Kanishk Tharoor

In both presidential debates, John McCain repeatedly invoked General David Petraeus - America's much-praised military chief in Afghanistan and Iraq - as if the general was on his side. The shout-outs were a salvo in McCain's broader offensive against Obama's foreign policy agenda. While Obama supposedly scorned the accomplishments of the troops and sought to negotiate with implacable enemies, McCain stood by the intrepid general who had turned the tide in Iraq. In McCain's world, "victory" - and the search for victory - is a virtue, not a tactical outcome. Petraeus became the paragon of that virtue of victory.

Perhaps resenting being dragged into the rhetorical smoke and mirrors of the campaign, Petraeus lent his credibility to the Obama camp. In recent remarks at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the general insisted that "you have to talk to your enemies." He made much the same distinction Obama makes in defending negotiations, differentiating between "preconditions" and "preparations"; you don't go into talks without an agenda, without a clear objective, and without a strong sense of your scope for compromise.

The glowing tributes afforded Petraeus' achievements in Iraq are, of course, overstated (as we've mentioned on this blog). But his words carry the kind of gravity that will make McCain advisers shiver. The Republican is looking increasingly isolated in peddling his tough and uncompromising commitment to "victory" in the middle east.   

Peter Facey (London, Unlock Democracy): Following the resignation (or was it sacking?) of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair after Boris Johnson said he did not have confidence in him, there has been a lot of talk about political control of policing.

Boris has been criticised for overstepping his authority and the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has made it clear that she will ultimately decide who is the next Commissioner and not Boris. Just to complicate matters even further, Ken Livingstone has now come out in support of Johnson, after a fashion.

What this does is make it clear that we actually have political control of policing, it's just central control. So the question really is who should the head of London’s police force be accountable to, the Home Secretary or the Mayor and Assembly?

At the moment the present system is a mess. The Met is London’s police force but also has national responsibilities. Ultimately these need to be split with the creation of national police unit responsible to the Home Secretary and Parliament and a London force accountable to the Mayor and Assembly and ultimately Londoners. But in the meantime, why not make confirmation of the Home Secretary's nominee for the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner subject to a public confirmation hearing by Metropolitan Police Authority?

Unlock Democracy ran a series of articles about policing and democracy in their latest issue of Citizen, which can be found here (http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/?p=1406).

Solana Larsen

A quick aside: I wonder if a presidential candidate has ever graced so many t-shirts as Obama has.

Certainly in New York City, his face is on shirts at street stalls and wholesale retailers everywhere. Yesterday, on Union Square in Manhattan, I saw a shirt for sale that said "Obama is the New Black" ($20). More than a political figure, he seems to have become a fashion statement. John McCain? Not so much.

Palin, on the other hand, was pictured on a t-shirt at a stall near the Obama one, wearing a bathing suit and a sash. The words beneath her torso: "mysongynist". After 5 weeks in the media spotlight, I'm surprised not to have seen more Palin shirts. They must still be saving the best ones for Halloween.

Photo by Ed Yourdon on Flickr, Creative Commons license.

Helen Coskeran

Guy Aitchison

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): On the eve of the crucial vote in the House of Lords on the issue, Liberty has published a collection of pieces by forty two of Britain's literary figures attacking the extension of pre-charge detention in terrorism cases to 42 days. They have set up a nifty little website dedicated to the collection as part of their Charge or Release campaign: www.42writers.com. It features the name of a different author in each of the forty two calendar days, illustrating quite graphically the sheer length of time the Government wants to imprison people for. It joins Amnesty's new campaign and petition against 42 Days you can sign up to here.

I spent an enjoyable half hour clicking through each of the calendar days, reading some powerful contributions from Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Ian Rankin, Hari Kunzru and other literary big-hitters. What the authors do a great job of conveying (far better than any lawyer or political commentator could hope to) is the sheer length of time we're talking about and the intense personal trauma visited upon the innocent. I won't say much more than that because I hope people will check the site out for themselves. But I do want to quote in full the following poem by Ali Smith. By focusing on the simple passage of time, it asks the reader to empathise with the plight of an innocent detainee - a useful thought experiment perhaps for any of their lordships not quite convinced of the injustice of what is being proposed: Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Introducing his book Britain since 1918 last month, David Marquand suggested that Britain may be ripe for an outbreak of democratic republicanism. At the time, his colleague Kenneth Morgan put in a word for what is, in Marquand's scheme, the rival left-wing tradition of democratic centralism.

