The Global Financial Crisis

Under the heading Stocks and dollar dive amid new economic fears, an article on the front page of The Weekend Australian, 6-7 February 2010 begins:

Global financial markets reeled yesterday, with $30 billion carved off Australian stocks alone, amid escalating fears the world has not seen the last of the economic crisis.

My only question about that is to ask who on earth thought that the world had seen the last of the economic crisis? There is worse to come, much worse.

As I wrote last March in Debt and sovereignty: another issue for the White Paper, what we are seeing is not a blip in the story of Western dominance of a process of endless economic growth, with a return to “normal” in a year or two’s time – it is a fundamental change. There is no “normal”, there will be no going back to the status quo ante. That lesson seems to be lost both on governments who ought to know better and on the bailed out bankers rubbing their paws in anticipation of their next fat bonus.

Later in the article:

The Australian dollar, which last year was chasing parity with the US dollar, slumped to US86.63c last night as investors flocked to the greenback.

One has to wonder about that too. This time last year the smartest people in the financial world were bailing out of the Australian dollar in the flight to “quality” or “safety” in the form of the greenback. By 1 February 2009 the AUD had been sold down to 63.6 US cents. Just over seven months later, on 10 September 2009, it cracked 90 cents, and on 17 November it was worth 93.5 US cents. Someone buying Australian dollars on 1 February and selling them on 17 November would have made 47% profit – not a bad little return for a bit under ten months. One didn’t have to be very precise about picking the right day – the average price for February 2009 was 65 US cents, and the average for November 2009 was 92 cents.

So why were all the experts selling Australian dollars in February and buying them in November?

Reforms to naval ship repair

The Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, The Hon. Greg Combet, today announced reforms to Australia’s naval ship repair sector. Under the reforms,

... the Defence Materiel Organisation will reform the Navy's Major Fleet Unit Repair and Maintenance program as outlined in the Smart Sustainment initiative.

If the DMO’s conduct towards the government’s shipbuilder/sustainer ASC Pty Ltd is anything to go by, the thought of DMO teaching anyone else how to go about their business does not have me throwing my hat in the air.

Yepes-Argenta Concierto de Aranjuez

In Narciso Yepes and the Concierto de Aranjuez I described the close relationship in the late 1940 and 1950s between the up and coming classical guitarist Narciso Yepes and the inspired Spanish conductor Ataúlfo Argenta.

On 16 December 1947 Yepes had made his Madrid debut, performing the Concierto de Aranjuez with the National Orchestra of Spain under the baton of Argenta. The performance was an outstanding success, due apparently in no small measure to the conductor, who it seems had taken it upon himself to promote this as yet little known concerto, and who seems to have guided the young guitarist in aspects of its interpretation. Guitarist and conductor took the Concierto on international tour in Europe, and the success of these performances ensured the fame of both Yepes and the beautiful Concierto de Aranjuez. Argenta and Yepes recorded it for Decca in the late 1950s.

At the time of writing the earlier post I lamented the fact that (as far as I was aware at the time) this particular recording had not been re-released either on CD or on iTunes. It turns out that the recording was in fact re-released on CD in 2008, and is now available on iTunes. The easiest way to find it is to enter Ataulfo Argenta into the iTunes search box, and look for the coupling of the Yepes Concierto de Aranjuez with the equally wonderful recording by Gonzalo Soriano of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, again under the baton of Argenta.

These are historic performances and well worth listening to. Although both Yepes and Soriano (a specialist in Spanish music) made subsequent recordings of these works, Argenta leaves the other conductors for dead, and in both cases I think this is the soloist’s best performance. Also, this is the one recording by Yepes of the Concierto de Aranjuez which predates his development of the ten-string guitar, which with its four resonating strings has the merit of giving the guitar extra sonority, but I think the thinner sound of the standard six-string guitar better suits this particular work.

Baggage nightmares with V Australia

Yesterday my wife and I returned to Australia from a two-week skiing holiday in Utah (Park City), flying each way with V Australia’s daily service out of Sydney. The flying experience (passenger comfort, cabin cleanliness, meals, adherence to schedule) was of good standard. Unfortunately I cannot say the same about my experience of baggage handling, as the following account will indicate:

-   We were booked to fly from Melbourne to Sydney on VA 873, operated by Virgin Blue, ETD Melbourne 1745 hrs Wednesday 13 January, ETA Sydney 1910, to connect with VA 001, ETD Sydney 2105 hrs Weds 13 January.

