Tabloid Edition

Pajama Media, Major Problem.

Two seemingly unconnected events today, the combination of which leads me to suspect that Pajama Media has a serious problem on its hands, one that could, if unaddressed, cripple the entire project.

The first was the arrival of the latest Pajamagram detailing progress and all seems well and the project is developing nicely.

The second was my being invited out to lunch by a reader of this blog. A decent lunch in a decent restaurant, what could be wrong with that? (BTW, thanks again Erik!) Well, the problem that arises is the method of payment used for that very lunch. As my host was not only a reader, but a fully paid up member of the mainstream media, he was able to use the corporate credit card to pay for said lunch. Again, there is no problem with that and our discussion roamed over the role of blogs, newspapers, the coming changes, the way in which the very best bloggers (Jane Galt at The Economist for example) are already adding to the glories of the mainstream....a general and wide ranging discussion.

As he said when inviting me to the lunch:

I'm a card-carrying member of the MSM, and as such have something the blogosphere, in the main, doesn't: an expense account.

I fear that this lack could be an insurmountable problem for Pajama Media....just where are the corporate credit cards to which we can charge expensive and alcohol fueled lunches? Where, in fact, would be journalism without such? As anyone who has ever been around journalists will know, whatever we might be doing while sober will not be journalism as we know and love it.

So Pajama does face a serious problem: who’s picking up the lunch tab?

Hooah.

I am indeed, as Harry Hutton explains, a hooah. Guilty on at least three counts.

Aero Contractors Ltd.

Air America rides again in the guise of Aero Contractors Ltd. The man who knows all about this is over here, at the Yorkshire Ranter. Dig through his archives.

Dog Bites Man.

Did anyone ever think it was going to go any other way?

A court on Tuesday declared tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of an array of charges including fraud and tax evasion,

Howling Stupidity

The New York Times makes this statement of the utmost howling stupidity:

Most of all they need help from Brazil's charismatic president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who must persuade himself and his country's agricultural oligarchy that the rain forest is not a commodity to be exploited for private gain.

Crippled JC on a bloody crutch, for crying out loud how stupid can you get? Things will always get exploited for private gain, that’s the very nature of the human beast. What you need to do is alter the incentives so that by exploiting the resource for private gain the exploiter is also providing public gain. If you don’t get that basic thought into your head right at the start you will never, never ever, manage to solve the problem.

Somehow, one needs to make the continued existence of the Amazon more valuable to those currently cutting it down than cutting it down. In short, make exploiting it for private gain work towards its preservation. Ideas on a postcard please.

Stanley Fish.

A quite wonderful article in the NY Times. No, no excerpts, simply go and read it, on the teaching of language. Stanley Fish sounds like exactly the sort of professor everyone should have had but sadly, all too infrequently did.

Jane Novak

Jane Novak of Armies of Liberation seems to be touching a few nerves. She’s been writing for some time in various Middle Eastern newspapers  (pro-Bush, pro-war and so on) and whatever one thinks of her worldview the latest response is simply wonderful. The Yemen Times has a headline:

Jane Novak a docile pupil of a monkey monk

How wonderful to get people that pissed off!

Moonbat on Trade.

As it’s Tuesday we get to hear the words of wisdom of Chairman Monbiot. Today’s really is quite a doozy, he managing to completely miss the point about tariff barriers, fair and free trade and how the two differ in their effects on developing countries. I realise that Jim will disagree but what the ’Bat is advocating is what will keep the poor poor.

This, indeed, is what the UK appears to have done. In March it published the most progressive foreign policy document ever to have escaped from Whitehall. A paper by the departments of trade and international development promised that: "We will not force trade liberalisation on developing countries." It recognised that a policy that insists on equal terms for rich and poor is like pitting a bull mastiff against a chihuahua. Unless a country can first build up its industries behind protectionist barriers, it will be destroyed by free trade. Almost every nation that is rich today, including the UK and the US, used this strategy. But the current rules forbid the poor from following them. The EU, the paper insisted, should, while opening its own markets, allow poor nations "20 years or more" to open theirs.

There’s just one tiny problem with this view (apart from it being totally wrong). Under the Lome Convention and successors, since 1975 the poor countries have had preferential access to EU markets without having to provide free or preferential access to their own in return. As ’Bat points out this doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect:

As the World Bank's own figures show, across the 20 years (1960-80) before it and the IMF started introducing strict conditions on the countries that accepted their loans, median annual growth in developing countries was 2.5%. In the 18 years after (1980-1998), it was 0.0%.

Now we can all argue about cause and effect, we can all scream correlation is not causation but we do have at least a correlation there, do we not? Precisely in that time period that the poor countries did not have to open up their internal markets median growth was zero. And, amazingly, the movement is, the solution offered, is that poor countries should not have to open up their markets. Breathtaking.

The British government has made its own contribution to the poor world's misery by tying aid disbursements to the privatisation of essential public services. It has been paying the Adam Smith Institute, a rightwing lobby group, up to £9m a year to oversee privatisation programmes in developing countries.
....
Again the government admitted, before the election, that its critics were right. The Department for International Development (DfID) published a long mea culpa in which it promised: "We will not make our aid conditional on specific policy decisions by partner governments, or attempt to impose policy choices on them (including ... privatisation or trade liberalisation)."
....
What about the privatisation it was demanding in 2004 and early 2005? What about its recent assault on the public services of Tanzania, South Africa, Ghana and the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh? What about the money it is still paying the effing Adam Smith Institute?