Where democratic republicans emphasise citizenship and participation, democratic centralists focus on delivery. They have traditionally seen the state as an instrument which can be taken over and turned to their social goals without worrying too much about how it works.

The credit crunch has vindicated Morgan's warning that there are some things only the state can do, and there are some tentative signs that it is the democratic centralist tradition which is being reinvigorated as a result. Read the rest of this post...

Tony Curzon Price

Will Hutton writes in his Observer column that "big public stakes in banks and offer guarantees to the interbank market [...] is a necessary condition for stabilisation [but] it is not sufficient."

While I agree with Will that we need to sort out the "black hole" of the Credit Default Swap insurance pyramid, I think that the time for recapitlaisation is now passed. Recapitalisation is not a necessary condition for stabilisation. The rapid creation of a new state lending bank is what is needed.

Recapitalisation might once have worked: financial pyramids are a confidence trick, and a state recapitalisation of the order of a few percentage points of GDP might have allowed a gradual, orderly wind-down of the massive liabilities. But the kind of confidence that would allow a gradual, muddle-through solution of the sort that happened in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s is simply no longer there. Barclays and RBS alone are the ultimate insurers against default of contracts worth more than the annual income of the UK. These are the sorts of contracts which, in an auction on Friday of Lehman Brother's assets, went for less than one tenth of their face value. The trouble with nationalisation and recapitalisation is that the liabilities do not disappear. When the slate is this heavy, you need bankruptcy to wipe it clean.

The financial sector is scrabbling aorund for whatever cash it can lay its hands on because every institution is likely to find itself in the position of having to pay out on insurance contracts with other parts of the financial sector that they know they cannot currently cover. The taxpayer with our capital injectionshave become the latest source of that cash, and we will see it disappear into the black hole of CDS liabilities.

The time for confidence tricks is passed. The banks are bankrupt.Time to stop  putting in good money after bad -- it simply will not help.

Save the real economy by rapidly creating a State bank that will lend directly to business, and let the finance system diappear into the black hole that it has dug for itself.

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): In his latest Daily Mail column, Peter Oborne takes issue with Gordon Brown's appointment of Harlow MP Bill Rammell to a senior Foreign Office post:

Four years ago, as a junior minister at the FO, Rammell was personally informed by the Red Cross about the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American forces in Abu Ghraib jail.

However, Rammell did nothing. Indeed, he apparently failed to pass on the information to any other member of the Government.

Karl Smyth

The continued salience of the financial market meltdown may mean that the intensity of the media's spotlight will not burn quite as bright, or be as probing, as in previous weeks; nor does the nature of the crime appear sufficiently severe to force John McCain to make a potentially disastrous last-minute change to the Republican presidential ticket. However, there is no doubt that the findings yesterday of the Alaskan legislature into the 'Troopergate' affair hold pronounced political repercussions that will stretch far beyond the boundaries of the Land of the Midnight Sun - and which may ultimately serve as the final death-knell of a presidential campaign that in recent days has looked increasingly frustrated and bereft of ideas.

The damage the Troopergate report has already done to the Republican presidential bid and will prove to do in the days to come is multi-faceted: first, since her unveiling as the Republican vice presidential nominee, one of the central strategies of the McCain camp in assuaging concerns over Palin's obvious inexperience has been to portray her as a Washington outsider who would repeat the same sweeping, take-no-prisoners style of executive reform she achieved during her time as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.

That the Republicans have struggled to elaborate how Palin would "bring change to Washington" has proven largely inconsequential: as the success of Barack Obama's campaign illustrated so vividly in the primaries, such a message holds strong resonance with an electorate that has bestowed upon the current Congress the worst right track/wrong track poll ratings in American history. However, now tainted with the charge of impropriety, the McCain-Palin ticket has had the credibility of this proposition seriously undermined, and now faces an uphill struggle in selling the Alaskan native as the implacable and unyielding purifying force that the American bureaucracy badly needs to purge it of its excesses.

Moreover, while the campaign has been eager to highlight some of Palin's accomplishments in executive office (reigning in budgetary deficits, energy legislation) and exaggerate others (foreign policy experience), the most thorough investigation into the inner-workings of a Palin administration has produced a portrait of an executive characterized by Time's Michael Scherer as "shockingly amateurish" in its conduct throughout the affair. It raises serious questions about the Alaskan's ability to effectively manage her own executive, let alone the highest in the land.

Karl Smyth

A 263-page report released yesterday by the Alaskan legislature has concluded that Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin personally exerted pressure in her capacity as Governor of Alaska to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, while at the same time allowing both her husband and aides to press for his firing, based on his attitude and previous disciplinary problems.

