Politics

In a 2010 article in the Guardian on the financial troubles in Greece, the Economics editor Larry Elliott referred to the 1997 IMF bailout of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. He says:

Asian nations found another way of protecting themselves against speculative attacks on their currencies: they used the devaluations that were part of the IMF bailout packages to export their way back to growth.

The result was that they amassed huge foreign exchange reserves, which they recycled into western financial markets, leading eventually to asset price bubbles. The countdown to the crash of 2007 started right there.

In other words, countries devalued to make their exports more attractive.

That is not possible for countries within the eurozone.

Imagine a country contemplating setting up a common currency with a number of other countries, and the deal was that they would all stump up so much per month to enable them to buy supplies at cheaper prices.

And imagine that one of them spent its income on fancy tables and chairs, parties and high incomes for its workers.

You can imagine how the others would be pretty upset.

If they had been smart, they would have agreed at the outset not to spend more individually than they took in as income.

If they had been really smart, they would have given each other access to their books so that they could all see whether there was a risk that one or more of them was going off the rails.

If they had been super-smart, they would have given a veto on each other’s chequebooks so that none of them could write cheques for more than they could afford.

So why were the Europeans so outraged at the idea that they should introduce this power and tread on each other’s sovereignty a bit?

It took a default by Greece to make the Eurozone countries wake up and even contemplate agreeing to contemplate this.

Hidden Benefits In Default

While Germany was powering away and building up its economy, its banks (and French and Belgian banks) were lending to Greece and Italy even though they knew that Greece and Italy were sub-prime economies.

And they made good interest out of the loans. And then when things got tough, they raised the interest rate to compensate for the risk.

But they created the risk themselves by lending in the first place to an economy that they knew was not paying its way.

When the game was up and the fun was over, Germany and France imposed budget restraint on Greece; the budget restraint that should have been agreed and mutually imposed from the start.

Why wasn’t it? Why is there not a code of practise among nations?

The answer is surely that too much money was being made and no-one in the governments of the rich Northern European nations were able to or wanted to stop their banks making hay while the sun shone.

And when the Greek default loomed? Germany and France and Belgium didn’t say – Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Instead they got public money from across the richer countries of the eurozone to bail out Greece via the ECB.

Who thinks that is a correct view? Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist.

In an article in the Telegraph of 16 October he is reported as saying he saw:

the first Greek rescue in 2010 as little more than a bailout for German and French banks, insisting that it would have been far better to eject Greece from the euro as a salutary lesson for all.

The Greeks should have been offered generous support, but only after it had restored exchange rate viability by returning to the drachma.

Where Does This Leave Britain

A couple of weeks ago, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England prior to Mark Carney was reported as saying in an interview with Sky News:

During the referendum campaign, someone said the real danger of Brexit is you’ll end up with higher interest rates, lower house prices and a lower exchange rate, and I thought: dream on.

Because that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve for the past three years and now we have a chance of getting it.

So, four months into the Brexit referendum vote, where are we?

The FTSE is holding up because the UK economy is fundamentally strong.

The pound has fallen because hedge funds have taken their property investment portfolios out of the UK.

And the future? The future is uncertain because it’s the future.

If Trump gets in / If Russia and China take a more aggressive stance together over missiles in South Korea and Eastern Europe / if China confronts other countries more aggressively over sovereignty of the South China Sea / if Ukraine is annexed by Russia / if Brexit ever happens…

I saw a photo today of a city by the sea. Lovely photo – and almost the first thought I had was how the city might be threatened by global warming and the rise in sea level.

In other words, I thought about danger and change and uncertainty.

The ground is moving under my feet. And under the feet of millions of people, to judge by the comments that are swirling around in the news and social media at the moment.

The news is that we are all much more wound up and tense thinking about problems than we were. I certainly feel the pressure.

I think it comes down to parent figures. We want them to take the responsibility off our backs. We want them to keep things on an even keel, running smooth, predictable.

From the perspective of the West, we don’t want relations between the US and Russia to deteriorate. We don’t want to look into what behaviour and what ambitions have brought about the tension across the globe.

We don’t want Russia and China forming new alliances to to oppose US intentions as they see it. We don’t want Turkey and Russia doing deals on gas that strengthens Russian access to the Mediterranean.

And on the other side, we don’t want the US and/or NATO putting missiles ever closer to the dividing line down the middle of Eastern Europe – at least, we want the defence shield and the extra capability but we don’t want to stir up problems with Russia.

We want a better technology that strengthens the defence shield, but we want it invented in the Pentagon with little or no visible sign to ratchet up the tensions.

Geography and territory still rule in all our thinking. We have not moved on in thousands of years.

And when rogue politicians appear, we get all the more nervous.

I think that is perhaps Clinton’s greatest psychological strength – that she appears as a steady hand on the tiller in this dangerous times on the international stage.

But it’s a dangerous game for her to refer to the dangerous times we face. After all, she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. There is always the thought that perhaps things could have been ratcheted down had someone else had the job.

Still, it’s a better hand than Trump can play. He is on the knife-edge of becoming a laughing stock and a hate figure for his attacks on women. And that undermines the image he tries to portray of himself as someone who can talk tough and talk frankly and do a deal with Russia and others.

