Guest post by Giles Wilkes

Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million inhabitants, is enjoying a blindingly good few years for crime. It looks like LA might have only 230 murders this year. Less than one per day! They may have to outsource their dramatic reality cop shows. Nirvanna, for the Los Angelenos. Which means a murder rate of only 6 per 100,000.

This trend has been widespread in the US since the mid 1990s, so that now one or two cities even seem to have a rate as low as the UK. Yes, after a couple of decades of improvement, the USA might aspire to having a murder rate in one or two of its many cities as low as the UK as a whole.

Incidentally, this question naturally leads to another one: if the UK is so much more murder-free than its Anglo Saxon cousin, why is it apparently so much more violent? continue reading… »

Wondering what “savage cuts” in public spending would actually mean in practice, or what would happen if the government got out of the way of providing basic services? The residents of Colorado Springs are about to find out:

“More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.”

“A budget crisis caused by the recession left Colorado’s second-largest city with a $28-million shortfall in its $212-million general budget. Residents — largely conservative, anti-tax and suspicious of their elected leaders — resoundingly voted against a proposal to triple property taxes and keep the city humming. Mayor Lionel Rivera said the city has no choice but to cut fundamental services.”

Nick Cohen has not written anything on international issues for a while, but he was back on form in the Observer this week. “Opponents of the Iraq war are deluded if they think Chiclott will find the allied intervention was illegal” he thundered, The “central allegation that the second Iraq war was ‘illegal’ is unsustainable,” he concludes.

Uh huh.

An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.

The inquiry was launched after foreign ministry memos were leaked that cast doubt on the legal basis for the war.

But what would they know, eh Nick.

Meanwhile the Economist has some reasonable questions for the inquiry to put to Tony Blair:

When they question Mr Blair about WMD, Sir John and his colleagues should concentrate on nuclear weapons—and in particular on the government’s assertion that Saddam might develop one “in between one and two years”. These nuclear allegations, which helped Mr Blair call the threat from Iraq “serious and current”, need further probing.

A second focus should be on how raw intelligence was changed. Mr Blair described as “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence that was, in fact, patchy and old; he described conclusions that were speculative as “beyond doubt”. At the inquiry, Mr Campbell drew a distinction between shifting lines and paragraphs in dossiers and actually fabricating intelligence. . . . .

There is also a string of outstanding questions about the conduct and aftermath of the war. For instance, why did some British troops seem not to have been fully equipped for the task? . . . . Another concern is the increasingly vexed issue of when, precisely, Mr Blair committed British forces to the invasion—and whether he simultaneously said different things to George Bush and the British public. And why did he enter the war without much assurance that the Americans had a plan for post-war reconstruction?

As political leaders there is much more Barack Obama and Gordon Brown could be doing to help Haiti. Above all they must make sure that the disaster is not compiled by the cynical exploitation of the current crisis.

In an article for The Nation Richard Kim details how Haiti has been crippled by its indebtedness to Western powers.

Following Haiti’s liberation from the French in 1804 it was forced by 1825, under threat of embargo from France and other Western powers, to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners. It turned primarily to Germany and the US for help.

However, it has never escaped from this spiral of debt and also has been subjected to the imposition of ’structural adjustment policies’ by the World Bank and IMF.

All of which have contributed to Haiti being not just the poorest but also one of the most unequal societies in the Western hemisphere.
According to a report;

It is second only to Namibia in income inequality (Jadotte 2006) , and has the most millionaires per capita in the region. Margarethe Thenusla, a 34-year old factory worker and mother of two said, “When they ask for aid for the needy, you hear that they release thousands of dollars for aid in Haiti. But when it comes you can’t see anything that they did with the food aid. You see it in the market, they’re selling it. Us poor people don’t see it”.

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Back in March, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

The first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

I’ve also been tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story.

Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained.
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The attempted terrorist attack on an airliner on Christmas Day has attracted so much international press that it’s difficult to ignore. However, my thoughts are mainly in a jumble about the whole thing so rather than take time might a cogent think piece I thought I’d make a list of ‘things what occur to me’.

1. Fail to blow up a plane, you get wall to wall coverage for your cause in every nation on Earth. Actually blow up dozens or even hundreds in Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan and you’re lucky if you get into the inside pages once let alone over and over again. It’s obviously news but the response feels disproportionate.

2. What would the world be like if we rewarded non-violent protest with this kind of media coverage? Does the international media actually, inadvertently, make violence more attractive than democratic avenues? The media’s approach is certainly what leads Al Quaida to see airplanes as their targets of choice over other possibilities.
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Odds are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic.

