[economy] for and against free markets

Today I took a car from the side of the road, having agreed a price for the journey to the centre. How legal this is over here I’m not sure but it’s free enterprise, it’s a voluntary transaction between two parties and it was win/win for both today. There are many such transactions over here and it’s not going too far to state that without them, the economy would implode.

Everyone’s making his little on the side. The babushki lined up along the footpath selling jars of berries, jams and salads – that’s free enterprise, as are the million or so deals done by mobile telephone day and night. Today, in front of our house, a car pulled up, then another, two boots/trunks were opened and the deal was done.

I have always operated in a free economic zone. Years ago I got it into my head to follow the family business and get into screen printing sports t-shirts for clubs and so I hawked my wares around the city, made contacts and the big boys waited till simple economics snuffed me out.

Along the way I met a guy who produced trophies for clubs and we combined forces. I had two girls working for me, plus a day job. Big mistake. Suddenly, mindboggling orders came in and we had neither the infrastructure, the talent nor the time. That was the end of the business.

And yet I strongly believe in market forces and feel that in a free economy such as we have [on one level] over here - anything is possible. However, there are distinct negatives, which I never really saw until I got into ‘trade’. Arguments against a free economy do exist and include:

Market economies have higher average incomes - but these are unequally distributed. They do not tolerate any competitor for the free market system in itself. Once a market is imposed by people’s acquisitive instinct, other forms of economy are snuffed out. Forever.

A comprehensive global free market, by definition, will always tend to a planetary monopoly. In one’s own country, anti-trust laws partially moderate the trend but outside of national constraints, where is the constraining force? The UN? The WTO?

Expansionism is one of the clearest characteristics of market liberalism and if you were to ask Mexico and Brazil about this, they’ll say it all works one way – in favour of the US.

Free marketism is not above military conquest. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and parts of Macedonia all owe their economies to the aftermath of military action.

NATO itself lists ‘the free market’ among its core values.

The market becomes a goal in itself, replacing spirituality as the summum bonum.

The free market limits choice - it produces only goods and services which are marketable and only in sizes and numbers produced as a job lot, eg. clothes at Debenhams which are never the right size and with all the good patterns and colours taken . The little man who started up a sweatshirt shop in radical designs falls to the big boys who latch onto his idea and produce their own. An example was the IQ range.

Free markets tend to monopoly, not to the highest good of the greatest number of enterprises. The ubiquitous Walmart, which decrees to suppliers the specifications, the unit price and the payment arrangements, take it or leave it; or McDonald’s specifying the exact potatoes which are acceptable are examples of this.

The market is not innovative. It will run with someone’s idea and then standardize it for bulk sale. One of the few firms where this is not so is Hermes.

Self-regulation is a myth. It is simply dog eat dog. Here are the rules:

# to compete for market share
# to damage the interests of competitors
# to sell products at more than cost price
# to seek to ensure its own continued existence, even when that contradicts ethical goals
# to exclude from decision-making persons of good will and ability
# to internalise the principle of competition among job applicants - so creating a labour market.

Whatever happens to the Gross National Product, the combined market share is always 100%. To increase share, a successful business competes its rivals out of existence. At first, the rival firms suffer financial loss. Ultimately, they can not meet their financial obligations: they collapse, usually via a bankruptcy procedure.

This is how a free market works – mammoth monopolies, eg. Walmart, move in on a town like Port Elgin, in Ontario and squeeze the life out of the local economy. Over here, Moscow money moves in and squeezes out first local entrepreneurs and then businessmen on rungs progressively lower down.

A market society is not based on ‘added value’ but ‘decreased value’ across the range of society. The entrepreneur has no other interest other than his own and he will not seek to protect others. If you say that that’s the job of the government, then you are no longer a free marketeer.

The free market is always 'triangular' in character. At least one buyer and two competing sellers are needed. One must always lose.

Repeated transactions and interactions, on the basis of the outcome of previous transactions and interactions, have a centering effect and leads to a more conformist society, with everyone wearing virtually the same as everyone else and going about their business in the same way as everyone else.

Having said all that, I still support a market society for the reason that I can’t see the obligation to help those who won’t help themselves, as distinct from those who can’t help themselves. Even free marketeers recognize that pensioners cannot fend for themselves, especially if it is their parents involved.

The free market would be a grand idea if people were essentially altruistic, which they aren’t, unless they embrace a philosophy close to the Christian ethic. A free market is essential to the economic well being in macro terms – the government must pick up the pieces in the other areas.

Therefore, this militates against the free market and leaves the government between a rock and a hard place. And what does the poor old government do about monopolies and trusts? I’ve read the economics of monopolies ultimately self-imploding and the theory would be valid if it weren’t for one factor – the inexorable move towards global monopolization on the part of all major money lending institutions.

But that’s another topic.

[far-east] 2020 vision in anticipating china

I’m reprinting this Melbourne Age August 21, 2006 article on China, by Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, as another take and an authoritative one, on the rising hegemony of that country:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years ago, there has been only one megapower — the United States. For the first 10 years, the dominance of the US was seen as a great opportunity to rebuild the global institutional architecture in favour of a more democratic, rational and equitable system.

The United Nations, partially crippled during the Cold War by superpower rivalry, acquired a new lease of life and UN peacekeeping operations multiplied.

In the past five years, however, US hegemony has been viewed much less favourably with opinion polls across the world recording unprecedented levels of distrust of the US Governments throughout the world.

The US is still the only megapower, but this could change in the next 15 years. While no country is close to present levels of US defence spending, military prowess is only one aspect of megapower status.

Power in international affairs stems from economic strength, political influence, cultural attraction and the ability to use coercive diplomacy. It is this combination that makes the US a megapower despite the fact that it is not supremely dominant in any of these areas except the military.

Other countries might aspire to megapower status in the next 15 years, but only one — China — is likely to achieve it. Its annual rate of economic growth is likely to be at least double that of the United States, while its population is five times the size.

This will make China not only the second-largest economy in the world by 2020, but also the main trading partner for a wide range of countries. With economic power will come political influence, the growth of the Chinese language (now being promoted all over the world by the Confucius Institutes) and a steady rise in military spending.

China already enjoys many of the trappings of a great power, thanks to its permanent seat on the UN Security Council and the ability to exercise a veto. [Add to this the Beijing Olympics.]

The world in 2020 is therefore likely to be dominated by two megapowers and this will require a difficult process of adjustment by all other states. Both countries are strong upholders of the principles of national sovereignty for themselves with a great reluctance to commit to international laws or treaties that could compromise or restrict their ability to act as sovereign powers.

The US, believing itself to be a force for good in international affairs, is less respectful of the national sovereignty of other states while China is a strong upholder of the principle of non-interference, fearing that anything else might set a precedent to be used against it in the future. China, [see earlier article on stirring the pot].

However, as it gains in confidence, it may move closer to the US position by 2020.

Most countries will hope for good relations with China and the US and this may not be easy particularly [for Australia] in Asia and the Pacific. Just as the US used its growing power a century ago to reduce the influence of the United Kingdom in the Caribbean Basin and become the regional hegemon, so China will want to use its economic strength to reduce US influence in the regions of the world closest to its borders.

The Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, at China's prodding, has already called for an end to US bases in Central Asia. And China will have accumulated a great deal of "soft" power by 2020, allowing it to strengthen commercial ties with "friendly" countries.

China is not, and will not be, an easy country with which to collaborate. Its one-party system is likely still to be intact in 2020 with nationalism having replaced communism as the prevailing ideology.

Some countries — notably Japan — have already made clear that an even closer alliance with the US is the best insurance policy against the "peaceful rise" of China. This is understandable — if shortsighted.

China's relative importance to Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries will increase by 2020, while the relative economic importance of the US is likely to diminish. Even Japan, therefore, can be expected to reach a new kind of accommodation with China in the next decade.

For the US, China's emergence as a megapower is likely to be particularly traumatic. The US State Department has called for China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system, but the US has not set a good example and China is no more likely than the US to commit to international treaties that restrict its freedom to manoeuvre.

Containment is no longer an option, while strategic rivalry is fraught with danger. The risk of the two megapowers, therefore, carving out spheres of influence — with China dominant in the Asia-Pacific region and the US in the Americas and perhaps the Middle East — is very real.

This is an outcome that other countries — Australia included — will need to resist. For small and medium-size powers, the greatest protection of national security lies in multilateral institutions and the rule of law.

China does need to be encouraged to become a responsible stakeholder, but it is the pressure from other states in the international community — not from the US — that is more likely to make this happen. And China must come to understand that good relations with its neighbours, including Australia, depend on this.

The year 2020 once seemed very far away, but no longer. Democracies, such as Australia, are often fixated on the short term for understandable electoral reasons. However, the big challenges — climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the risk of pandemics, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and energy security — all require long-term strategic thinking.

The emergence of China as a megapower in the next 15 years requires such strategic thought; it cannot be reduced simply to a commercial opportunity.

Professor Bulmer-Thomas is director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. He will give the inaugural Sir Zelman Cowen Oration tomorrow for the Australian Institute of International Affairs Victoria, an event supported by The Age. His visit is hosted by the Monash Institute for Study of Global Movements.

[world round-up] news in three or less paragraphs [continued]

UK British authorities recently uncovered an alleged plot to blow up airplanes using homemade explosives produced on board using chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide. Similar homemade explosives were used in the London subway bombings in 2005, which killed over 50 people.