I think people are getting the idea that he would be ridiculed. Then he would get angry and start posturing in a way that would further threaten the stability of the world.

But he is not an idiot. I think he made credible points at the second debate on October 9th. Here is a link to the transcript of the debate. Search for ‘Assad’ and you will find the section where he says that the US has strengthened Iran, that the US Administration doesn’t know who the rebels are, and that Russia and Iran are killing ISIS.

I think he is missing the greater geopolitical picture in the relationship between Syria and Russia, and that the US Administration are well aware of it. You’ll find that in an earlier article Why Russia has been bombing ISIS

This is a precis of a talk about fracking given by a Dr. Ingraffea, who is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University in the US and an expert in fracking.

Here is the link to his bio at Cornell.

His Talk:
Deep fracking is done by drilling long laterals holes at great depth. The technology is fifteen years old and it is still being developed.

The sheer length of the piping necessitates that water is injected at very high pressure. Water resists being pumped, so chemicals (eight million gallons of chemicals in the case of some wells) are added to make the water flow more easily – this mix is the so-called slickwater.

Once the hole is drilled a cement case is built around it. The cement case around the piping prevents methane from escaping into the the surrounding rock and travelling wherever it will, rather than being extracted via the piping.

The cement is pumped in as a liquid, and if it doesn’t make good contact with the surrounding rock, then methane will escape.

Reasons why it might not make good contact are

• The cement went in too dry

• The cement wasn’t pushed down properly

• Not enough cement was pumped in to reach above existing shallow shale deposits

The centralisers that makes sure cement is put all around the pipe are not placed correctly or at all.

If centralisers – a series of ‘o’ rings that are placed over the pipes – are not placed correctly, then the pipe will not be central in the bore hole and there will not be any cement where it is needed to keep the methane from escaping into the surrounding rock.

The failure rate for inland fracking wells of this type, which are just a few years old – as determined by Schlumberger in one review and by Watson and Bauhu in another – is more than 6%.

The experience from offshore wells is that wells of all kinds have an increased failure rate as they get older – up to 60% for thirty-year-old wells.

The chemicals pumped in to make slickwater include hydrochoric acid,acetic acide, sodium chloride, polyacrylamide, ethylene glycol, borates, carbonates, glutaraldehyde, guar gum, citric acid, isopropanol, and ethylene glycol.

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The Wikipedia page on polyacrylamide says:

Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. While polyacrylamide itself is relatively non-toxic, it is known that commercially available polyacrylamide contains minute residual amounts of acrylamide remaining from its production, usually less than 0.05% w/w.

The World Socialist website noted in March that Jeremy Corbyn had deleted hundreds of articles and speeches spanning decades, from his own web site.

The World Socialist argued it was to conceal his previous opposition to the EU. That may be so, and it fits because as I have said before, it seemed clear to me during the referendum campaign that he was lukewarm at best over his support for remaining in the EU.

And it was obvious when immediately after the result he was quick to close the door and say that there was no going back from the vote on Brexit.

But there is another article he deleted from his website. It was there when I first looked, and then later it was gone.

Gone, but not lost.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, a non-profit site that has indexed over fifty billion pages, you can read articles from current and defunct websites that would otherwise be lost forever.

Here is Corbyn’s article on Palestine that starts with a sentence that describes, as he puts it, the “running sore of the illegal occupation”.

Want to see the text without accessing the webarchive? It’s at CloudUp Corbyn and you can read it there.

Other Articles

There are other articles on Palestine and Gaza that Corbyn cannot delete. He cannot delete them because they are not on his website. They are on The Morning Star newspaper web site, to which he has been a long-time contributor.

In article after article, Corbyn makes a pretty damning case against Israel – everything from screaming warplanes to snipers shooting old men in wheelchairs. And woven in is praise for Hamas.

I looked through his articles on the Morning Star and I found one article critical of Saudi Arabia and one article critical of what was happening in the Congo.

But the greatest number of articles by far, are about Israel and critical of Israel. He sees nothing good in Israel, only something to condemn.

By only writing about Israel and not about all the other countries around the world about which he could speak, I know that under all that righteous anger, he is antisemitic.

He says at some points that he is right to speak about Israel because of Britain’s role in helping to establish Israel.  I don’t think that is much of a reason given the number of countries in which Britain has played a role. But even given that logic, what makes Britain’s role the benchmark about what injustices (as he sees them) he should write about and speak about?

I think it is a smokescreen for his hatred of Jews – one that he may not be able to admit to himself. I don’t know what he thinks of Jews at an individual level, one person speaking to one person. But as a group I think he sees them through the eyes of his version of the playing out of world history, and thus condemns them.

One-Party State

I see a quote in an article in the New Statesman from August 2015 where Paul Anderson, a former editor of the socialist weekly Tribune says that the Morning Star

..runs articles extolling the virtues of single-party ‘socialist’ states on a regular basis – North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam. Its default position on just about everything happening in the world is that anything any western power supports – but particularly the United States – must be opposed, which has led to it cheering on Putin, Hamas, Assad and a lot of other real nasties.

I think that is where Corbyn’s heart lies, towards that single-party State.