British Labour Pledge Card

He abolished boom and bust apparently. He ran constant budget deficits, he sold billions in gold reserves at the bottom of the market (to offset his overspending) and now he's devaluing the pound to offset his overspending, and prevent a full asset price correction.

Sadly because around a third of Britain lives directly or indirectly off the state tit, (and the Conservative party is an inspiring as a plastic wrapped premade sandwich) this lot still have a reasonable chance of continuing in their jobs.

(Hat Tip: Old Holborn)

Pity Haiti and the Vatican's hypocrisy

The earthquake has been devastating for a country beset for decades by corruption, kleptocracy, dictatorship and mysticism. It can only be hoped, and no doubt I expect private and government relief to come to this country with a history of being one of the most damned places in the Caribbean. It is ranked 156th by the CIA in per capita GDP, with the average of only US$800 per person per annum, alongside the likes of Cambodia and Chad, and the lowest in the Americas.

If ever there was a country that long needed rule of law,a culture of reason and respect for individual liberty and property rights, and the end of kleptocratic violent government, it would be Haiti.

However, whilst Catholic news services and the Vatican no doubt show true concern about conditions there, even though one questions why a military jet to fly a Bishop from Brazil does anyone any good (except a conscience), it is a shame that the Vatican can't truly be said to be morally consistent about Haiti at all. No, I'm not going to start on the idea that a loving omnipotent God might not strike the most poverty ridden countries with natural disasters like this (that's too obvious).

You see, in 1981 Mother Teresa of Calcutta went to visit Haiti. Not a big deal you might think? Well at the time Haiti was run by a criminal family called the Duvaliers. Papa Doc Duvalier ran the country with an iron fist, all media was controlled by the state and all broadcasting generated a North Korean style personality cult around the Duvalier clan. By 1981 he had been succeeded by his son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc). The Ton Ton Macoute acted as the personal army of the Duvaliers, and would abduct, torture and murder suspected opponents of the regime. Tens of thousands died at the hands of the regime. The Duvalier's meanwhile enriched themselves enormously by creaming off profits from government export monopolies, spending extravagant sums on themselves.

Did Mother Teresa go there to call for freedom, to end abuses of human rights, to call for the Duvaliers to share their ill gotten gains? No.

She received the Legion d'honneur award and praised the Duvaliers for their treatment of the poor. The picture above is of her holding the hand of Michele Duvalier, Baby Doc's wife, who endured the estimated US$3 million wedding not long before Teresa visited. She said of Michele Duvalier that she was "someone who feels, who knows, who wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words but also with concrete and tangible actions . . . the country vibrates with your life work". Vibrates with fear.

Mother Teresa provided open explicit moral support for this gang of thieving murderers. A gang who all up inflicted misery on Haiti for nearly 30 years. It was used as propaganda in Haiti, which has a strongly Catholic population. What more could the Duvaliers have wanted? How disgustingly evil was she in provide succuour to the despicable?

Pope John Paul II by contrast spent only a few hours there in March 1983 and damned the situation in the country.

Yet the Vatican still beatified her. Beatified one who gave warmth to some of Haiti's most evil rulers, who told complete lies about them, and who turned her back on the reality of the country.

No doubt Haitians will warmly welcome any assistance from Catholic charities in the coming days, weeks and months.

However, an appropriate footnote would be to strip Mother Teresa, or rather (her real name) Agnesë Bojaxhiu of her beatification, and to apologise for Haiti for her complicity in supporting the Duvalier regime. There are reports she received funds from the Duvaliers at the time as well. This should be investigated and if found true, it should be spent on providing humanitarian assistance for Haiti.

After all, it is one thing to ignore evil and say nothing, it is another to take a very long trip, to sup with evil, to receive an award, to praise it, to give it credit when it is dripping with the blood of those you purport to care for - and then for your employer to grant you one of its highest honours and respect.

Until then, the Vatican's claim for compassion is deeply darkened by its sympathy for one of its own who did great evil in embracing great evil.

Next UK government must cut spending.

Given it is UK election year, I have decided to start a secondary blog. It simply will report on every announcement by the two major UK political parties calling for increased state spending or decreased state spending.

It is entirely UK focused, and the main purpose is to expose the lies and deceit behind politicians promising to spend more money that isn't theirs, that they don't have, that they would need to borrow from future taxpayers and voters, and not be the slightest bit accountable for.

An election is an advance auction of stolen goods. This UK election is now an advance auction for future stolen goods.

Gordon Brown for 13 years has overspent and borrowed to pay for it. He did so in the good times, and has done so on a grand scale in the bad times. As a result it cripples the public finances for the next decade or so, makes the next government face the need to cut spending and/or hike up taxes. It is a chance for the next administration to seriously address the role of the state in British society, but the chances of that appear slim indeed.

So in the next few weeks there will be more on the Cut Government Spending blog.

Chinese government wants cyber order

Having mulled over how to respond to Google's threat to withdraw from China, the New China News Agency (Xinhua) has responded with a technique well honed since 1949. It evades the truth.