Switzerland Researchers have developed a video-display technology that can produce an unlimited range of colours by flexing tiny artificial "muscles" that generate different shades by expanding and contracting in response to electricity.

The flexible material allows individual pixels — the dots that make up an image on a screen — to display "every single natural colour," said Manuel Aschwanden, a project researcher and nanotechnology specialist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

By contrast, conventional displays rely on ever smaller pixels that trick the eye into seeing a colour that is in fact mixed from the three basic colours red, green and blue.

France Une organisation soutenue par de grandes entreprises veut améliorer l'image des Etats-Unis dans le monde. Et si on confiait à Disney la gestion des files d'attente des contrôles de l'immigration aux aéroports américains ? Après tout, ils s'y connaissent : ils ont révolutionné l'organisation des queues dans leurs parcs d'attractions et leurs visiteurs gardent le sourire.

L'idée fait partie de toutes celles que mijote le Business for Diplomatic Action. Cette organisation, fondée en 2004 et soutenue par de grandes entreprises comme McDonald's et Microsoft, a pour objectif d'améliorer l'image des états-Unis dans le monde.

Japan Nippon Oil Corp. plans to start importing crude oil from Russia's Sakhalin Island as early as this autumn in a bid to diversify its energy supply sources, company sources said Tuesday.

According to the sources, the company plans to make a one-time purchase of about 500,000 barrels of crude oil produced under the Sakhalin I project, which incorporates U.S. energy company Exxon Mobile Corp., the Osaka-based trading house Itochu Corp. and other firms. Nippon Oil is also considering procuring fuel from the Sakhalin I oil fields throughout the year, the sources added.

Since 2001, Japanese oil companies have imported crude oil through the Sakhalin II project, run by a consortium consisting of Royal Dutch Shell plc, Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi Corp., but shipments have to be suspended during winter when the surrounding waters freeze.

USA [again] Housing and its impact on the US consumer is supposed to be the Achilles' heel for the dollar. It's the collective "thing" that all have been waiting for as a trigger to drive the dollar into its death spiral.

Some problems with this theory: 1) Too many people seem to be expecting it. 2) The weight of US money overseas. 3) If prices continue to remain in check, expectations for rate increases globally will be reigned in. 4) If the US consumer decides to take a holiday, the current account deficit - would likely improve.

Pakistan Hezbollah has emerged as the new champion of the jihadist world, eclipsing even al-Qaeda as it battled the might of the US-backed-and-supplied Israel Defense Forces.

Shi'ite Hezbollah's newfound international popularity is likely in turn to encourage closer ties between it and Salafi-dominated al-Qaeda, which had fallen in Hezbollah's esteem for its targeting of Shi'ites in Iraq.

An Iranian intelligence official explained, "There have been some contacts between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda in the past, but those contacts were at the individual level. The two organizations never spoke to each other officially. Neither did they exchange any official delegations.

USA [yet again] Scientists in the US have developed a test that they claim could help detect chemical precursors of homemade explosives easily and can prevent potential bomb attacks on aircraft.

Christopher Chang and colleagues at the University of California in Berkeley have developed the compounds for basic research into oxidative stress, which they say could be adapted to detect the chemical precursors of homemade explosives, reported the online edition of New Scientist.

[presidential election looms] viva la nouvelle france!

Good article from The Age, abridged here:

What is France’s place in the world? Can it keep its character and difference, or will it be overwhelmed by globalisation?

President Jacques Chirac's decision on Thursday to commit 2000 troops to the Lebanon peacekeeping force was also about national identity: France's standing on the world stage.

Last year's riots in poor suburbs, the failure to win the 2012 Olympics, France's catastrophic loss of primacy within the European Union after its voters rejected the European Constitution in a referendum in May 2005, the end of labour market reform and the presidential hopes of Dominique de Villepin] have not been good for French pride.

As people return to work after the long summer break, the country enters the last nine months before the presidential election in May. Some commentators say the nation's future hangs on the result.

The election "is the most important in the history of the Fifth Republic (established in 1958)", Christophe Barbier, editor of the weekly magazine, L'Express, wrote this week. "It is one of France's last chances to stay among the really big countries," says Emmanuel Lechypre of the Centre for Economic Forecasting at L'Expansion business magazine.

Who, then, is the great hope to replace the enfeebled Chirac and raise the tricolour again? On current trends it will be "Sarko" or "Sego".

Intelligent and charismatic to his many followers in the centre-right UMP party, egotistical and self-serving to his critics, Sarkozy is the enigma of French politics. More than any other leader he has called on France to make a "rupture" with the past, and adopt a more free market economy.

But he mixes courage with cold calculation. As Interior Minister he has chased the right-wing vote by stoking fears about immigration and disorder: he famously called last year's rioters "scum" and this year tried to deport the children of illegal immigrants (he had to halt his plan after a protest movement of teachers and parents hid children from police.)

Royal, meanwhile, has become a media magnet overnight. Not in the race a year ago, she is in line to be France's first female president. Long before either party has chosen its candidate, a poll last week put her potential vote at 55 per cent, with Sarkozy on 42.

Royal has also dared her party to break with old policies — criticising the 35-hour week, for example. "She is suspected of Blairism," says Reland, a dangerous tendency in France and especially in the Socialist Party, which Reland says "refuses to assume its social democratic nature".

Royal is seen as weak on foreign policy and untested in many areas. Many wonder whether she, or Sarkozy, have the stature to be "presidentiel". Best known for her focus on the politics of family and community, in this she may have caught the mood of modern France. But that mood is also the candidates' biggest problem, Lechypre believes. In a poll of 1000 people to be published in L'Expansion next week, 75 per cent accepted that France needed to make sacrifices to save its social model.

However, it seems sacrifices are best borne by others. Asked if they would accept allowing companies to more easily fire staff if retrenched employees were guaranteed good income support and promises of retraining 58 per cent of people said no.

Similarly, asked if they would accept a rise in taxes to pay for their generous pension schemes, 63 per cent said no. Majorities also opposed paying more to fund health and higher education. "It shows there is a problem of maturity in the French mind," says Lechypre.

One of the Socialist Party's most powerful constituencies is the many civil servants, who benefit hugely from the status quo. Lechpyre says Royal or another Socialist candidate will "have to say to their voters, 'If you vote for us you will have to make sacrifices.' It is very hard to say that."

He thinks right-wing voters are more likely to agree change is needed. But they dislike Sarkozy's talk of "rupture", and he, too, may choose to tone down as the election approaches. Some good recent economic news may also discourage Royal and Sarkozy from being bold with their criticism. Growth is up, business is doing well, unemployment dropped a percentage point in the year to May.

Lechypre thinks the economic gains are cosmetic and, as interest rates rise, already sputtering out. Even so, he says former centre-right prime minister Roland Barre told him recently he thought the French had not really been touched by decline and there would be five more years of stagnation before the crisis was so acute they realised things had to change.

To Barbier, that will be too late. The election is a moment of truth, he wrote this week. If France faces the truth it can leap into the new century.

If it continues to lie to itself, "it will wither bit by bit, becoming a museum country, a 20th century fossil, offering its charms — countryside, monuments, gastronomy — for the enjoyment of the warriors of globalisation".

[russia] putin was right to imprison khodorkovsky

You could be forgiven for looking at the smartly attired, well groomed Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky and thinking butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. In fact, there is ample evidence that he had plans to establish a parliamentary republic in Russia and who could possibly be the leader of that republic?

President Putin accused Khodorkovsky of accumulating enormous amounts of oil reserves and yet not contributing to the state, through the vehicle of taxation. Of course this was par for the course with such oligarchs, as long as they were onside with the administration.

In other words - onside with the stable governance of Russia. Because, whatever your personal opinion, Putin and the Duma are the state.

But Mikhail Borisovich was a driven man. Or rather, he’d had the sniff of power and threatened to take Russia back to the lawlessness of Berezovsky and Co. It was basically the clash of two gung ho ideological movements – on the one hand the soon to be One Russia, with the backing of the state and the stability many hankered for and on the other - Open Russia, with Khodorkovsky.

It is hotly disputed that Putin’s government itself was hankered for but stability – yes, yes that was. The average Russian I’ve spoken with says Russia needed stability in the public sphere after the crazy early nineties and the bust of the late nineties. The dollar, the euro – these needed protection. The stabilization fund was an essential, however it was administered.

In an embryonic democracy such as Russia, it was necessary to step carefully, whilst not denying the people the new found freedom to accumulate wealth at grass roots level. In other words, a middle class was rising to which almost all aspired. Credit would facilitate this in the next few years.

On the one hand, yes, freedoms have been eroded and memories of pre-1990 still haven’t faded and in the case of the babushki and dyedushki, the grandparents, those days are actually celebrated, not least over the recent pensions issue. Putin found to his cost that he needed to tread carefully, slowly, step by step, laying out his platform and working inexorably towards it.

The people are terribly anxious, more or less all the time and they don’t understand. That’s when they revert to old stereotypes and old modes of behaviour, particularly the hoarding instinct.

Vladimir Perekrest says that back in 2003, Khordokovsky, seen by many as an antidote to the seeming backsliding to repression and a heavily influenced press, came to be seen in many quarters as synonomous with democracyand as some sort of saviour [although inate cynicism tempered this].

Poor Russia, if this is what they’d hoped for.