I’m guessing entirely, of course, but it also seems reasonable to assume that there will also have been quite a few Muslims on the plane. Statistically speaking, the numbers involved even make it quite likely that those travelling on the Airbus A330 included one or two of the kind of people who habitually resort to such formulas as ‘refusal to condemn’ when discussing terrorism that they would classify as anti-imperialist.

There is an old joke that runs ‘just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you’. Unfortunately, the same consideration now applies to sane, rational, left of centre civil libertarians.

However morally outraged us lot get when the US blitzes an Afghan wedding party to Kingdom Come, it’s a fair bet that Osama bin Laden and his mates do not reciprocate our sincere Guardianista indignation when their team clocks up a home run.
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The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.

It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.

The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.

That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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On Christmas Eve, a time ostensibly meant for peace & goodwill, the New York Times ran an epic op-ed arguing for military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear technology. Should you have the stomach to endure Alan Kuperman’s belch of war-baiting, you can go here; it’s some real Deck The Halls shit.

Because I’m not particularly interested in the substance of Kuperman’s argument (there are already some excellent rebuttals by the likes of Marc Lynch & Matt Duss), I’m instead going to note Stephen Walt’s reaction. For Walt, this is but the opening salvo of a concerted campaign to pressure President Obama into taking military action. He warns that opponents of this action should start refining their arguments now because the march for war may soon become a deafening din.
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So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’.

The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”

It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo.

It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.
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contribution by Ben Six

So, on Tuesday, Liam Fox, the man who’s likely to be our next Defence Secretary, will step onto a platform somewhere in London and celebrate one of the 20th Century’s most notorious war criminals: Henry Kissinger, a man whose bloody footprints trail through Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor.

He even had a hand in Iraq, talking to Cheney “probably…more than just about anybody else“.

The event’s organised by The Atlantic Bridge, “a policy organization that seeks to promote a special security relationship between the U.S. and U.K.“. As relationships go, that’s one of the most wholly unhealthy since Caligula first hit puberty.

Fox, Gove, Osborne, Hague and Grayling all sit on the Bridge’s advisory board, along with US belligerents like Joe Lieberman. It operates largely through dinners and discussions, the low profile of which belie the standing and influence of those involved.

They bring together some of the most hawkish figures in US politics, the media and even banking – Lehman Bros. high-ups made a number of appearances.
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This is a lovely example of conservative principles, taken from a conversation with leading American conservative thinker Irving Kristol:

“The talk turned to Irving’s son, William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.”

“With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action.

‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ “

There’s been a surge in the number of articles slamming Barack Obama for his allegedly disappointing record on progressive causes in recent weeks. Only a few days ago, Mehdi Hasan wrote in the New Statesman that:

The distance between Obama and Bush on a host of policies is not as great as many people might hope or have expected – and it appears to get narrower by the day. [...] It was inevitable that even the slightest sense of continuity in policy, personnel or practice would disappoint, as it has. Obama, however, has gone further, adopting his predecessor’s positions on a wide variety of issues, from the parochially domestic to the grandly geopolitical.

Although such attacks fit in comfortably with the Left’s long history of sado-masochism, they’re also remarkably ingenerous.

When Obama spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign he reminded us of the abyss between his administration and his predecessor’s.

Remember that only four years ago, George W Bush was publicly stating that “marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society”.
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Someone on Twitter actually said to me Obama won because he was the first black US president. Enough of the race-card playing, it’s getting boring.

I’ll concede that there are two reasons against Obama’s win for the Nobel Peace Prize. First that he’s merely reversed some of what Bush did and therefore does not deserve to be rewarded for shit he was expected to do anyway (as Kashaan said on Twitter). Second that he was awarded too early. His efforts to bring peace to the world have yet to fully bear fruit. In fact, as Mike Forster pointed out to me, the closing date for nominees was eleven days into his presidency.

But there will be plenty of lefties (and right-wingers of course) pouring scorn on the decision.

I won’t be, partly because I worked on the campaign and am obviously biased, but partly because I think a broader defence needs to be made about how lefties react when left-wing leaders get into power.
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Yesterday’s Times reported that, in his speech to Congress, Barack Obama made a ’strong case’ for the so-called ‘public option’ (the part of his healthcare reforms that offers government-run insurance to people who cannot get affordable healthcare). Frankly, the writer must have been watching another speech. Here’s what Obama said:

It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight. But its impact shouldn’t be exaggerated – by the left, the right, or the media. It is only one part of my plan, and should not be used as a handy excuse for the usual Washington ideological battles.