Concluding that Palin's lobbying was a clear violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, the committee's report stated that "such impermissible and repeated contacts create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior's displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure."

While the Legislature may choose to subsequently censure Palin for her behaviour, or impose a fine of up to $5,000, the political fallout from the report's findings could prove far more damaging - particularly given the amount of political capital spent by the Republican party in a failed attempt to delay the report's release until after the general election.

Thomas Ash

To his credit, John McCain has started taking on some of the wilder anti-Obama sentiments in his crowds. He took back the microphone from a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who called Obama an Arab and said: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not." The implication that Arabs can't be decent family men is regrettable, but let's not be churlish. Even more creditable is the way McCain replied to a man who merely said he was "scared" of an Obama presidency and the Supreme Court judges it might bring. McCain said: "I have to tell you. Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States." This earned him boos from a crowd that clearly did not share that attitude.

Update: Ken Vogel reports that Obama himself drew boos by acknowledging his rival's comments at a rally in Philadelphia. So this phenomenon is not the exclusive province of Republicans.

Update 2: Michael Schaffer disputes Vogel's report, and describes the Obama crowd's mood as far more sunny. 

Thomas Ash

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): There's still time to get your camera out if you want to take part in a major Europe-wide protest against the database state this Saturday:

NO2ID have teamed up with the Open Rights Group to show Parliament the 'Big Picture' by constructing a giant image made out of thousands of pictures taken by UK citizens of surveillance state ephemera. YOU can join this protest from anywhere in the UK by simply sending us a photo. We would like you to send us a picture of 'the database state' in YOUR life. We want images of the signs of mass surveillance, and any form of intrusive ID or state control - cameras, cards, scanners, forms, whatever you like.

Kanishk Tharoor

A recent piece on Politico takes the temperature of the Republican base, and sees it reaching feverish desperation. The mood at recent McCain-Palin rallies has turned more "frenzied" and "visceral". Examples of this nastier turn can be seen in the video posted on openUSA yesterday. Are such demonstrations of emotion admissions of impending defeat? Or inklings of a last ditch Republican tactical coup? More likely the former. As Tom Ash pointed out this week, negative campaigning doesn't seem to work.

Anthony Barnett

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There are reports that gleeful Labour MPs are celebrating the Prime Minister's handling of the banking and credit crisis as a 'Falklands' style triumph for him and the Labour Party, after he has slapped around Iceland with anti-terror laws. Somehow, I doubt it. It is true that Margaret Thatcher was responsible for triggering the Argentine invasion by insisting on the withdrawal of HMS Endurance, the only naval presence, as a cost-cutting measure. But Brown's responsibility for the over-exposure of the UK is of long-standing and the coming wreckage will be laid at his door even as he presents himself as providing 'world leadership'.

Tony Curzon Price

Plan 'B"

Face up to it: the Brown re-capitalisation plan may not work. The banks have relied to a massive extent on Credit Default Swaps, a sort of insurance on lending. They have given themselves false comfort, and in some cases very real cash-flow, on an insurance pyramid that will not hold-up under even modestly higher default rates. Liabilities under these insurance contracts are vast. One hedge fund was insuring 100 times its cash base before it went under. If the banks that we are now the proud part-owners of end up being heavily exposed to these liabilities--the total CDS market is measured around $50 Trillion, almost 1000 times more than the Brown rescue--we should just cut our losses and let the banks go under.

The problem is the protection of the real economy. The Federal Reserve has shown the way here, with its direct lending to companies, started 2 days ago. We should start a new state bank, recruit bankers and accountants from the City, and get them to work on lending to the real economy. At first, they will not have the time to distinguish good and bad loans. They will have to be lax but short-termist in their lending decisions. Their task will be to rapidly and efficiently become ``relationship bankers''--understanding the underlying businesses they are lending to and setting appropriate and gradually tougher lending terms. Once financial flows to the real economy are safe, the state bank should be broken into 10 identical pieces and with 9 sold to private investors who will operate in a new regulatory regime. The tenth should remain in state hands, as a benchmark bank, a way for the state to stay close to what is happening in the markets.

It is disturbing that the Brown re-cap was hatched by the Treasury, the Bank of England and top bankers. The trouble any regulator has is that the people who best understand the business and the crisis are the people you are trying to regulate. This is the basis of every regulatory capture. You cannot trust what the knowledgeable say to you. If the liabilities of the banks start to mount, let's make sure this plan B is ready to be deployed.