The same April, when Putin had his famous meeting with Khodorkovsky, an "analysis of constitutional law problems of state building and improvement of the constitutional legislation of the Russian Federation" was published, ordered by the Foundation for the Development of Parliamentarism, but as was found out later, the report was in fact ordered by "Open Russia", according to Perekrest.

The game plan appeared to be the old one of gaining control of the Duma, putting in place legislation which ensured an ‘independent’ prime minister and effectively creating a power separation. That was the first step, accompanied by all the usual promises of payback – the numbers game.

The real purpose was, of course, to marginalize the President and vest the legislative, if not the executive power, in the hands of the parliament, i.e. the prime minister.

The Open Economy Institute, coincidentally and around the same time, produced an analysis which proved, in its eyes, that the economy usually grows faster in countries with a strong parliamentary government. This institute had at least geographical ties to Yukos.

These were the days of ‘chutzpah’, of daring forays into constitutional change, under the nose of the administration. It was the challenge of the nouveau riche and because it seemed an alternative to state control, it was widely popular. It was an attempt at Russia plc. It was an attempt to do a better job than Yabloko had done.

In May 2003, the Council of National Strategy, also composed of eminent politicos, gave out a counter-report: "Oligarch revolution in preparation in Russia".

Essentially, it spoke the truth.

The oligarch class in Russia, from the earliest days, not unlike the robber barons around the time of the Magna Charta, has never been a benign ‘upper class’, so to speak. The oligarchs have always acted from financial self-interest and never from the point of view of the greatest good. Well, who ever has? But with the Russian model, there is a distinct edge to the business. Don’t forget Rasputin’s grisly end.

This model which, for want of another, they always fall back on makes for a class of ruthlessly self-interested hoarders, with muscle to get their way. Thus, all rules are made to be either broken or negotiated around, they brook no opposition to their activities and they are driven men. It’s a dangerous game but the stakes are high and the top dog changes periodically.

You have to understand the fear factor in Russia. One goes to buy, say, a particular jacket and sees a rather nice pair of trousers but decides to come back in a few days. It won’t be there. Here today, gone tomorrow and you’d better get it while the going is good. In many ways Russians are optimists – they always feel they’ll still be alive and kicking ten years down the track but not financially.

As a consequence of the oligarchic model, the economy is always going to be transitory and fundamentally unstable. And one of the root causes of the instability is the attitude of the average Russian. One couple I knew in my early days over here decided to tell me a joke.

The transport drivers needed a vehicle and so they were given the Kamaz and then the farmers said, ‘We need a vehicle as well,’ and so they were given the Lada.

I have a Lada. Everyone asks me why, when to sport a foreign ‘importni’ car or ‘inamarka’ is the sign of social elevation, I drive around in a Russian tank? I think everyone should buy Russian and in roubles. I have no dollars and no euros. Only roubles.

To a man, the Russians wryly smile and applaud my patriotic foolishness.

According to Perekrest, perhaps Khodorkovsky was initially advised not to enter politics but over time, that changed. People surrounding him started to say that the calibre of an oil company, even the largest, was too small for MBK. Only the post of prime minister is the post in which he can show his "eminent abilities of administrator and strategist".

Perekrest believes that in 2001-2003, the idea of pushing Khodorkovsky ahead to power began to be considered as realistic and as the first step toward the qualitative new possibilities of influence, not only in the oil business, but also for the entire economy.

Meanwhile, Putin was fighting on several fronts - the Iraqi war and the USA, NATO, WTO and IMF coolness, the general coolness of Europe. If you look at the photographs of the D Day remembrance, Putin was not engaged in conversation with any Anglo-Saxon or European except Chirac and that for France’s own reasons. There was the delicate matter of the Club of Paris and CFR to consider as well.

Into this came the spectre of Khodorkovsky and Putin had to deal with this summarily. Just think it out yourself and you’d see that it was an intolerable situation for the country and never, ever forget that Putin was and is the country.

All the preceding caused angst in Russia and it was clear for any who would see that Putin had to have a dedicated, loyal, vertical chain of command on whom he could rely. However, the main money spinner for the nation, energy, was private. Not only that but largely in the hands of Khodorkovsky and a handful of others.

Perekrest says that suddenly, the Yukos/Sibneft union was consummated and Khodorkovsky became the head. American oil companies now entered the picture in a much bigger way. Exon-Mobil declared its intention of acquiring either 40 percent, or the control block of the united company.

There is one more story about Khodorkovsky connected with America.

Stanislav Belkovski, a political analyst, said that according to reliable sources, during a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, it was said that in the next political cycle of Russia, Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin would have key positions in order to move towards nuclear disarmament.

Quite a key issue, isn’t it? For if it was indeed as reported, then it is tantamount to treason and under the rules of the political game in Russia, Khordokovsky is mighty lucky to even be in one piece today, relatively speaking.

Khodorkovsky always maintained that forces were planning to take his company and one name pops up - Roman Abramovich. Personally, I believe one has rocks in the head to even think of taking on the siloviki. Now the expat Bukovsky has much to say about the siloviki but I ask the question, ‘Would you prefer the OGPU or the Cheka?’

That was not the main point. The main point was that whether it was the truth or not, Khordokovsky was regarded as colluding with western business, with the Bush administration behind them, to enter Russian soil and access Russian markets, not so much as partners but in their own right. So again, say what you will about the siloviki but such an idea as allowing Americans to strut around the sovereign territory was quite clearly anathema to even the average Russian.

Basically, no one stood up for Khodorkovsky when the heat was really applied and he found himself adrift and friendless, a situation which very much reminds me of the way Lord Archer was abandoned.

So, the Federal Service of Prison Administration is now entertaining Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the county’s pleasure, in the closed Chita region and reports indicate that Khodorkovsky has been out of line and behaving very badly. This, of course, means remission of parole. Under the current political climate, there is no way back for this man.

Vladimir Putin was at some pains to explain that the Khordokovsky business was a one-off, that the man was quite clearly out of line and that as far as Russia’s relations with other countries were concerned, it was strictly business as usual. Unfortunately, he misread the west, which has never forgotten Newsweek’s extremely damaging September 7th, 1998 story of Yevgeni Polyetski.

No Russian I’ve spoken with does anything more than shrug his shoulders about this tale and yet it sent waves around the world at the time:

The country's frantic privatization created a class of politically connected bankers and businessmen who got rich buying assets on the cheap; Boris Berezovsky, who played a key behind the scenes role in ousting Kiriyenko, is the most famous. These so-called oligarchs effectively paid for Yeltsin's election campaign in 1996.

After that, secure in the knowledge that private property was going to be respected, they insisted they would prove their talents as legitimate businessmen: investing in the companies they had acquired, lending money to deserving businesses, creating jobs.

With some exceptions, that never happened. But Yevgeny Poletsky, for one, made the mistake of believing them. Poletsky owned a fleet of fishing vessels in Astrakhan, in southern Russia. Seeking to expand in 1996, he went to one of the largest Moscow-based banks looking for a loan.

He eventually had a meeting with the bank's president, after which, he says, he was escorted into a private room by two of the executive's security guards. Poletsky says the two men then told him that, even though the bank had not yet agreed to the loan, the fishing fleet was now the property of the bank.

"Then they made it clear that if I tried to protest, I would-get hurt." Poletsky says.

Such hardball tactics have persuaded potential foreign investors to steer clear of Russia. And the oligarchs remain unreformed. Once Kiriyenko announced that the ruble would be devalued on Aug. 17, the Central Bank knew that banks would be in deep trouble. It then funneled a series of soft loans to some of those owned by the politically connected oligarchs. They converted the rubles into dollars and shipped the money offshore, fueling the run on the currency.
The West can be under no illusions.

That was 1998 and this is 2006 and yet old fears run deep. Effectively, what Putin has done is to wed Russia irrevocably to the world economy, play the game responsibly e.g. the paying off of the Club of Paris debt in full, the Fitch and Moody’s upgradings and so on. He knows the pitfalls full well.

In my own republic here, the wealth can be seen everywhere and whereas people were formerly counting kopeks, now they’re laying 1000 rouble notes on the counter. Perhaps everyone, each in his own small way, wishes to be a mini-oligarch. If the sign of affluence and prestige is the motorcar, then this capital city has that in abundance.

There is no sign of a red jacket and gold chain anywhere these days. Those who have, they shop in Europe and those who have less, pretend they’re doing so. This is one of the reasons Putin was returned in a landslide and with control of the Duma.

Detractors were quick to point out that the civil service ‘instructed ‘ people to vote for Yedinaya Rossiya or else and that corruption was rife. I can only answer that with my own experiences at the time.

On the day of the poll, I got up late and wandered over to the school where the polling station was. Firstly, there were no ‘how-to-vote’ cards, no rosette-sporting party faithful. There was a big board [unguarded] in the main foyer and I watched an old couple scrutinizing the details of each and every candidate and talking earnestly between themselves.

I went up to the big board and there the candidates had all set out their stall, so to speak, complete with which party they represented or which faction group; all legal and above board. Naturally, as a foreign national, I wasn’t allowed into the polling room but I could see through the door and what I saw was eye-opening.

You remember the old one about the dog which did not bark – that was the surprising thing? That was the situation here. There were the ballot boxes, manned by the electoral commission; there were the booths with their curtains and no hidden cameras, there were the ballot papers which many did not understand, as in the west.

