Guy Rundle writes:
No-one ever picked up a newspaper without a sense of expectation said GK Chesterton, and no-one ever put one down without a sense of disappointment. Ditto for British political party conferences, which are in full swing this month. They all take place in dying seaside towns - for the plethora of hotel rooms available in off-season - and the forlorn torpor of Blackpool or Bournemouth tends to match the sense of slow death of the modern political system.
It's Labour's turn this week - after a concerted attempt by the leadership to change the rules so that even the minimal degree of debate hitherto on offer was removed. That was resisted, but it's hard to know why the rank and file bothered - there hasn't been a real ding-dong battle on policy for many a year, save for the time when octogenarian Wolfgang Walther heckled Mr Tony's defence of Iraq and was escorted out by Esplanade Hotel style bouncers and threatened with the Prevention of Terrorism Act (he's now on the National Executive Committee).
The headline announcement so far is from defence secretary, the aptly named Des Browne, who confirmed that the British retreat from Iraq will soon be total, with a full pull-out from Basra as, ha-ha, the Iraqi forces take full responsibility for the gang-run de facto ministate the area is about to become.
But that was always going to happen, as was Gordon Brown's speech in which he leant on the notion of Britishness - using the term 80 times - both as a way of deflecting anti-Scottish feeling against him from the shires, and because he genuinely seems to believe in the notion of a "progressive patriotism" (as advanced by commentators such as David Goodhart of Prospect) as something other than a ludicrous confection of cultural engineering.
No the real biggie was as buried as this lead is -- David Miliband's announcement that the proposed EU Constitution "Treaty" version would be ratified by parliament rather than by public referendum. The Constitution was going to be taken to a referendum in 2006 -- but then the French and Dutch voted it down, and it was all over. British ratification is the lynch pin of progress to the next stage of European integration -- and the fact that it won't be taken to a public vote pretty much marks the end of the 50 year project of marching to ever greater stages of integration, culminating in the creation of a fully federal Europe.
Miliband's announcement, together with Brown's Britishness mantra, suggest that the rug is being very visibly pulled from under any notion of ever greater union. And with other leaders like Poland's Dead Ringersesque Kascinzyki twins talking about Polishness and cutting up rough, today marks the point at which Europe starts to go in a substantially different direction.
That was the actual event of the conference - and even that was a done deal. Perhaps they should just rough up a few OAPs to make it interesting?
25.09.07
27. IMF signals the credit squeeze is far from over
Guy Rundle writes:
Just when you thought it was safe to go back and put in new share orders... comes a report from that wascally bunch of wadicals the IMF that the private equity market is at much at risk of a meltdown as the sub-prime mortgage market, with potentially greater consequences for global investment.
They say there'll be a further tightening of credit, that the sub-prime fall is by no means over, and they conclude that a squeeze on credit is going to expose a whole lot of half-completed LBOs with: "In the near term, financial institutions are exposed to potential syndication risks, with unsold bridge commitments contributing to an overhang in the market."
What the - ? Amazing really that the right attacks cultural studies for meaningless jargon. The upshot is that ovesposed private equity won't be able to get the money to complete the purchase which will mean an asset sale and then a yet higher rate of credit resulting from the resulting fall in confidence - or "haircut contagion" as the IMF calls it, stealing a band name I was going to use.
But what's really going on? There's no point asking bourgeois economists - their ideas are to reality what a Mazda engine manual is to quantum mechanics. A great way to run very specific parts of the world, while actually understanding none of it.
The huge amounts of money sloshing around the West - private equity at one end, house price inflation at the other - is not a result of prosperity, but of sluggishness. As Robert Brenner has demonstrated, real Western economic growth has been no more than 2% per annum for decades now, and that is effectively going backwards.
You can count pet shampooing and wedding planners in GDP if you want to - it doesn't mean that $1 billion of them is real compared to $1 billion worth of steel mills in China.
Yes, there's the multiplier effect etc etc, but sooner or later the bill comes in and it's revealed that large sections of the economy are guaranteed against nothing.
That doesn't mean a capitalism-ending crisis anytime soon - as the post-marxian economist Phil Shannon has noted it's the mildness of recent reversals which are interesting, not their crisis nature.
But it does mean that the abiding illusion - that because you invest in something physically solid like a house it will retain and grown in value - is over. Or should be.
But what greater more cherished illusion has there been for millions of Westerners that they have somehow got out of the trap of work without accumulation? And how will they cope with its demise?http://www.crikey.com.au/Business/20070925-IMF-signals-the-credit-squeeze-is-far-from-over.html
21.09.07
16. Lebanese vote an exercise in confusion
Guy Rundle writes:
It's always good to start a political campaign off with a bang. In Lebanon's case it was another political assassination, this time of Antonie Ghanem, a pro-western member of the Christian Phalange party. Ghanem has been cited as a possible compromise candidate for President in the parliamentary vote due on September 25th.
But the main question that has got everyone talking is not who will win, but whether the vote will take place at all. If sufficient members boycott it, the Lebanese political system will enter its worst political crisis since the end of the 1975 - 1990 civil war/invasion period.
The dispute centres around the determination of pro-western PM Fouad Siniora to continue governing, even though a good chunk of his cabinet has resigned in protest at his attempts to curry favour with Washington even at the expense of Lebanon's interest in the region.
The various opposition parties argue that the presidential vote requires a two-thirds support; Siniora's supporters, by some fancy interpretation of the constitution argue that a simple majority will suffice. They have threatened to hold the vote anyway and select a President on that basis.
To get around that, incumbent pro-Syrian President Lahoud has said that he will appoint a caretaker government led by the head of the army.
The US has said that it will not interfere in Lebanon's affairs - it's just that it won't recognise a PM appointed by Lahoud, even though such an act is arguably constitutional. Not that they're interefering or nothing.
This would leave Lebanon with two presidents and two PMs - and the potential for another state, this one on the frontline with Israel, to fall into the sort of chaos that allows militant groups open slather.
Would Israel invade again in those circumstances? If not, it is not because of international condemnation for the last jaunt. They could care. It is because they could not afford another defeat -and Hezbollah, by far the best organised political grouping, would benefit immensly from Lebanese political chaos.
What the Lebanese seem to want above all is an end to the middle east proxy war being fought within Lebanese politics - a condition to which it is predisposed by the official recognition that different officeholders must come from Christian, Shia and Sunni communities. In the undermining of national sovereignty by both the Iraq invasion - and the US's shameful refusal to condemn the 2006 Israeli invasion - there's less chance of that than any.
Which leaves the grim prospect that the place will be another piece of collatoral damage from "military humanitarianism", suffering a civil war that would be a sort of 70s nostalgia trip, a worse example of such - if you exclude of course the recent revival of Xanadu, the musical - it is hard to imagine.
http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070921-Lebanese-vote-an-exercise-in-confusion.html
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