Karl Smyth

While the result of this year's presidential election remains far from conclusive, the complex reality of making the transition from one administration to another at the upper echelon of American politics means that the gears have already been set in motion behind the scenes in Washington.

In an executive order signed today, the White House has created a Presidential Transition Coordinating Council-chaired by Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton and composed of a broad spectrum of representatives from within the executive branch-to begin liaising with and preparing both the Democratic and Republican camps for their potential ascendancy to the highest office in the land on 20 January 2009. As the White House press secretary Dana Perino noted, "It has probably never been more critical that a transition from an administration from one to the next is as seamless as possible. Our nation is at war. We are dealing with a financial crisis. And we are trying to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks."

Interestingly, today's announcement coincides with an article penned by Sam Stein of the Huffington Post yesterday which revealed that the McCain campaign is lagging well behind Obama's in terms of both its readiness to succeed the current administration and the resources they are prepared to commit to it prior to election day - due predominantly to the wishes of McCain himself. Stein's article cites sources both within McCain's inner circle and from previous transition teams who have voiced concern with the Arizona Senator's approach, contrasting as it does with Obama's methodical division of nearly one hundred people into working groups in recent weeks to produce policy agendas and potential governmental appointees.

Such contrasting organisational approaches seem strikingly endemic of how both candidates have handled their respective campaigns throughout the race, given Obama's very professional strategic mobilisation of grassroots support during the primary season and McCain's almost myopic tendency in recent weeks for short-term gambles designed solely to achieve victory to the detriment of greater cohesion and security in the long-run (e.g. Palin's selection as VP, suspending campaigning during the financial bailout, etc.).

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK):Henry Porter added a significant item to the charge sheet against Sir Ian Blair's stewardship of the Metropolitan Police in his Observer column at the weekend:

the conduct of the police during protests against President Bush's visit in June when it was alleged that unreasonable violence was used against the marchers. The surveillance and pursuit of legitimate demonstrators three months afterwards is to say the least very worrying. It smacks of a police state. 

As the Daily Mail and the Guardian reported at the time, 25 people were arrested at the demonstration on 15 June following clashes that erupted after the police sealed off part of Whitehall, and prevented the marchers from handing in a letter to Downing Street.

Reports of further arrests have since surfaced on Indymedia. The Metropolitan Police have confirmed that 3 people were arrested in connection with the demonstration on 1 August, while a fourth person arrested on 20 August has since been charged with theft of a police baton and two counts of assaulting a police officer.

Last month, the Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison appealed to the public for the identities of another four marchers:

"In a climate where London is at a severe level of threat from global terrorism any attempt to breach security measures designed to protect the President had to be defended by our officers.  

"What our officers did not deserve was to be the subject of such violence, being pelted with bottles and struck with metal barriers. 

"A number of officers even had sharpened sticks poked into their eyes and faces.  The acts of violence we witnessed that day were deplorable and no one could claim they were in any way a lawful demonstration.

"This post event investigation aims to identify and arrest the worst offenders to make them answer for their actions that day."

The Met's allegations are disputed by the Stop the War Coalition, which is asking anyone contacted by the police to get in touch with its defence campaign on 020 7278 6694 or by email at office@stopwar.org.uk:

The Stop the War Coalition has held more than twenty national demonstrations, everyone of which has been peaceful, everyone of which has been stewarded by members of the Stop the War coalition. This one was a particularly well-organised demonstration, one that we had negotiated with the police beforehand, although we hadn't negotiated a march route.

Spokesman Stewart Halforty admitted that some placard sticks may have been thrown over police lines, but said that did not justify the response that followed.

My experience of it was that in a very co-ordinated way, the police drew their batons and that suggests that they were prepared for this. They also had 1,200 police on the day and we think there may even have been more.

For the first time ever they estimated our numbers at the same figure that we estimated them at, 2,500. In fact they seemed to think there were 3,000 there.

Stop the War also points to an account of the demonstration that appeared in the Mail shortly afterwards, which raises some intriguing questions about police tactics:

The man in the T-shirt was tall, well-built and handsome, smiling but with a hint of menace. He pushed aside children and elderly people.

He continued to shout slogans such as: 'Pigs Out.'

On his back was a black rucksack and he carried a professional-looking camera with a large telephoto lens. Hardly the sort of kit for a few snaps of his day out.

My friends and I, standing a few rows back, asked him a couple of times to calm down, but he ignored us.

I wondered why I was drawn to him. Was it his dark good looks or was I worried for the safety of my 70-year-old friend and children nearby?