The whole business was conducted not unlike any election I’ve ever voted in. So where are these allegations of impropriety? From whom do they come? From the west and from the opposition parties. That’s all.

Look, I don’t say Putin is a saint. I do say he has the pulse of the nation [with the exception of the pensioners where he went in with customary Russian overkill and I have a long history of being on the side of the pensioners] and he realizes that Russia is a special case. Russia will never have any negotiating power in foreign forums unless it first builds up an unassailable and stable economic base.

No one is suggesting this can be done in two electoral terms. And yet that is what Putin is grappling with. To decry the siloviki is to misunderstand the whole post-Stalin history of Russia. Probably most things are true, which have been said. And yet which country does not have such?

And yet these eyes have seen an amazing turnaround, there is money in the pocket and butter in the refrigerator and more in the shop when that’s finished and now the big question remains, ‘Who will succeed Vladimir Putin?’

Khodorkovsky?

James Higham, August 25th, 2006

[nuclear] iran's answer to the 'gang of six' proposals

This is a summary of the key points in Bill Samii’s* article on Iran’s 23 page response to the ‘gang of six’:

· Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani gave representatives from China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland (representing US interests) a 23-page written response to an international incentives package at a meeting in Tehran.

· Mohammad Saidi, of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that although suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment was no longer an appropriate precondition, Tehran was willing to hold talks. Iran has also rejected the possibility of suspending uranium enrichment.

· The proposal called on Iran to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities" and "resume implementation of the Additional Protocol" of the NPT.

· In exchange, the six countries would suspend Security Council talks on the Iranian nuclear program. Future cooperation would include a nuclear-cooperation agreement between Iran and Euratom (the European Atomic Energy Community), cooperation on the management of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, and assistance in nuclear-related research and development. Other issues included assurances on the provision of nuclear fuel, including enrichment at a joint facility in Russia.

· The June proposal mentioned political and economic incentives, too. There would be a regional security conference. Iran would be fully integrated into the international economy - including membership in the World Trade Organization - and there would be a trade and cooperation agreement with the EU.

· Restrictions would be lifted on the sale of European and US-manufactured parts for civilian aircraft. A long-term Iran-EU energy partnership would be created, and restrictions on the use of US telecommunications equipment in Iran might be eliminated. There would be cooperation in the high-technology and agriculture sectors, too.

· If Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment, the Security Council could impose commercial or diplomatic sanctions, the overseas travel of Iranian officials could be restricted and their assets frozen; there could be restrictions on Iranian sports teams' participation in international competitions; and there could be major economic embargoes.

· Resistance to this will come primarily from Moscow and Beijing - in part due to their geopolitical competition with the US. China, furthermore, gets much of its energy from Iran. European powers get oil from Iran, and the country is a significant market for European goods.

· There is concern that Iran would respond to sanctions by restricting oil exports. Yet Iran is heavily reliant on its oil revenues, which account for 40-50% of the state budget and 80-90% of total export earnings.

· Iranian withdrawal from the NPT is another possible response by Tehran. Ahmadinejad hinted at this possibility in February, and doing so now would conform to his confrontational foreign-policy style.

· Military action against the Iranian nuclear program is a remote possibility. Tehran has responded to this risk with a new doctrine of asymmetric warfare.

· Iran also reportedly has links with Iraqi insurgents who could act against coalition forces. Additionally, Tehran believes US forces are already overstretched with Iraq and Afghanistan and cannot commit to another military confrontation.

· Iran displayed the new Fajr-3 missile, torpedoes and other weapons during war games in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Sea of Oman in late March and early April. These exercises allowed Iran to show its naval forces' area-denial capabilities.

· Rohani went on to note the significance of Europe, Russia, Japan, China and other industrialized states, and he emphasized the importance to Iran of diplomacy and the danger of isolation.

* Regional Analysis Coordinator with RFE/RL [Ra

[liban] la situation la plus explosive qui soit

« Nous sommes ces jours-ci dans la situation la plus sensible et la plus explosive qui soit » : c’est en ces termes que la ministre israélienne des Affaires étrangères, Tzipi Livni, a dépeint le tableau israélo-libanais, mercredi, à Paris.

Selon elle, l’urgence de la situation impose « une action extrêmement rapide » de la communauté internationale au Liban.

« Plus le Hezbollah pourra interpréter l'action internationale comme étant hésitante, plus les choses resteront difficiles », a-t-elle argué. «Le temps œuvre contre ceux qui veulent voir cette résolution (1701, mettant un terme aux hostilités, ndlr) appliquée».

De son côté, Philippe Douste-Blazy a réclamé la levée du blocus israélien. «Si le Liban veut se reconstruire, si le Liban doit repartir économiquement, il faut la levée de ce blocus», a martelé le chef de la diplomatie française.

Mis en place dès le début de l’offensive israélienne, le blocus des ports et aéroports libanais est maintenu malgré l’entrée en vigueur, le 14 août dernier, de la cessation des hostilités. Mardi, le premier ministre israélien, Ehoud Olmert, a conditionné la levée de ce blocus au déploiement d’une force d’intervention multinationale.

La ministre israélienne s’envolera ensuite pour l'Italie, qu'Israël souhaite voir prendre la tête de la Finul renforcée dans le cadre de l'application de la résolution 1701. Le Danemark a exhorté les pays européens à s’entendre sur ce dossier. «Il s'agit de la crédibilité de l'Europe dans le domaine de la politique étrangère et de sécurité.

Le monde nous attend et ce serait une très grande déception et un très grand étonnement si l'Europe faisait faux bond», a estimé le ministre danois des Affaires étrangères. Des premières consultations diplomatiques ont commencé mercredi à Bruxelles entre les pays européens.

L’Allemagne a appelé l’Europe à « faire preuve d’unité ». Les ministres des Affaires étrangères de l'Union européenne doivent se retrouver vendredi pour discuter de leurs contributions à la future Finul.

lefigaro.fr

[oil spill] ship rusts away, fishermen prepare class action

A fisherfolk group is preparing a class action against Petron Corp. for the oil spill in Guimaras that has affected more than 26,000 people and seen to be in danger of turning into a "catastrophe."

Well, that’s a relief. Just for one moment there was some chance they’d be out there keeping back the spill, pressing for the salvage and so on. Not a bit of it. Inspired by the giants, the Pamalakaya are taking care of the dosh first.

Fernando Hicap, national chairman of the Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya), said the Saudi Aramco-owned oil firm should be held accountable for economic and environmental crimes.

"A class suit can be filed against Petron either in the Philippines or in any international court. Something must be done to stop a transnational giant like Petron from destroying our environment and people’s livelihood," he said.

Hicap said filing a class action against an oil firm accused of damaging an environment with millions of liters of spilled oil has so many precedents.

He cited the class action filed by Ecuadorans against Chevron Texaco in 2003, which was charged with dumping over 18 million gallons of toxic spill in the Latin-American nation between 1964 and 1992. Hicap said that in 1998 Texaco undertook a $40-million cleanup for the spill.

The Guimaras oil spill "resulted from Petron’s great rush for superprofits, nothing more, nothing less," he said. Around 26,000 Filipinos, all dependent on fishing, have been economically displaced by the oil spill.

Hicap said some 20 barangays, 6 wharves, 13 resorts, 9 fishing grounds, 4 diversities, 7 scenic views and a cave were affected by the oil spill. He said 453 hectares of mangrove and 58 hectares of seaweed plantation have been destroyed.

Raffy Ledesma, a spokesman for Petron, issued a statement.

"Our latest aerial surveillance shows there is evidence that suggests that the oil coming from the vessel has stopped. There is no oil slick near the area where the vessel sank. On the Negros side, no coastal areas have been hit by the oil spill and the reported oil sheen off the coast has been thinning.

"Nonetheless, we are gravely concerned about the possibility that the oil remaining in the vessel will continue to be released into the environment. We have engaged the services of a company that can undertake deep-sea underwater inspection and salvage operations employing the best available technology.

Our primary goal within the next few days is to determine whether and how the fuel cargo can be safely retrieved from where it is, under 640 meters of water.

"In line with our commitment to help in the containment and recovery of the oil spill, we have organized the communities in the municipality of Nueva Valencia to begin cleaning up the affected shorelines.

We have engaged more than 600 people in the municipality under a ‘cash-for-work’ scheme to help in the shoreline cleanup. Hopefully, we will be able to engage more of the local communities to expedite the cleanup.

As of August 20 we have covered nearly 12 kilometers of shoreline and collected 60 metric tons of debris. At our current rate, we expect the cleanup to be completed in 30 to 45 days. As of today, cleanup operations in two barangays in Nueva Valencia [Canhawan and Igdarapdap] have been completed.

"In coordination with the DSWD, we are contributing to the relief efforts by providing essential goods to the affected communities. We are coordinating with various foundations and groups to seek their assistance in our relief efforts and find long-term solutions.

"At sea, we have deployed equipment which includes W.I.S.E. [Waterborne Industry Spill Response] tugboats, oil spill booms, absorbent pads, oil skimmers, dispersants etc. We have four oil-spill response teams assisting in the cleanup. We have also sought the assistance of experts as well as other members of the oil industry in order to expedite the oil-spill containment and recovery.

"Petron will extend all the assistance needed to the province of Guimaras. We are committed to staying and helping in the province as long as necessary."

