This the (former) United States Republican presidential front-runner discussing Libya. Let’s hope the Libyans don’t see it or they may change their minds about democracy.
Posts Tagged ‘democracy
is this any way to manage your pension money?
In 1983, at the age of 24, I started working for an investment bank in The City of London. In those days I thought I disagreed with capitalism. Even as the banking industry swirled around me I thought that for every winner there was a loser. I now have more time for capitalism. I no longer believe that investment of spare funds by people trying to save for retirement is wrong or likely to deprive someone else of value. Indeed I can see now how capitalism is merely the free allocation of funds in a free society and that it is a more efficient way of allocating funds than some bureaucrat in Whitehall.
If I have a few thousand pounds saved which I want to invest for retirement it is acceptable to lend that money to an entrepreneur who has a plan to form a company to provide goods or a service which will make a profit. If, after a few years, I consider that my investment has grown sufficiently and I can’t see the guy making much more money or if I see that another guy has a better chance of making money then it is legitimate for me to sell my stake in the first company and buy into the second.
These are fairly standard arguments and, if one believes in freedom of the individual and of individuals to act together as groups, then they are difficult to disagree with. A whole industry has grown up to facilitate these transactions along with information services to allow me to analyse various economic and financial information.
Yes, much of the money washing around the system does belong to pension funds holding capital on behalf of rich and poor alike. From rich bankers to grieving widows.
But not all who take part in the market are equal. The people who run the companies providing the financial transactions and related services realised that they were making a lot of money and that they could make even more money by ploughing their profits back into the system and trading on their own account.
Further, an article in the Financial Times on June 7th reported that big institutional traders “are winning preferential access to deals because computers used by exchanges are programmed to accept bigger orders first when matching prices”.
So we have a market where the small invester in my initial example is at a considerable disdavantage to large pension funds and banks and as the large organisations may jump in and out of a stock several times within a day we have to ask: Is this investment or gambling?
Another fault that I see in the system is the frenzied nature of professional dealers. In 1986 a wave of deregulation swept through The City in a process known as “Big Bang”. Prior to this trading took place using a process known as open-outcry where traders use hand signals to transfer information. There was a lot of shouting and yelling and things were pretty frenetic. The process is still used by the London Metal Exchange but, after Big Bang, the London Stock Exchange replaced open-outcry by rows of traders sitting at computer screens. Technology went berserk and computers now regularly buy and sell automatically. Volumes have increased and the pace is now extraordinary. A trader will have numerous computer screens displaying graphs and figures and they will need to assimilate this information quickly and then make decisions involving huge amounts of money.
Walking around The City one has to be impressed by the fantastic granite and glass buildings with vast marble entrance halls. One has to be impressed by the frenetic pace of trading activity and by the vigour and determination of the traders but one also has to ask:
Is this any way to invest the funds you are saving for retirement?
Should the various banks be spending your pension money on the most expensive real estate in England? Should they be using your money to build luxurious head offices? Should they be rigging the pay scales of their traders to encourage them to engage in undue risk? Should they be trading in an atmosphere of hysteria?
So what’s to be done? Ban something? Many would argue that you cannot restrict such activity without restricting our fundamental freedoms. They argue that, yes, there are outrageous abuses and failings of the system but that, overall, the system functions better than any other system yet devised. As with the saying about democracy, that it is “the least worst” of all the systems of government.
I read an article recently on the risk assessment process undertaken for nuclear power stations and I recall discussing risk management with an ex-colleague who now works in the oil industry managing the movement of supertankers around the world. In bith nuclear power and oil transportation the impact of a failure can be catastrophic and risk management is tasked with analysing and controlling these risks.
It seems to me that the risk management strategies in use by banks and financial institutions are mere fig leaves when compared with the very real risk management which takes place in other industries.
The British government are now making plans to require banks to ring fence their retail banking divisions keeping them at arms length from more risky investment banking. The United States had a similar law known as Glass Steagall requiring separation of high street banking and investment banking. The law was enacted to control speculation following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. However, as the American economy recovered various parts of the law were repealed until the whole thing was dismantled in 1999.