-   We landed in Sydney at about 1900, thus leaving two full hours for baggage transfer.

-   Nevertheless, when we landed in Los Angeles my suit case failed to appear on the baggage carousel.  My wife’s suit case and our two ski boot bags did appear, thus demonstrating that there had been time in Sydney to make the baggage transfer.

-   The V Australia representative on the ground at LAX directed me to Delta Baggage Services, where I was told that about half a dozen bags had been left behind in Sydney and would be despatched on the following day’s flight. I should file a missing baggage report on arrival at Salt Lake City Airport.

-   When I filed the missing baggage report with Delta Baggage Services at Salt Lake City Airport at about 2130 local time on 13 January the agent did a baggage trace and confirmed that my bag had been left behind in Sydney: I saw this for myself on the agent’s screen. She said that it would follow on the next flight and be delivered to my hotel.

-   The following day I rang V Australia’s toll-free baggage services number in the United States with the aim of ensuring that V Australia was up with the play and that my bag would indeed be despatched on the next available flight.  I found myself speaking to someone in an India-based call centre. The woman I spoke to told me that the whereabouts of my bag was not known but that everything possible was being done to trace it.

-   I protested that on the evening before I had been told that it had been left behind in Sydney and the agent had shown me the results of the baggage trace on her screen. The agent simply reiterated that the whereabouts of my bag was not known but that everything possible was being done to trace it.

-   I then rang Delta Baggage Services and the agent I spoke to confirmed that my bag had been left behind in Sydney and as it had not been scanned aboard an aircraft it could be assumed to be still on the ground in Sydney. This meant that it had not been despatched on the flight following mine.

-   The following day (Friday 15 local time) I rang both V Australia and Delta Baggage Services again. With V Australia the story was the same – whereabouts of bag not known, everything was being done to trace it. When I started to protest that this was not what I was being told by Delta Baggage Services, the line dropped out; I assume that the agent, whose English was barely adequate, hung up on me. I rang back and spoke to someone else, but the story was the same: whereabouts of bag unknown, airline is trying to trace it.

-   Delta Baggage Services, on the other hand, was able to tell me that the bag was being carried aboard the V Australia flight which would be landing at LAX at about 1530 that day (i.e. the one which left Sydney two days after me), and give me an estimate of how long it would take to forward it to Salt Lake City.

-   The bag finally caught up with me in Park City, Utah, about 72 hours after I filed the delayed baggage report.

After a long career involving extensive international travel I know that bags do miss connections or get delayed for one reason or another. I also know that this is supposed to be a rare occurrence, particularly in these days when security considerations dictate that baggage should travel on the same aircraft as the customer, and that the usual reason for missed connections is delayed incoming flights leaving too little time for the baggage transfer to be executed.

What I find unacceptable about the above experience is as follows:

-   It is unacceptable for baggage to be left behind when there is more than two hours to make the transfer, and within the same airline group.

-   It is unacceptable that, having been left behind, the bag was not despatched on the flight the following day, taking a full 48 hours to be sent on its way.

-   It is unacceptable that V Australia’s baggage services agents are not able to provide the passenger with information which Delta agents can readily ascertain from the international baggage tracing system. Even when my bag was en route to Los Angeles on board a V Australia aircraft, V Australia was telling me that the whereabouts of my bag was unknown.  This is hopeless. My advice to V Australia would be to lose the India-based call centre, fast. The use of outsourced call centres for purposes like this smacks of a culture of “managing” customer problems, rather than attempting to resolve them.

It gets worse:

-   My wife and I departed Salt Lake City on Saturday on a Delta flight to Los Angeles, connecting with VA 002 to Sydney, on timelines which provided for a two hour window for the baggage transfer. The flight landed on schedule.

-   When we arrived in Sydney we again had the dreary experience of standing at the baggage carousel watching a diminishing number of fellow passengers retrieve their baggage, at the end of which we wandered off to find someone with whom to file a missing baggage report. Neither of our ski boot bags had come off the plane. A trace of the bag tag numbers quickly ascertained that the two boot bags were still on the ground in Los Angeles.