That was right from the horse’s mouth.

Original article by Mark Ivan Roblas, The Manila Times

[oil and gas] brinkmanship means a long cold winter for ukrainians

Ukraine may still face an energy crisis this winter, Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Klyuev said on Thursday, Aug. 17, despite assurances from Russia that it will not sharply raise the price of gas supplies to its neighbour.

Simple statement, yes? The DPM should know, right? Yes, he knows all right – knows how to play the game of brinkmanship with his fellow countrymen and women. This thing is all about the subsidized gas Vladimir Putin alluded to when, at the press meeting in Moscow before the G8, he said:

Let’s work out uniform rules together. You, for example, represent a German news agency. Why should German consumers pay 250 USD for 1000 cubic metres and Ukrainians 50? If you want to give Ukraine such a gift, why don’t you pay for it? Why do you want us to give such presents?

Klyuev’s position is:

“We can clearly state that we have a gas deficit of about 8 billion cubic meters. We have difficulties with gas supplies, payments, with the financial situation at (state oil and gas firm) Naftogaz and other energy companies,” Klyuev said, quoted by Reuters.

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who favours closer ties with Russia and was appointed earlier this month after a fierce tug-of-war with pro-Western factions in parliament, won Moscow’s word on Wednesday, Aug. 16, that there will be no big hikes in gas price just yet.

Given the state of play and the fact that Moscow would want to bolster Yanukovich’s position in the Ukraine, their word could probably be taken as read on this matter – for now.

At the start of the year Ukraine was forced to accept nearly double the price - $90, compared with $55 previously and now Gazprom is definitely stirring the pot with suggestions that it could go to $230 next year.

-Mosnews, Reuters, Russian Oil and Gas

[spy v spy] russia’s kgb and the clairvoyants – grasping at straws?

Would you fear an international intelligence service which employed clairvoyants?

Correspondents of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said that not long before he passed away, Professor Alexander Spirkin, well-known scholar and co-author of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, admitted in an interview that the Soviet KGB employed clairvoyants to spy on their enemies.

Alexander Spirkin used to head a secret lab under the Soviet government and worked closely with clairvoyants hired to carry out special missions for the Kremlin.

“I used to work closely with hundreds of all sorts of extrasensory individuals,” Mr. Spirkin recalled in a conversation with Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents.

“In the 1960s, when the [Khrushchev] Thaw began (the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point) and people began to speak out, groups of people interested in telepathy met at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum.

”Wolf Messing who possessed a true gift of clairvoyance and telepathy was a key figure at those gatherings. I had known him since university. His posters reading: “Experienced in reading thoughts at a distance!” were all over the country.

“In those days I had campaigned for studying those phenomena, claimed they were incomprehensible, and, in terms of Marxist and Leninist ideology inexplicable, but we had no right to deny the fact they exist.

Eventually, I was summoned to the scientific department of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee and offered a post of the chairman of the laboratory for biological information. Provided, of course, its operation would be closely watched by the KGB and the Central Committee.”

Spirkin’s task was to hire at least 200 “agents”. Each contender was to fill out a questionnaire containing such questions as: “Which extraordinary properties do you possess?”, “What kind of dreams do you have?”, “Are they of erotic nature?”, “Do you fly in your sleep?”, “Are you able to influence people?” and “Have you ever tried to heal?”

Candidates were examined by a commission made up of clairvoyants who had already proved their ability, and Spirkin himself.

One of the female agents possessed great healing power, as her body produced extraordinary heat. Ivan Fomin used his extrasensory energy to investigate all sorts of disasters and technical malfunctions.

His services are still in demand in Russia, Prof. Spirkin said. He used to work as an advisor to Boris Yeltsin and investigated aircraft accidents. Spirkin also mentioned Boris Shapiro, who possessed a very strong sense of diagnostics. These days, Shapiro consults wealthy entrepreneurs.

All employees of the secret laboratory were closely watched by the Soviet omnipotent security agency — the KGB. Some of the lab staffers, too, were KGB agents. One of such “students” once entered Alexander Spirkin’s office and introduced himself as KGB General Makarevich.

The official said that he was ordered to control the professor’s activities because they were of great interest for foreign intelligence and defense agencies, especially for the CIA and the Pentagon.

Spirkin responded that the laboratory had not developed a scientific base that could deserve such immense interests in other countries. The general replied that foreign intelligence officers wanted to know everything, even if there was nothing to know about. “Even the fact we have made no progress whatsoever also amounts to important intelligence data,” he said.

“In the end I had to leave the lab. New know-how and technical devices started to appear but I could hardly make them out. A special committee came to check our equipment, and they were shocked to see how obsolete it was. The laboratory was not closed. A younger scholar took over my post.”

Prof. Spirkin admitted he still did not know what the outcome of the research was. He knew that the military took great interest in the lab’s work, seeking to use clairvoyants for purposes of spying. The Soviets hired clairvoyants to report on the state of health of U.S. leaders or travel to the United States under the guise of tourists, so that they could report on local developments, using their extrasensory abilities.

From MosNews

[environmental disaster] petron’s alleged kickbacks and obscene profits fuelling the catastrophe

All the words in the world are not going to get that tanker off the ocean floor and 450 000 litres are ready to spill now. Until that tanker's salvaged, all talk of who's responsible and how deeply Petron is into graft, all such talk is just so much oil on the water

After that, Sunshine Marine Development Corp., the owner of the Solar I, which sank off Guimaras two weeks ago, needs the most rigorous investigation into how they could commission such a derelict ship through such an environmentally sensitive area on such a mission.

Officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources investigating the oil spill have promised to release the results of their inquiry sometime this week.

Oh yes? Like National Power Corp. off Semirara island last year? The NAPOCOR barge spilled 364,000 liters of fuel and ruined vast stretches of the coast of Antique province.

The cleanup has been haphazard and ineffective, the spill happened right smack in the middle of the monsoon season but much worse is that they plus Greenpeace are expending their energy on ‘why it happened, how to prevent another etc. and meanwhile:

450 000 litres lie in nine tanks on the ocean bed, the metal sides of those tanks are now in the process of rust deteriroration and there’s an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Now. Right now.

Petron Corp. sources described the obsolete, single-hull tanker as a disaster waiting to happen. It was carrying 2.1 million liters of oil when it sank in the Guimaras Strait. As of noon Friday, the Philippine Coast Guard estimated that over 200,000 liters of oil have already leaked into the waters of Western Visayas.

Some 1.9 million liters remain in the tanker’s nine other compartments. But if the vessel is not raised soon, the remaining oil could also spill out and cause even more widespread destruction.

The problem is that there are others with Petron moving through the archipelago [see Black Quill’s queries here]. How can Petron, whose motto is “fuelling success”, jointly owned by the Philippine government and Saudi Aramco, operate this way?

Answering that question will require looking into who approves multimillion-peso tanker contracts. There is talk in industry circles of kickbacks and “syndicates,” which not only allow vessels of questionable seaworthiness to service

Insiders allege but it can’t be proved, that Petron is also into hijacking and smuggling. And the owner, Sunshine Marine Development Corp., should be investigated better than the Exxon Valdez was 17 years ago.

Petron controls 38 percent of the Philippine market and their net income last year was P5.765 billion. And yet they say they can’t afford the cost of the cleanup and the slavaging of the tanker, which is the greater issue, truth be told.

Information from Dan Mariano, Oil and Gas and others

poll results on 'greatest threat'

Greatest Threat

Who currently poses the greatest threat to world peace? North Korea (1) 3% U.S.A. (10) 31% Iran (9) 28% Israel (1) 3% China (2) 6% Saudi Arabia (0) 0% The Financiers (2) 6% Hezbollah (3) 9% Ahmadinejad (2) 6% Al Qaeda (1) 3% Your choice view suggestions (1) 3% Total Votes: 32

[great people] 'give ‘em hell' harry

I’m possibly going to lose half the Americans checking this site before I even begin this. That’s appropriate, given the pugnacious subject of this piece – Harry S [without the period] Truman.

Those of you on that side of the pond – you’ve had some fine leaders; you’ve had some poor ones too but you’ve also had some whom I believe do not yet occupy their rightful place in American hearts and should – they really should.

By far the most interesting chief executives, in my eyes, were Old Hickory, Andy Johnson, Harry S Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and that’s because they stood up for what they believed.

Jackson was a colossus, because he was the last man who stood foursquare and tried to crush the Monster through its mouthpiece, Nicholas Biddle; Johnson was wrongfully vilified at the most difficult of times for the nation and probably did well to govern it at all. Was there ever a beat up like those impeachment proceedings? Eisenhower will be touched on at a later date.

Which leaves the last of the four. A battler, an unfashionable dirt farmer, lacking in the graces, in the shadow of a four time presidential great. I suggest that he represents, more nearly than any other president, the qualities America should be proud of. He showed that Adlai Stevenson’s aside was correct – that if you play your cards right - you can become president.

It was a nasty time in history – desperately unfashionable, the Cold War just round the corner and McCarthy in full flight. Truman faced crisis after crisis and never baulked once. Is that not a leader? In his wartime experiences, this sums the man up for me:

Truman, thrown by his horse, had been nearly crushed when the horse fell on him. Out from under, seeing the others all running, he just stood there, locked in place, and called them back using every form of profanity he'd ever heard.

And back they came.