Let’s hope that the British have leaned from the American experience and that the ring fencing legislation currently being discussed will remain in force in bad times and in good.
A better way to choose our rabble
On May the 5th the British people have a chance to fundamentally change part of our democracy yet for some reason the media has been practically silent about this. There has not been nearly enough coverage and it’s likely that many people will not think that voting is worthwhile.
I think we should get out in large numbers and vote AV and I’ll tell you why.
The current voting system is known as First Past The Post (FPTP). It’s supporters claim that it is simple and straightforward. We all get a single vote to cast for a candidate to represent our constituency in Parliament. After voting closes all the votes are counted and the candidate who has the most votes wins.
This system has the advantage that each constituency gets a representative who has been voted for by local people. It has the disadvantage that, when there is no clear overall favourite, a candidate will be elected who has the support of only a minority of the electorate.
The Liberals have long advocated Proportional Representation (PR). This is a system where all the votes for all the parties in the UK are added up and a number of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) allocated proportional the the number of votes cast for their party. This overcomes the shortcomings of FPTP as smaller parties or parties with support widely scattered through the country are allocated MPs which they would not otherwise have got. It has the disadvantage of breaking the MPs link with his constituency.
But the system which is being put to the British people on May the 6th is not PR. The system which is being proposed is known as the Alternative Vote (AV).
With AV the voters get to rank the candidates in order of their preference. So the voter puts a ’1′ by their first-preference candidate, a ’2′ by their second-preference and so on. They can rank as many or as few as they wish.
When all the votes are counted, if a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes then they are elected. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over 50 per cent.
Initially I was skeptical about this and I may have been swayed by the Tories pushing their propaganda that this is a “complicated” and odd system. However, after mulling it over for some time I have decided that, if one is trying to elect a representative, then this is not only a superior system to FPTP or PR but that FPTP can be absolutely undemocratic.
My reasoning is as follows. Suppose you and 59 other people survived a ship sinking and you were marooned on an island. 60 people in all. You decided that someone should be the leader (I leave aside why we think we need leaders for the moment). You decide to elect the leader. You decide that you will all vote and the person who gets the most votes wins.
Suppose 3 people are candidates and one guy gets 50 votes. You’d be fairly satisfied that most people wanted this guy as leader. Both FPTP and AV would deliver this result.
However, now suppose that one candidate received 8 votes, one candidate received 25 votes and one candidate received 27 votes. FPTP would dictate that the candidate with 27 votes would be the leader even though the majority of people would not want him as their leader. In fact the majority of people might think the guy was completely unsuitable but they would be overruled by the minority.
I believe that in this situation everyone would start yelling and people would decide, that, OK, it was obvious that the guy with only 8 votes was not a contender and he should not be a candidate. A second round of voting would be held with only the two main candidates.
Now the people who had voted for the least popular candidate would cast their votes for one or other of the two mains candidates. The outcome of this would be a majority.
In a national election with numerous candidates it is not practical to keep rerunning elections but whoever invented AV has obviously thought of this. AV gives us a chance to rank our first preference and then asks us: if your first preference were to come last then who would you vote for. This is a much fairer system because, as in the shipwreck scenario, it ends up with everyone voting on two candidates and one necessarily end up receiving a majority vote.
The Tories argue that AV is too complicated and strange and that FPTP is more like a sprint race. The Tories are TALKING BOLLOCKS!
FPTP does not always produce a clear winner. If it were a sprint race then, in many situations, all the runners would collapse, never finish the race and be carted off on stretchers. The winner would be declared the guy who got closest to the finish line. It is an absurd system as there are situations where nobody wins yet one guy gets to become an MP.
To continue the analogy, AV is more like a series of heats where the loser of each race is knocked out and the races rerun until, in the semi final, only two runners remain and first across the line is the winner.
I believe that AV is fair and logical because it produces a clear winner voted for by a majority.