Quite, what about the effing Adam Smith Institute? They can defend themselves no doubt but this anger at liberalization and privatization seems grossly misplaced. Our own experience over the past few decades has been that both of them contribute greatly to the efficient operation of our economy. That is, that they have made us richer. Telecoms, water, electricity, the basic infrastructure serveices are now provided more cheaply, more efficiently, by private sector actors than they ever were when they were State owned. Now if we have learnt this lesson, that having private sector companies do these things makes a country richer, shouldn’t we tell people this?  It is something, after all, that we can prove empirically, not something that is merely a fantasy of a particular political or economic world view.

Are we not, collectively, trying to make the poor countries richer? Is this not the aim of the whole game? So if we have a method that we know does this, we would, if you think about it  ha moment, be fools not to tell people about it. 9 million quid a year seems pretty cheap actually, if via that expenditure the poor countries see the same efficiency gains that we saw in the 80s and 90s by following the same advice.

Two specific examples which I’ve written about elsewhere. One at the Globalisation Institute on mobile phone penetration of the market. Another at Techcentralstation on the digital divide and the need for competetive internet acccess. In both cases we can see that the requirement for things to get better is both the liberalization of the market (more players) and the taking out of the game of the State owned player by privatising it (for if the dominant player remains State owned then competition will never get off the ground).

In short, Moonbat is arguing against those very things that will make the poor richer, just as they have made us richer. The liberalization of markets and the privatization of the inefficient State producers. A highly valuable way to spend 9 million quid out of our aid budget of 4 billion odd. Or 0.25 % of the money going on something that we actually know works. Really, who would have thought it, part of the aid budget that is well spent?
 

Chinese Textile Quotas.

Words of wisdom from the Chinese commerce minister:

Bo Xilai, the commerce minister, said the EU and the US had not provided sufficient evidence that the flow of Chinese goods have damaged their local markets.

Chinese textile exports to the US have swollen by 250 per cent in the last year, and by 83 per cent to Europe.

However, Mr Bo said the price of a dozen T-shirts, one of the product lines cited by the EU, had risen from €97 (£67) to €101 between January and March. He said China had fought hard for its place in the World Trade Organisation and was determined to uphold its trade rights.

"If you place limits on Chinese products, we will adjust our policies accordingly," he warned. "If you place five ounces of pressure on our businesses, we will remove eight ounces of their burdens."

"The EU and the United States should spend more time on the development of high technology, rather than spending time quarrelling with us on issues like shirts, socks and trousers," he said.

The EU said yesterday that it had provided three months of data to show European businesses were suffering. "We see there is irreparable damage and that is why we have launched a request for formal consultations," said commission spokesman Claude Veron-Reville.

She warned that China had 15 days to limit its exports or face possible EU curbs.

The problem with Ms. Veron-Reville’s statement is that it is a lie. Flat out, complete and total and utter bollocks. I have repeatedly asked both her office and Eurostat for the figures. (Before anyone can actually decide what is going on we need the numbers not just for Chinese imports but for all imports by country of origin. Some countries will have seen falls in their exports....most probably as a result of Chinese companies moving production back to China as they no longer need to do the finishing elsewhere to gain quota share.)

Here is the answer I got from Eurostat on May 23 2005:

Thank you for your e-mail. There are still 5 Member States missing for March
2005: Belgium, Denmark, Cyprus, Portugal and Lithuania. We estimate to have
them within 2-3 weeks, so I suggest you contact us again a bit later on, if
it's not too late for you to receive the data by then, and I hope that we
then will be able to send the data to you.

The Commission cannot have provided the relevant data for the three month period as the relevant data does not yet exist. Lying bastards.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn has a few words of wisdom today:

After that, the rest doesn't matter: you can't do trickle-down nation-building. The British, who've written more constitutions for more real nations than anybody in history and therefore can't plead the same ignorance as President Juncker, should be especially ashamed of going along with this farrago of a travesty of a charade.

Ah, say the Eurofetishists, but you naysayers are gloating undeservedly: the French didn't suddenly see the light and decide British Eurosceptics had been right all along; they rejected the EU constitution because they thought it was an Anglo-Saxon racket to impose capitalism on their pampered protectionist utopia.

But so what? Britain's naysayers don't have to reject the constitution for the same reason as France's commies, fascists, racists, eco-nutters, anachronistic unionists, featherbedded farmers, middle-aged "students", Trot professors and welfare queens, bless 'em all. If they want to go down the Eurinal of history clinging to their unaffordable welfare state, their 30-hour work weeks, 10-month work years and seven-year work decades, that's up to them. If Britain doesn't, that should be up to Britain.
....
Incidentally, that "lunatic fringe" in France now accounts for about 60 per cent of the electorate. That's another lesson for the decayed Euro-elite. One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional "rights" - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time.

I don’t (despite what you might think) agree with everything Steyn says but that last sentence does strike a chord. Indeed, looking at some of the speeches from the pro- side, that’s actually the point. Attempting to set in stone the European exception, the social democratic state. Yet that is exactly what we are supposed to be deciding at each and every election.