This was no Douglas MacArthur, strutting the edge of a trench to inspire the troops. This was a man who carried extra eyeglasses in every pocket because without glasses he was nearly blind.

He had memorized the eye chart in order to get into the Army. And there he was in the sudden hell of artillery shells exploding all around, shouting, shaming his men back to do what they were supposed to do.

Here are just some of the reasons I believe he should be regarded as one of the greats:

1. An unlikely leader

No President, it was said, could have been more poorly prepared than Harry S. Truman for the immense burdens of leadership that were thrust upon him in April of 1945. He was lightly regarded by the men around Franklin D. Roosevelt, and there had been little time, and even less inclination, during his brief vice presidency to initiate him into the highest policy - making circles of the Administration.

2. An underrated man

Harry Truman was, in fact, an easy man to underestimate. In speech and manner, the 60 - year - old Missourian was as simple and artless as his small - town upbringing might suggest. He had never attended college, though he had a wide knowledge of American history.

As a young man he had tried his hand at farming, with modest success, then at business, with no success at all. At last, deciding on a political career at the age of 37, Truman had entered public office under the banner of a notoriously corrupt political machine.

3. Surprising political courage

But though Truman was a Democratic Party regular and loyal to a fault, he proved himself to be strong - minded, diligent and as personally honest as his sponsors were venal. And when he arrived in the US Senate in 1935, he demonstrated both an unexpected breadth of vision and a steely resolve to act on the issues as he saw them.

During his first year in Washington, Truman supported Roosevelt's initiative for a law binding the United States to the rulings of the World Court at The Hague-an unpopular cause in a Congress hostile to any international ties. From 1939 onward, he backed the President's controversial efforts to aid countries fighting Germany and Japan.

And in 1940, he confounded his border - state constituency by making equality for black Americans an issue in an uphill race for reelection.

4. Momentous decisions

Truman was dismayed when fate declared him President; he genuinely had no ambitions for the job. Almost immediately, he was called upon to make momentous decisions, and none more difficult than whether or not to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

To Truman, the course was clear; he made the decision swiftly, aware that although hundreds of thousands of lives might be lost, millions more would be saved by putting an immediate end to the War.


Harry S apparently initiated the "period" controversy himself in 1962 when, perhaps in jest, he told newspapermen that the period should be omitted. In explanation he said that the "S" did not stand for any name but was a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young. He was later heard to say that the use of the period dated after 1962 as well as before.

Some Truman quotes:

The buck stops here.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Take a two-mile walk every morning before breakfast.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Finally, Harry S, quoted by Time, June 9, 1975, summed up his view of life thus:

I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have - when he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do.

[far-east] yet more remissions for the bali bombers

Does anyone remember the Bali bombings? They probably didn’t grip the US and the UK quite so much as home grown disasters and certainly didn't grip the Indonesian authorities at the time, being largely an Australian affair and yet they were jolly well no picnic for the families and friends of the 202 people killed and scores injured in one of the worst terrorists bombings of recent times.

Just to fill you in, Paddy's Bar in the Bali town of Kuta, a very popular nightclub, especially with Australian tourists, was gutted by bombs on the night of October 12, 2002 and the aftermath was as you’d imagine. Following on some time later, the three main culprits, Amrozi, Ali Gufron, and Imam Samudra were finally convicted by an Indonesian court and are due to be executed this month.

Gradually, it came out that the cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was the holy man behind the planning and funding of the bombings. Though officially wanted in Singapore and Malaysia, Bashir held a news conference to deny any involvement and laid the blame at the door of the United States for the explosion.

Naturally, his execution was expected to follow by Australia and the US alike, in line with the capital sentences also passed on convicted Australian drug smugglers over the previous few years and in line with convicted terrorists the world over.

Not a bit of it.

The authorities delayed, hummed and hawed and then sought grounds to release the inspirational Indonesian leader and it became the sticking point between the two countries. For the Indonesians to lightly pass over the death and destruction and even, in some quarters, extol the virtues of the revered cleric shocked and nauseated more than one nation.

Eventually Bashir was given a nominal 30 months and after serving 26 months, his sentence was cut for last year's Independence Day celebrations, on August 17th.

This is a yearly Indonesian tradition, where convicted criminals are released early, on grounds of national forgiveness and closure and last year, of course, included Bashir. The sense of outrage outside Indonesia, especially among the families and friends of victims, was intense.

Now, one year on and it’s happening again. At least 10 of the original 33 had their sentences cut on Thursday and the families of the 88 Australian victims are again less than happy. But more, much more than the actual remissions is the whole Indonesian attitude.

There has never been any form of contrition either on the part of the murderers or on that of the authorities. Rather, it has been the direct opposite as in this statement:

"They are entitled to remissions because they have behaved well," prison chief Djaya said. "Those given remissions were convicted on charges such as robbery to help fund the attack and giving refuge to key figures. Four people serving life sentences for the Bali bombs were not given remissions. "

On the other hand, Schapelle Corby, serving 20 years for drug smuggling, was also given a two-month remission.

Tensions between the two countries continue to simmer and there is a forum here.

This was a compilation from the reporting of Ahmad Pathoni, Ed Davies and James Grubel.

[environment] solar 1 tanks ready to rupture

The sinking of the Solar 1 last week is soon to become a major environmental disaster [see earlier article].

The tanker with 10 tanks, each of 50 000 litres, of which the first has already ruptured and the others are just biding their time.

A disaster official admitted Saturday that Philippine authorities have no capability to refloat the sunken ship off Guimaras province fearing that the country's worst-ever oil spill will affect the province for years.

Chief Superintendent Geary Barias, chairman of the Regional Disaster Coordinating Council said at least 200 liters have already spilled out of the sunken tanker, affecting three towns and 14,000 people. Authorities said the ship's 10 tanks carrying 500,000 gallons of bunker fuel might rupture if it is not retrieved immediately.

This is not a minor spillage but what can a humble blogger do to bring it to people’s attention? And what can we do about it?

This is precisely the question that the main players in the area are also asking each other and meanwhile the slick spreads.

Petron Corp., which chartered the tanker, said the company does not have the capability to retrieve the sunken ship. The ship is still lying in the sea floor off Guimaras.

The company said the liability rests with the owner of Solar 1, Sunshine Maritime, "which is why [the ship] is covered by insurance for an event like this."

"However, we, in Petron, feel a moral responsibility to extend every assitance that we can to the province of Guimaras . We are committed to stay and help in the province as long as necessary," Petron spokeswoman Virginia Ruivivar said in a statement

Well, that’s just wonderful. Giving aid to a province whilst your tanker is rusting and preparing to rupture with the other 450 000 litres.

[far-east] the nuclear power game warms up

North Korea’s armed forces comprise:

Active forces: 1.14 million
Special forces: 100,000 estimated
Manpower fit for military service: 3,694,855

It has the world's fifth largest military and is the most militarized nation in proportion to population (estimated at 22 million. Military spending is 22.9% percent of GDP while around 70 percent of the army is deployed within 65 km of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

Overall, the effectiveness of the North Korean military is questionable. The majority of its tanks, for example, were acquired from the now defunct Soviet Union (Russian T-54 and T-55 tanks) - many of which are over 50 years old.

The technological superiority of the U.S. based weapons systems in South Korea would seem to discourage conventional warfare from the north. Therefore, they would most likely resort to other forms of warfare.

North Korea maintains the world's third largest arsenal of chemical weapons which includes mustard gas, phosgene, sarin and V-agents.

Along with these, the DPRK also maintains an active biological weapons program and have developed a significant amount of anthrax, botulism, plague, and smallpox.

They possesse enough weapons grade plutonium for two to five nuclear devices and has reprocessed spent nuclear fuel rods which could contain enough plutonium to produce between six to 12 nuclear weapons.

The greatest threat comes from the weapons of mass destruction and the fact remains that the South could be decimated by a massive biological / chemical attack.

Stats from Robert W. Martin, About Military History

In addition, North Korea has certainly thrown down the gauntlet, at least within its region, even if its current reach does not quite match its rhetoric. Though it can certainly launch and has the current capacity to strike China or Japan, most observers consider it’s still some way away form being a viable threat, although closer than Iran to that goal.

The United States is not convinced, at the official level, that North Korea poses no real threat. Therefore, they have been making overtures, through casual asides in speeches, that if Japan chose to arm itself with nuclear weapons, it would not be against this in principle.

US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer has raised the possibility of an independently nuclear-armed Japan.

"If you had a nuclear North Korea, it seems to me that that increases the pressure on both South Korea and Japan going nuclear themselves," he said.

There are two ways to view this move. The first is the conventional strategic, five year view and the US move would appear to make sense in that context.

However, then one reads and re-reads Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment to Meet the Press, saying:

"The idea of a nuclear-armed North Korea with ballistic missiles to deliver them will, I think, probably set off an arms race in that part of the world."

Now forgive me but when Cheney speaks, Bush, Concoleeza Rice and the world listen. When the man who assumed Kissinger's mantle speaks so calmly, then this scenario is more than likely.

The Bush administration continues to push China to push North Korea to disarm and China is stonewalling. The US therefore considers that one way to motivate Beijing is to scare her with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan.

The Republican Party policy committee paper anticipating a North Korean test put it this way: "Essentially, the United States must demand that the PRC [People's Republic of China] make a choice: either help out or face the possibility of other nuclear neighbors."