Then it dawned on me. I had met this man at a party. I tapped him gently on the shoulder and said: 'Have we met before?'

Instantly he recognised me. 'Hi, how are you? It's really nice to see you here.'

My puzzlement grew. This chap wasn't really the sort you'd expect to see shouting abuse at police officers at an anti-war demo. He was, after all, a policeman himself - and a high-ranking one at that.

Thomas Ash

Kanishk Tharoor

The video below has been doing the rounds in the liberal blogosphere. Filmed at a McCain-Palin rally in Ohio, it edits together the "ignorance" and racism of supporters of the Republican ticket. I find it difficult to watch, in part because I don't know what to make of those filmed (Do they really believe what they say? How "representative" are they?), and in part because of their casual dismissal by those who watch them (see the comments beneath the original posting).

Growing up in New York, I remember thinking of the "hinterland" as a strange and fictitious world (a disease especially common in New York perhaps). Now, I'm made all the more uncomfortable and uncertain when that world (the interior, the Red state) is made "real" to me (to the coast, to the Blue state) in the shape of caricature. What can we take from videos like this, and what shouldn't we?

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Independent Commission set up to examine the funding of the Welsh Assembly Government began its work this week.

The Commission's call for evidence from interested parties comes as rising inflation is forcing the Government to dip into its reserves to cover its spending plans.

It will take over £200m from reserves, cutting them to 1% of the total budget, as spending rises to £15.2bn.

The money released will fund priorities including £60m over two years for the Foundation Phase education for three-to-seven-year-olds.

But opposition parties said local government was being "clobbered".

Over at the Institute of Welsh Affairs blog, James Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School argues that the Commission should consider the option of greater borrowing powers:

Devolving borrowing powers will be resisted by the Treasury on the grounds that there is an implicit Treasury guarantee to such borrowing although they cannot control the amount. The UK central government would be obliged to pick up the tab if the Welsh Assembly Government defaulted. But are we not seeing something like this for our big commercial banks at the moment? Anyway the Treasury’s point will need addressing in any recommendation for greater powers.

Tony Curzon Price

Nick Bloom has a good description of the most plausible transmission mechanism to medium term economic activity and growth over at VoxE:

So why is this banking collapse and rise in uncertainty likely to be so damaging for the economy? First, the lack of credit is strangling firm’s abilities to make investments, hire workers and start R&D projects. Since these typically take several months to initiate the full force of this will only be fully felt by the beginning of 2009. Second, for the lucky few firms with access to credit the heightened uncertainty will lead them to postpone making investment and hiring decisions. It is expensive to make a hiring or investment mistake, so if conditions are unpredictable the best course of action is often to wait. Of course if every firm in the economy waits then economic activity slows down. This directly cuts back on investment and employment, two of the main drivers of economic growth. But this also has knock-on effects in depressing productivity growth. Most productivity growth comes from creative destruction – productive firms expanding and unproductive firms shrinking. Of course if every firm in the economy pauses this creative destruction temporarily freezes – productive firms do not grow and unproductive firms do not contract. This leads to a stalling productivity growth. 

I disagree strongly with Nick on his conclusion about the impact of change of policy towards an anti-market stance. The financial markets have imposed not only the huge direct costs of crisis on the economy, but also a huge opportunity cost in taking talent away from other honest, productive activities.

Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Over at Liberal Conspiracy Laurie Penny highlights moves by abortion rights campaigners to extend the law to Northern Ireland.

Diane Abbott has tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, due for its third reading on the 22nd of October, calling for an extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. This is precisely the same amendment that Emily Thornberry MP was forced to withdraw back in May, when Gordon Brown assured her that the move would be seen as a slap in the face by the nine DUP members who swung the 42 days vote in the Prime Minister’s favour.

The issue has sparked a vigorous debate on Slugger, where veteran Westminster-watcher Brian Walker offers his assessment:

This effort will almost certainly fail and may not even reach the floor of the House of Commons. Much depends on Harriet Harman who is minister for women as well as the organiser of Commons business.  It made waves at Westminster in July by exposing divisions at the very top of government over priorities- which was more important, the rights of women ( Harriet Harman), or the stability of the NI Executive (Gordon Brown)? 

Patrick Corrigan

Patrick Corrigan, (Amnesty Blogs: Belfast and Beyond): The number of rapes being reported in Northern Ireland has increased by 50% in the past six years, according to official figures. More than 450 rapes or attempted rapes were reported last year – more than one every day.