So get out and vote on May 5th.
good times
Hypocrisy seems to be high on everyone’s list since the rebellions started in the middle east. The media have been reporting that the great and the good have been fraternising with defunct Arab establishments.
First Sir Howard Davies resigned as director of the London School of Economics because of a connection with the, now out of favour, Gaddafi regime and now we discover that Prince Andrew has “entertained” a leading member of the deposed Tunisian dictatorship at Buckingham Palace
Yes, from what I can gather Muammar Gaddafi is a shit. Yes, he has been ruthless and abominable in his dealings with the Libyan people. But hold on, don’t we know some other people like that. Didn’t Tony Blair invite Chinese president Jiang Zemin on his first satte visit to a Western country? Didn’t the New Labour government arrange for three white transit vans to shield Jiang Zemin’s eyes from people in the UK protesting against the despicable treatment of the Tibetan people by the Chinese regime?
I am not saying that we should not do business with the Chinese. It’s too late for that now.
What the West needs is less grand standing on human rights and more disciplined rules on engagement with undemocratic regimes. Democracy should be understood as a great prize. Experience in democratic countries has shown that it is something which is difficult to achieve and requires constant vigilance to maintain. It is not something that we can order a nation to introduce overnight. It needs time to grow and mature.
So we should not go around the world condemning every regime which does not measure up to Western standards of democracy. We should, however, encourage democracy and prefer democratic regimes over authoritarian regimes.
A good start would be for democracies to agree to refuse to grant Most Favoured Nation trading status to undemocratic regimes.
In the words of Elvis: A little less conversation and a little more action.
She wont vote for militant Islam
This evening BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze is discussing the unrest in Egypt. I usually find this program to irritating to listen to. The panelist seem to consider that it is their soul objective to be obnoxious and insulting to the “witnesses”.
In describing tonight’s program the BBC web site asks: “Is it morally justifiable to tolerate or support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse for the citizens of Egypt.”
My answer is simple: NO! No because it is wrong to support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes. NO because we cannot know what the alternative will be. And NO because we have experience of what happens when revolution finally breaks out in countries where the West has connived to suppress democracy. i.e. the people despise the West along with the dictator which they have just thrown off.
The classic example of this is Iran. In 1953 the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état instigated by the United States and the United Kingdom. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed as Shāh and propped up by the United States until the revolution in 1977.
From what I have read the revolution was initially backed by a secular movement but militant Islamists used the chance to grab power. Secular Iranians tried to resist but were crushed by the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. They could have received help from the West but having been responsible for 20 years of their repression we were not trusted and there followed a caustic division between Iran and the West that lasts ’till this day. That is an example of what happens when we support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse.
We should support the people of Egypt in ejecting their dictator. If they then elect an authoritarian Islamist government then more fool them. At least the responsibility will not be ours and when they are finally in a position to reject authoritarianism we will be in a position to help.
More optimistically I believe that Egyptians will have learned from the experiences of Iran and Afghanistan and will reject outright Islamist rule though Islamists may have some role in a coalition. It is possible that Egypt could finally break the curse that has afflicted the Arab world for decades and start to modernise.
Imagine a middle east of modern democratic countries right on the border of the largest trading block in the world. I am talking of the European Union. While the world obsesses over whether China will supplant America as the largest economy in the world they overlook the fact that the EU has an economy larger than both. With the Arab world modernising trade would take off and this would be great news for Arabs and Europeans.
The financial crisis has caused market uncertainty and companies have been nervous about initiating capital projects. Investors are also unenthusiastic as many assets appear overpriced; there is even talk of a Chinese asset bubble. Consequently some sectors, such as insurance, are awash with capital.
If democracy were to blossom then this capital could find it’s way to infrastructure projects in the Arab world. There was speculation in The Economist in 2009 of solar powered electricity generation in the Sahara with the electricity transported to Europe across the Mediterranean. That is not going to happen while the region is ruled by unstable dictators.
Lastly consider the effect on the Arab / Israeli conflict. Today the subtext of much of Israel’s argument is that the Palestinians are just Arabs who are used to being oppressed and the Palestinians are no worse off than citizens of other Arab countries.