China will not concern themselves greatly, even if Japan does go nuclear. But Japan will do it because it would expose them to inordinate risk, taking them out of the protective post-war cocoon which enabled their re-industrialization.

Japan simply won’t do it anyway because of the public mood which has not greatly altered since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus one other thing.

It can not match China in mutual assured destruction. Japan would lose every time. Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto and that’s the end of Japan.

The same number on China would be sustainable, in Chinese terms. China is also rattling sabres.

Major-General Zhu Chenghu, dean of the Defense Affairs Institute for China's National Defense University of the People's Liberation Army, last year said:

"We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian."

Japanese Self-Defense Forces staff, in 1981, concluded that in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, Japan would suffer about 25 million fatalities, compared with about 1 million in Russia's Far East. The scenario is different in China, with it’s evenly spread population but population does not equal defensive capability in China’s case and geographical depth is everything.

Todd Crowell from the Asia Times concludes:

Japan is much better off continuing to rely on the US and to strengthen its alliance with the US so that it can depend on the United States' nuclear weapons for protection. Among other things, the US provides the strategic depth that Japan simply does not have.

[oil and gas] passing the buck in the solar 1 oil spill

So far, only one of the Solar 1’s 10 containers has ruptured in the sinking in the Panay Gulf, off Guimaris but this alone has spilt more than 50,000 gallons of oil into the sea.

The slick now stretches across 13 nautical miles of water polluting 1,100 hectares of mangrove and 26 hectares in the Taclong Island Marine Reserve, as well as seaweed plantations and coral reefs containing popular dive sites. The damaged areas are not merely where townsfolk get their source of livelihood; these are protected areas which took years to develop and will again take many years to revive.

About 450,000 gallons are still onboard, and there were fears the seawater and metal stress could corrode or burst, dramatically worsening the situation. Without urgent help to lift a sunken tanker, still loaded with fuel, off the ocean floor, it’s going to get much, much worse.

The tanker is on a seabed some 900 meters deep. The Philippines rushed ships and equipment on Monday to the seas surrounding the central island of Guimaras to stop the oil spill from spreading to other coastal areas. However, Philippine salvage teams are capable of diving only to around 120 feet and so international help is urgently needed.

"We cannot just sit and wait," said Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Coyme, spokesman for the Coast Guard. He said the spill could not be cleaned up for the moment and called raising the tanker the "foremost priority."

The government has asked Indonesia and Japan to send specialist teams to help

The United States has been asked for urgent assistance.

There has been no formal offer of help so far from Tokyo or Jakarta.

Continuous rains and strong winds are hampering efforts to stop the slick from spreading. Skimmer boats are using an oil spill boom to skim off the oil on the water’s surface before it reaches shore. They are also trying to contain it with chemical dispersants

The Coast Guard has ordered Petron Corp., which chartered the tanker, to hire a salvage company

Petron was also ordered to pay for the entire cost of the cleanup, including the fuel for the Coast Guard and other vessels involved.

Residents of Guimaras, including the fishing town of Nueva Valencia, have been asked to use picks, shovels, tall grass, rice husks and other absorbent material for the cleanup, the civil defense office said in a statement.

Petron gave its assurance that it would help in the cleanup but said that the slick is the primary responsibility of the tanker’s owner.

The ship’s captain, Norberto Aguro, gave the order to abandon ship about 4 p.m. Friday but did not raise a distress call.

The Coast Guard came to know about the sinking only on Saturday, when Nueva Valencia officials informed them of the rescue of the crew.

Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. on Thursday urged Sunshine Maritime Development Corp, the owner of the sunken tanker, to pay for the environmental and livelihood damage it caused.

Revilla said Petron should also be held responsible for the rehabilitation and restoration of the affected marine areas.

Meanwhile, 450 000 gallons await below the ocean.

[classic film] manchurian candidate still relevant today

The Manchurian Candidate had the effect on me that Silence of the Lambs might have had on cannibals around the globe.

Leaving aside the ubiquitous director’s cut, this would have to be one of the few films where the revised version stands up almost as well as the acclaimed original. Almost.

John Frankenheimer’s dark, brooding 1962 tale of American psycho-history is, if you can believe Rotten Tomatoes’ 100% rating, a genuine classic. It certainly took the box office by storm before being suddenly withdrawn from circulation and then re-released a quarter of a century later.

It is as much oracle as movie - steeped in what Norman Mailer called "that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation".

Jonathan Demme’s 2004 take of the same story has a different thrust entirely, despite the utilization of the same basic plot and characters.

Where Frankenheimer concentrated on the infiltration of the American body politik by Korean nasties, the implied theme running through Demme’s screenplay is one of the hidden organization lying behind the major current catastrophes around the globe. It just happens to use the American presidency and vice-presidency as examples.

I feel that the criticism that Demme's remake is an intervention, a desecration, a revision and an all-purpose metaphor is unfair. Yes, the Sinatra original is a classic, no two ways about it. But the 2004 version certainly grows and repeated viewings reveal much, much more than the sum of the parts.

The Manchurian Candidate [1962] probably wouldn't have been made at all, if it weren't for its star, Frank Sinatra. Studios were reluctant to touch the politically sensitive 1959 novel by Richard Condon on which the film is based.

In essence, Condon suggested the Cold War was a Soviet-American co-production. US electoral politics were represented as the province of communist dupes and zombie secret agents, while the novel's demagogic Joseph McCarthy figure himself turned out to be a Soviet creation. One brainwashed the other; left- and right-wing paranoia merged.

The scenario was nothing less than a satiric version of the John Birch Society's Black Book, which held President Dwight Eisenhower to be a dedicated servant of the international communist conspiracy.

Sinatra was known to be a presidential pal and when he asked the President what he thought about the idea of his company making this movie, Kennedy thought long and hard, then telephoned Sinatra and told him to "go for it".

When the Democratic honchos who then ran United Artists deemed the film too controversial to touch, Kennedy proved instrumental in getting the movie made. Although JFK previewed it at the White House in late August 1962, history does not record his response. Perhaps he was distracted - that day a U2 spy plane had reported eight missile installations in Cuba that were only weeks away from being operational.

Two months later, The Manchurian Candidate had its premiere as Soviet ships steamed towards the US quarantine line surrounding Cuba, and under-secretary of state George Ball warned UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson that there could be a "shooting war" by the following afternoon.

Thus the film opened at the climax of the Cold War, to unanimous raves and in fact, having supplanted Darryl Zanuck's D-Day epic The Longest Day, The Manchurian Candidate reigned as national box-office champ just in time for Kennedy's mid-term elections.

It fulfilled its prophetic mission 13 months later when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. It is, therefore, the quintessential Kennedy-era thriller. It clearly influenced American history by forever colouring speculation about Lee Harvey Oswald and has become so linked with the Kennedy assassination that a legendary aura has grown up around it.

Indeed, there's a sense in which the movie is the Kennedy era - the epitome of glamour and anxiety, an anthology of Cold War anxieties ranging from TV image-building to communist infiltration of the government.

Truman Capote weighed into the debate in 1968 when he proposed that RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan was a programmed "Manchurian candidate" and the term "Manchurian Candidate" has now entered everyday speech, meaning:

A brainwashed agent who has been hypnotized or torture-conditioned to act politically when his controllers pull the psychological trigger, even to the point of carrying out some morally repugnant atrocity, calmly and without the least shadow of remorse or feeling of guilt.

Six months after the Wallace shooting in 1972, and a decade after The Manchurian Candidate's initial release, Sinatra reasserted his rights, for financial reasons, in a contractual dispute with UA and the movie disappeared from cinemas for over a quarter of a century and thus from the popular consciousness. It remained withdrawn, not appearing again until its re-release in 1988.

The director, John Frankenheimer (1930-2002), was a movie-star-handsome, tall, rangy man who told hilarious stories about his adventures as a boy-wonder in the days of live network television. He used his TV experience to give The Manchurian Candidate a quick-moving, hard-edged urgency. Filming in black and white, incorporating inside details about political campaigns and journalism, he sweeps the story along with such utter conviction that its implausibility is concealed.

The viewer is asked to suspend disbelief and accept that a group of soldiers could be brainwashed in the space of three days and that the choice of U.S. president would be of paramount importance to the Russians and Chinese, who surely must have felt that such a choice could be likened to that of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The notion of the Russian and Chinese cooperating in this venture also takes some getting used to.

And yet, for all that, it is a politically groundbreaking, edgy and well-acted film, especially notable for the portrayal, by Angela Lansbury, of a manipulative, evil and power-hungry Washington matriarch, as well as for the emotional portrayal by Sinatra.

This is, arguably and certainly in his own opinion, Sinatra’s finest performance as an actor. On the other hand, Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin, nominated for an Academy Award, is one of the great villains of movie history - fierce, focused and contemptuous of a husband she treats like a puppet.

Frankenheimer uses a heightened visual style to underline the byzantine complexity of his story. There are tilt shots, odd angles, and the use of deep focus for his favourite composition, in which a face is seen in close-up in the foreground, while the action takes place behind it in the middle distance.

The Manchurian Candidate is inventive and frisky, taking enormous chances with the audience in not playing like a "classic" but rather as an "alive and smart" vignette. The film's point of view cuts back and forth between the different versions of reality, moving freely between realism and surrealism.

"It may be," Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "the most sophisticated satire ever made in Hollywood."

