Margaret Thatcher was right, there's no alternative? 
What about making as much as we can and importing only what we need?
"That would be inefficient” objects a scandalized economist. “Prices would go up.”
 “Perhaps,” respond the insecure, the unemployed and the underpaid, “But we’d have jobs and be earning money. So for us prices would come down.”
 “Chicken shit!,” returns the economist. “A price is a rose. If it grows, it blooms, regardless of whether you can afford it.”
 “Not so,” says a bright member of the unwanted (a physicist and disciple of Einstein), “Prices are not absolute but relative. It’s a question of viewpoint. If you earn little or nothing, everything’s too expensive. Once you earn an income, some goods at least come within reach.”
Our economist doesn’t catch this last remark. He’s gone off to enjoy a glass of Japanese Scotch with a local politician. Japanese Scotch? Isn't that an oxymoron? Depends who you talk to.