-   By the time we had finished lodging a missing baggage report in Sydney we had missed our 0745 connection to Melbourne and found ourselves standing at the back of a long queue at the transfer desk. It turned out that the baggage had come off the flight so slowly (it took more than an hour, although we were the only flight on the ground at the time) that many of our fellow passengers had also missed connecting flights and were being rebooked, the net effect of which for us was that the following two flights were full and we had to wait until 1015 for an onward flight.

In the course of thirty years engaged in intensive international travel for internationally oriented Commonwealth Departments like Trade, Foreign Affairs and Trade and Defence, I can recall only two experiences of a delayed bag. V Australia managed to more than double this in the course of a single return trip across the Pacific. If anyone were to ask me for my assessment of V Australia, I would have to reply, “How important to you is it to arrive with your luggage?”.

Reward for the arrest of Tony Blair

On 26 January well known writer for The Guardian George Monbiot launched a website www.arrestblair.org, the purpose of which is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former UK Prime Minister for the crime of aggression for his involvement in planning and launching the invasion of Iraq.

The matter turns on the legality of the invasion. As Monbiot puts it:

 Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the Nuremberg principles as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties". They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) and which was ratified by Blair's government in 2001, provides for the court to "exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression", once it has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted.

Read Monbiot’s article on the Information Clearing House website here.  To make a donation, go to www.arrestblair.org.

Max Bergmann on calls to bomb Iran

Writing for The Wonk Room, 24 January 2010, blogger Max Bergmann persuasively dismisses calls by US conservatives to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Noting that it is safe to assume that Iran has taken steps to protect its program, Bergmann argues that there is no way to tell whether an attack is successful – there will be no way to tell whether known underground facilities have been damaged, and no way to know whether there are other unknown facilities that have been missed.

Bergmann concludes:

The day after any attack on Iran, there will be immediate calls for more military action, as Iran still might have a fully capable and operational nuclear program. The only way to be sure that Iran isn’t developing a nuclear program, it will be argued, is to launch an invasion that results in the change of regime.

So when the right talks about taking out Iran’s nuclear program, they are really not talking about surgical strikes, they are talking about regime change. And that in effect would likely mean a full blown invasion involving thousands of American troops on the streets of Tehran.

 

It is hard to disagree with any of that, and it is probably what the John Boltons of this world intend.

Read Bergmann’s full report here.

Biden on dismissal of Blackwater charges

The New York Times reported on 23 January that United States Vice-President Joseph Biden has promised Iraqi leaders that the United States would appeal the dismissal of manslaughter charges against five Blackwater International security contractors involved in a 2007 shooting at a Baghdad traffic roundabout that killed 17 Iraqis including women and children (see report here).

Investigators concluded that the contractors, who had been employed by the State Department to guard US diplomats, had fired indiscriminately on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified attack. In December a US Federal Judge threw out the five guards’ indictment on manslaughter charges, citing misuse of their statements that violated their constitutional rights. 

Some comments and observations:

(1)  As a simple matter of justice to the innocent Iraqi civilians who were killed, it is to be hoped that the United States Government can successfully appeal against the dismissal of the charges. In view of the detailed and scathing judgement handed down by the judge, this seems to be an unlikely outcome.

(2)  One has to wonder at how it was possible for self-incriminating statements to be taken from the contractors straight after the incident, in violation of their civil rights, and how the prosecution came to rely on these statements. What was at work here – was it straight legal incompetence, or was something else going on.

(3)  Apart from the question of justice to the dead and injured Iraqi civilians and their families, it is to be hoped that the contractors can be brought to trial, because the case underlines the catastrophic effect of trying to wage war using mercenary soldiers. For make no mistake about it, these private contractors are mercenaries. Under international law it is only the armed forces of the state who have legitimated power to use, or threaten to use, lethal force, and then only under lawful direction from their chain of command.

(4)  Aside from the matter of legitimacy, anyone who thinks that the deployment of mercenary soldiers represents a saving is seriously deluded.  It is now settled United States policy that success in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq requires the support of the people – that the issue is a “hearts and minds” campaign, and that is what the supreme US commanders in both theatres are about. The deployment of trigger-happy private contractors who appear to blaze away not because they need to but because they can, with no apparent accountability to anyone, fatally compromises the capacity of the US commanders to do what they are trying to achieve. Losing wars on the cheap is far more expensive than winning them on the basis of legitimate forces under proper lawful command.