Possibly so, because it satirizes no particular target - left, right, foreign or domestic – but strikes at the very notion that politics can be taken at face value.

Seen today, some forty years or so following its initial controversy, the film feels astonishingly contemporary. It trusts its viewers to follow its twisting, surrealistic plot and presents an uncompromisingly cynical and unexpectedly modern perception of politics.

In its established context, politics is simply a plague, as bystanders and otherwise innocent individuals are robbed of their most basic freedoms in the name of political expediency or, dare it be said, of a highly placed "hidden agenda". And of course, as always in 1962, the dark clouds of Communism were impetuously threatening.

The Manchurian Candidate is impeccably designed. To say that the film involves twists does not accurately measure the intricacy of its plot; it is a thick brush of narrative directions. To mind, no political thriller gathers greater momentum and yet steers towards more impossible turns, arriving at a truly astonishing finale.

The film is rich with subtext: the plot moves forward through television and newspaper headlines, political icons and emblems. Around its periphery, images of Abraham Lincoln recur – there is a bust, a painting, and even Senator Iselin’s costume at a party; each image foreshadowing the desired assassination of a political figure by a trained assassin.

“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever met in my life.”

This line, notably repeated in The Manchurian Candidate, becomes more contradictory with each utterance it receives.

At first it seems befitting, as it describes a man receiving a medal for his exemplary courage in the Korean War. Later, however, we learn that Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw [Laurence Harvey] is a helpless pawn and his cited traits therefore become decreasingly apt.

The film opens during the Korean War in 1952. A group of American soldiers embark for a midnight horizon. They are captured shortly thereafter by Communists and are brought behind the Manchurian border. Platoon officers Captain Bennett Marco [Sinatra] and the detestable Sergeant Raymond Shaw, along with the traitorous interpreter Chunjin, are the focus at this point of the film.

The officers heroically "escape" their captors and inflict great damage on the enemy in so doing. Shaw, stepson to Senator John Iselin, who is campaigning for Vice President, arrives home to a hero's welcome.

In an important aside to the plot, he is greeted by his domineering, bitterly acerbic, widowed mother, Mrs. Iselin and his loudmouth, idiotic, bumbling stepfather, Senator Iselin, a thinly veiled imitation of the real life, politically ambitious, "red-baiting" Senator McCarthy of the early 50s.

Shaw despises both of them and takes a newspaper job far away in NYC, under a respected political columnist whom his parent's hate, Holborn Gaines. Meanwhile, Shaw is scheduled to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous bravery.

At the same time, two of the men from his platoon, Ben Marco and Al Melvin, are independently having the same recurring nightmare. Their dream is told in a fantasy sequence: Shaw is flanked by his platoon, while attending a meeting of a gardening club in a New Jersey hotel and they are sitting in front of a group of women, during a “Fun With Hydrangeas” lecture.

In an uninterrupted pan, the camera tracks 360 degrees, from the soldiers to the listening women and back around to the men but now the soldiers are surrounded by Korean generals, with posters of Communist leaders on the wall and there, in the center, is a military scientist, lecturing the generals and other party officials at the so-called "Pavlov Institute" about the progress of the Soviet and Chinese brainwashing program.

The soldiers have seen only what they have been taught to see and it is the generals and party officials who inhabit reality.

To show how strong the programming is, the scientist orders Staff Sgt. Shaw to strangle one of his men. Shaw does so and the others in his platoon yawn with nonchalant disregard – they are not conditioned to perceive the violence before them.

Shaw is then told to shoot another and he does so. The process is a success and the generals and party officials are impressed.

Marco and Melvin, after this dream, immediately attempt to contact Shaw. Marco boards a train towards Washington; Melvin writes a letter to Shaw, who, in the middle of reading it, answers a ringing telephone:

“Raymond, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” a quiet voice suggests. He does so.

Upon arriving at the Queen of Diamonds, Raymond is hypnotized and awaits his orders. He is the perfect killer: willing to act at a moment’s notice, devoid of any guilt and incapable of remembering his crimes.

After two years, Shaw is now ready to be used as an assassin. He kills the columnist Gaines as a test, following orders he receives via the solitaire Queen of Diamonds. He will later be asked to kill the wife he loves and also her father, Senator Thomas Jordan, a political rival of Iselin.

Meanwhile, Marco has been promoted to Major in an intelligence unit but is having trouble sleeping because of nightmares which bring back memories of his brainwashing.

Placed on sick leave, he meets a young lady, Rosie and falls in love with her. She helps him regain his mental health and he remains in NYC, where he meets with Shaw, trying to piece together what the shocking dream means.

Marco leads an Army investigation to determine whether Raymond may have been programmed as an assassin - but fails to bring him in for questioning because he feels Raymond's romance with future wife Jocelyn, daughter of a liberal senator, may cure him.

After finally breaking the brainwashing code, Marco hopes he can get to Shaw in time to save him from carrying out his next act. It is now Marco's magic against the evil Commie programming.

The climax plays out inside Madison Square Garden. Mrs. Iselin, it turns out, is a Communist controller. She has duped her husband into thinking that he is on a crusade against communism, when in fact he is actually just her puppet.

She knows that her handlers will be sending an assassin to the Party Convention to kill presidential nominee Benjamin Arthur and it is her job to trigger this agent, whom she doesn’t know, to shoot the presidential candidate during his acceptance speech.

Sen. Iselin, the vice presidential candidate, will catch the falling body and will then, according to Mrs. Iselin, deliver "the most rousing speech I've ever read. It's been worked on, here and in Russia, on and off, for over eight years."

However, the black joke is on Mrs. Iselin in the end, as she finally discovers that the assassin she has sent is her beloved son. She vows vengeance on the communists.

Raymond sneaks into the convention with a sniper rifle, but instead of shooting Arthur, he kills his mother and stepfather. Marco catches up with Raymond, but it’s too late; Raymond turns his rifle around and shoots himself in the head.

Considering its many aims, the film is a library of thematic successes. It is firstly Cold War paranoia; then it is a satire of political etiquette; it contains elements of romance, horror, and procedural crime thrillers.

The Manchurian Candidate is at once brutally intelligent and shocking. Long after the final gunshot segues into pounding thunder, the impression of the film’s climax only gradually fades, like a slow-healing wound.

Demme's remake does not have the same raw, frenetic provocation of the 1962 version. It’s a sombre film, with slick production values and a fabulous cast, including Liv Schreiber, a definitive performance by Meryl Streep which many see as the equal of Angela Lansbury’s original and a tour-de-force by Denzel Washington who may or may not have overtones of Colin Powell .

The move is a ‘sleeper’ in its own right and repeated viewings reveal just how good it is. The tale is not unreminiscent of Alan Pakula's post-Watergate Parallax View.

The integration of dreams, flashbacks and daylight reality, the Cold War nightmare – these are missing. Rather, it's the new world order, globalization and the nature of true evil.

Hannah Arendt, in 1963, referring to Eichmann, spoke of ‘the fearsome, word and thought-defying banality of evil’ and that is precisely what is present in this film. This is the same evil written of in the 2005 romantic thriller Insanity:

On a tray, like a dentist’s tray, beside each seat, were a series of instruments.

One of the seats was occupied by a young woman, attended by a doctor and what looked like a nurse; at least she wore a crisp starched uniform. Janine’s guide described the drug that had been administered to her intravenously, in order to heighten the pain and trauma - they couldn’t afford too high a charge as there could well be irreversible tissue damage.

The doctor was speaking in a low, gentle voice then nodded to the nurse, who turned the dial. The young woman went rigid and passed out, blood appeared and seeped down her hospital jacket, the doctor cursed and the nurse made a note of the failure on her clipboard.

If Janine was appalled, she didn’t show it – she looked on impassively and asked who the girl was, recognizing the name of the operative she’d been sent to spring. She was asked if she’d like to observe the process at closer quarters and graciously inclined her head. They left the booth and made their way down to the training room.

Janine asked, ‘What do –’ and felt the hypodermic in her arm.

She woke up an hour later, in a hospital jacket, her back and bottom unclothed and strapped to a chair.

The far door opened and a doctor entered, a nurse with a clipboard following him. He washed his hands and came across to her.

‘Hello, Janine,’ he announced, ‘I’m Doctor Brown.’

Sinatra's daughter Tina had long been interested in the Manchurian remake, but the project was only given the go-ahead in September 2001. It was co-produced by Democratic activist Scott Rudin for Paramount Pictures, whose head of production, Sherry Lansing, was a contributor to the Kerry campaign - as was Sumner Redstone, CEO of Paramount's corporate parent, Viacom.

The second Manchurian Candidate belonged to George W. Bush nearly as much as the original did to JFK. The movie was in production during the run-up to the Iraq War, with dialogue rewritten in the light of unfolding events.

The bogus military hero Shaw [Schreiber] and his commanding officer [Washington] have their brains washed during Operation Desert Storm; the title now refers to the mega-corporate Manchurian Global, part Halliburton, part Carlyle Group.

Coup d'etat has been reformulated as "regime change" and the focus is on "the first privately owned and operated vice-president of the United States".

In the light of the current situation in Iraq, of Abu Greibh and the like and of the constant destabilization of the area, maybe it’s just a matter of time before the third remake appears. Needed – one Washington matriarch, one vice-president who’s a slave to the Finance and a fine Colin Powell/Tommy Franks character to play the lead.