Imagine if Israel were surrounded by thriving democracies. Israel would be forced to confront it’s oppressive and racist policies toward the Palestinians. Could The United States continue to support the siege of Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? Shame on them if they did.
Hypocrisy Rules
Confusion reigns regarding legitimacy of Wikileaks but they may have done the world a favour by opening a Pandora’s box of hypocrisy over secrecy, privacy and information security.
Wikileaks have been dispersing information “leaked” by government or corporate employees for years now. However, what really put the cat amongst the pigeons when they released details from thousands of “cables” between United States Embassies around the world. The Americans responded by getting Paypal and Mastercard to stop processing payment transactions for Wikileaks though apparently these companies agreed without any legal intervention.
Meanwhile, the Swedish government is trying to extradite Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange from the United Kingdom under charges of rape. In accordance with Swedish law, the names of the alleged rape victims are confidential but Naomi Wolf in The Guardian is calling for the names to be published.
The U.S. authorities then issued a court order to get details of private Twitter messages for seven people whom they believe to be involved with Wikileaks. The original order stipulated that the court order must be kept secret so that even the people whose messages were being accessed would not be told. Wikileaks challenged this in the courts and we now know that the court order exists and that one of the people being investigated is an Icelandic Member of Parliament named Birgitta Jonsdottir.
A blogger who appeared on Channel 4 News on the 7th January complained that the U.S. authorities were spying on everyone and that nothing was really “private”. A lawyer interviewed worried that journalists were being prevented from defending the anonymity of their sources.
Then we have The Daily Telegraph sting where Business Secretary Vince Cable was prodded into a conversation where he discussed threatening to bring down the coalition. The Telegraph initially omitted to mention that Mr. Cable also claimed to have “declared war on Mr Murdoch”. This last tidbit was later leaked to the BBC.
We must not forget that the debate over information security takes place amidst a climate of fear of terrorism. Under New Labour the United Kingdom suffered more and more intrusive security measures justified by the need to confront the threat of terrorism. Police encourage this hysteria by preventing members of the public from taking photographs in public places.
The rational conclusion from this rumpus is that the concepts of privacy and freedom of information are under strain, that none of our data is secure and that all parties are behaving hypocritically.
However, Wikileaks may have done us all a favour by bringing the arguments to a head and this could be good for democracy if governments acknowledge and address the underlying issues.
The driving force behind the rise of Wikileaks and the challenges to privacy and freedom of information is modern information technology. In the past information has been stored on paper and was therefore difficult to copy and disperse. Though this may have been comparatively inefficient it meant that keeping information secure was relatively easy. Today’s technology allows vast amounts of data to be stored in devices no bigger than a postage stamp. It provides that data can be easily analysed and it facilitates easy dispersal via The Internet.
There are two aspects to the current chaos over information security. Firstly the data is obviously not adequately secured and secondly there is no agreement on what data should be freely available.
While securing information is technically possible, human factors make the process extremely difficult. Further, as data has become so concentrated, once a system is compromised the quantity of information dispersed can me enormous. All this has been known to information security professional for years yet we have not faced up to the fact that our efforts to secure information are not working.
All bureaucracies, such as governments, have a tendency toward secrecy. Rather than selecting information to be kept secret they prefer blanket regulations which keeps everything secret. Following pressure to release information the British Government responded with the Freedom Of Information Act 2000 which allows that some information can be released dependant on a public interest test. This is the wrong way around.
Rather than keeping everything secret and then allowing exceptions we should make everything freely available and only keep secret selected information.
Two things need to happen.
Firstly democratic countries need to define more clearly the information which can legitimately be categorised as secret or confidential and what information individuals can expect to keep private. All other information should then be freely available.
Secondly government and corporations should wake up to the responsibilities that is theirs because they hold vast amounts of other people’s information. This realisation should feed into some high level thinking about how to carry out effective information security and this should put a greater emphasis on professionalism together with standardisation of systems and processes. This will probably accelerate the current trend toward cloud computing.