Obama failed to give unequivocal support for the public option. In fact, he signaled that he is not really committed to it at all, and invites proposals to replace the public option. Those who want to scrap it will be emboldened.

This is just the latest maneuver by Obama to have disappointed the left. There is, also, e.g., his failure to stand up for a decent stimulus. And his heart-breaking capitulation on LGBT rights.

Liberals assumed, when Obama entered the White House, that he would be a transformational president, able to reorient America’s politics leftwards. That hasn’t happened.

And this is because Obama’s political strategising has been all wrong.
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The Cayman Islands are insolvent. Broke. Unable to make ends meet. Government staff are going unpaid, and the Island authorities have written a begging letter to the UK pleading for a bailout. Our Government has said no, because it doesn’t think Cayman can pay back the debt [PDF]. The world’s 5th largest banking centre, with 80% of the world’s hedge funds, is bust.

Cayman is one of the world’s most important tax havens – or as they are better termed, secrecy jurisdictions: places where banking and trust secrecy is enacted for the primary benefit of non-residents. In Cayman, financial secrecy is so extensive it is illegal to even ask for some kinds of financial information.

This sort of financial secrecy is a global menace. It enables massive tax avoidance, and facilitates tax evasion, the easy flow of illicit funds, terrorist financing, money-laundering by criminal gangs, and mass capital flight out of the world’s poorest economies. It is also at the heart of the financial order which collapsed so spectacularly last year, with very tangible consequences for millions of ordinary people.

The significance of Cayman’s problems is far-reaching.
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contribution by Josh Mostafa

Once people have had a taste of a proper public healthcare system, they won’t give it up. It’s a one-way street. In the UK, which is in general more closely aligned to the politics of the US (a neoliberal consensus on the centre right) than the mainstream of Europe, the NHS is the one public service on which the political classes dare not ravage with market fundamentalism.

Even the Tories have to pay lip service to the NHS, even going so far as to pose as its defenders from Labour’s cuts: ‘Mr. Brown’s short-sighted cuts and closures are damaging the NHS – we must stop them’. There may be grassroots mutterings, but a Tory manifesto that threatened the NHS would be an act of political suicide, and the top Tories know that.

The American Right are therefore correct – in strictly political terms of ideological self-interest, of course, not ethical ones – to oppose even the extremely timid steps being proposed by the Obama administration.
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On 16th February 2002, Valentina Rosendo Cantú was washing her clothes in a stream near her home in Caxitepec, Mexico, when six soldiers approached. Seemingly too busy for pleasantries, the men started barking questions at her: Who was she? Where was she from? Had she seen the people they were looking for? Did she recognise the names on the list they thrust in front of her?

Her answers weren’t good enough, so one soldier pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. Another punched her so hard that she passed out. When she came to, two men tore off her underwear and raped her, one after the other. She was sixteen years old.
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It’s worth noting in this US vs the NHS row is that the US has just about the highest healthcare spending in the world – 2nd highest by percentage of GDP, first by overall cost – largely because it’s among the most expensive. Time for some numbers – all freely available via Google.

I hold no brief for the NHS (and unlike most LibCon contributors tend to lean towards part-privatisation of its services), I’m just interested in the facts, so feel free to correct me if I’ve got some of the maths or figures wrong.

Of the c.15% of GDP the US spends on healthcare annually (that’s about $2.2 trillion*), around 50% is spent by the government (around $1.1 trillion). By contrast, the UK spends around 8% of its GDP on healthcare, with the Department of Health’s budget for the NHS (England**) in 2008/9 around £94 billion (about $155 billion).

The English NHS cares for 49 million people (100% of the population of England); US public healthcare currently covers about 83 million (around 28% of the US population).
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Only the most cold-hearted of cynics could expess disdain for the many extraordinary achievments made in Britain throughout history. Those who have struggled for freedom and justice have shaped a country safe and civilised, without fear of oppression, tyranny, death or disease in which nearly everyone is represented and enfranchised.

The human right to good health and protection from, and provision for, injury and sickness, are all enshrined in the National Health Service. It is an entity admired the world over, and one that many now could not imagine living without.

(image by Beau Bo D’Or)

So to see a British politician roaming the USA, frequenting the most biased, unreasonable and willfully ignorant news outlets in existence, spouting misinformed drivel to screeching hate puffed lummoxes like Glenn Beck about the imaginary horrors of ’socialized’ health care is almost obscene.

Watching Daniel Hannan speaking as a supposed representative for Britain on Fox News, bleating about how our country has been rendered feral and crippled by the NHS is enough to raise a sudden, unexpected swell of patriotism normally reserved for the success of a British icon on the global stage or spectacular sporting defeats.
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