Greater clarity over the rules on information security together with greater realisation of the challenges in securing that data can only be a good thing.
Feisal Abdul Rauf - Taking full advantage of democracy - When it suits him
A mosque should not be built on ground zero in New York. I agree with Americans I have heard who say that Muslims have the right to build but that they should not.
Why? Because to do so would be grossly insensitive!
Over centuries Western democracies have managed to throw off oppressive religions and now take pride in freedom of speech. So much so that it is enshrined in the United States constitution. I recall seeing the great and the good protest about the film The Life of Brian by Monty Python and I recall the storm over a ludicrous piece of art named Piss Christ. But the uproar did not sop these things it merely drew attention to them.
Wikipedia informs me that it was Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarising the beliefs of Voltaire who wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” and this is oft quoted when defending freedom of speech.
Along with other peoples, Muslims now take advantage of secular society in Western countries. However, it cannot have escaped many people’s notice that they have an uneasy relationship with the concept of free speech. Recall the fatwah on Salman Rushdie and the uproar over a cartoon depiction of the profit Mohamed.
Though Western media take great pride in their lack of censorship I note that they refrained from the obvious course of action which was to reprint the offending cartoon. I imagine that they did this because of a mixture of sensitivity to Muslims beliefs and fear of being killed by Muslims.
As we all know, in 2001, a bunch of bastards, claiming to be Muslims killed around three thousand people by destroying The World Trade centre in New York and since then Al Qaeda have been shooting their mouths off claiming to be killing Americans in the name of Islam. Now someone wants to build an Islamic Mosque on the site of the deaths of these people.
Since Muslims are very keen that respect and sensitivity be shown to their religion and beliefs one has to ask why they show so little sensitivity to the feelings of the friends, relatives and countrymen of those killed in 2001?
To my mind this stinks of hypocrisy.
If a madman dressed up as Ronald McDonald, took a machine gun and murdered a lot of people in a parking lot would McDonalds have the right to build a restaurant on the site? Absolutely! Should they? Hell NO! I would expect that McDonalds would not try to build because they would not want to offend people and because they realise that their relationship with people would suffer.
The guy behind the plan for the mosque is apparently Feisal Abdul Rauf and he must know that his plans will offend people and that Islam’s relationship with non-Muslims will suffer. Yet he presses ahead! Obviously he does not care about either factor. If he goes ahead with this mosque then I hope that this defender of liberty, champion of free speech and protector of the American Way will be out there defending the rights of all Americans to act without sensitivity. I hope that we never hear this man whingeing and taking offence in the name of Islam.
However, I am not holding my breath as I suspect that Feisal Abdul Rauf is an insensitive boor and an offensive hypocrite.
The building of this mosque will do nothing to help repair the rift that is opening up between Islam and Western countries and should be condemned.
I heard that, in India today, a high court has announced that the site of the Ayodhya mosque which is claimed as sacred by both Hindus and Muslims is to be divided between the two religions. What may have been more sensible would have been to build a joint religious building to be shared by both faiths. Similarly in new York, if Muslims had wanted a mosque in the area, it would have been more in keeping with their penchant for respect if they had offered to build some kind of religious centre to be shared by all religions.
..oh…and atheists too as I don’t want to leave myself out.
airplane hackney
Photography
Police spy on you at petrol stations
Tags: bollocks, cameras, CCTV, democracy, neighbourhood policing, neighbourly, Orwellian, petrol stations, police, spy
Where was the informed debate on this?
I saw this at a petrol station recently. OK, I can see that it is in the interest of the petrol station owner to log the registration plates of cars in case they drive off without paying. But I can recall no informed debate about whether this data should be automatically made available to the police!
Democracy my arse! Gradually, using fear of crime and terrorism, the state increases the control that it has over the individual. “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” whine the naive and trusting. This is bollocks. History shows that if authorities are given powers they will abuse them.
It’s also a bit rich to advertise it as “neighbourhood policing”. You’d have to have truly Orwellian mind to consider a nationwide network of CCTV cameras to be neighbourly.