"China's internet is open" it says. So what is the Golden Shield Project about then? Given my blog is now blocked in China, this is demonstrably a lie.

"China has tried creating a favorable environment for Internet". No China has sought to allow the internet to be used for business, but to use it to spy on dissidents and to block discussion, debate and free speech that goes contrary to what the Communist Party of China wants people to see.

Finally it makes it out to not be a big deal at all saying "Google sent a short statement to Xinhua Wednesday, saying, "We are proud of our achievements in China. Currently we are reviewing the decision and hope for a resolution."" This minimises the whole issue, makes it look like it is only a minor point.

Most notably the report says next to nothing about why Google has suggested it withdraw, citing a "dispute" with the government.

However, a darker response came from an official spokesman quoted by the New York Times. Wang Chen, the information director for the State Council (cabinet) said:

"Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty" as he called for internet companies to "scrutinise" information that may threaten national stability and for online public opinion to be "guided".

Wang Chen thinks he knows better than your average Chinese internet user what opinion is worth considering and what information they should see. Big Brother state is alive and well in China.

The People's Daily (the official paper of the Communist Party) is saying more:

Spinning that this is all about pornography, not free speech per se it reports "all countries should "take active and effective measures to strengthen management of the Internet and make sure their problems do not affect other countries' cyber order." Cyber order?

Then it plays the "people will be victims card" "Chinese Internet users are the real victims if Google quits China. I think Google is just playing cat and mouse, and trying to use netizens' anger or disappointment as leverage" and the government doesn't care "It will not make any difference to the government if Google quits China; however, Google will suffer a huge economic loss by leaving the Chinese market".

Meanwhile its headline talks of linking the internet with telecommunications and broadcasting networks (hardly news), no doubt with the intent of showing China forging ahead with technology and development, to attract foreign corporate interest.

Of course, business analysts are unsurprisingly wondering if Microsoft and Yahoo will reap rewards from this. Neither have shown any great concern for allowing free speech in China, and Microsoft in particular is more focused on getting the Chinese government to combat software piracy. Yahoo in China is predominantly Chinese owned now, so it's sold out, literally.

My big question is how many business people, starry eyed by the size and scope of the Chinese market have sold out free speech, property rights and individual freedoms to make some cash. How many have been disappointed that the enforceability of contracts in the People's Republic of China has more to do with connections, the size of the company you are contracting with, its relationship with the layers of government and the Communist Party? How many have wondered why theft of intellectual property is rampant, as the Communist Party has long regarded theft as a legitimate tool, like the USSR did? How many have found corruption to be rampant and have participated in it?

In other words, how many of those who seek to enjoy the fruits of capitalism spend so little energy and time in supporting the basic concepts that make it work? As such, is it any wonder that they then become victims as governments and citizens turn on businesses, assuming that capitalism unfettered doesn't mean laws against fraud or theft?

For Google, free speech and the ability to enforce laws against trespass (hacking) have proven to be critical to what it does. Maybe it is about time that other businesses in China (and indeed in all countries) paid attention too.

Google says no to the Communist Party of China

Google's enormous success as a company offering a search engine and advertising related to it has given it dominance in how people search the internet. A dominance that has upset governments, some of whom are keen to kneecap overly successful businesses (think of anti-trust/competition law agencies, none of which have learnt from the absurd attempt to kneecap Microsoft, only to find that Microsoft itself is facing both competition and the disadvantages of being too big), but others don't like the internet because of it facilitating a free flow of information and media.

Every new communications and information technology has seen responses from vested interests seeking to restrict or ban it. However, they have also proven to be the unlocking of freedom, a check on bullies, charlatans and authoritarians of every bent. It is no surprise that the Nazis engaged in public book burning, that communist Romania banned typewriters unless they were officially approved, registered and their typefaces customised so the Securitate could tell whose typewriter had produced a document.

Whilst the Nazis were the first to extensively use radio broadcasts to rally support across the nation, the discovery of shortwave radio meant that people in authoritarian regimes could get news from free countries. So the Soviets and even today regimes in China, Cuba and Iran still attempt to jam inbound radio broadcasts from the likes of the BBC and Voice of America. North Korea simply produces radios with no tuning dial, with the capacitor preset to the single state radio station.

Television became a key platform to inform East Germans of what life in the West was like, and news from a non-Stalinist perspective, with much of East Germany able to receive West German terrestrial television broadcasts. Satellite TV more recently has made major inroads across the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. However, entry into that market in China has been done respecting local censorship laws.

However, the internet has become revolutionary. As anyone online can produce content, and the content accessed is up to the person online, its scope is ubiquitous and all encompassing. However, unlike broadcasting, the internet is also an essential business tool. Email is now vital to the productivity and sales of many businesses.

In the mid-late 1990s I attended several intergovernmental meetings which discussed "regulating" the internet. At the time Saudi Arabia had banned it, because it had no idea how to handle content that was blasphemy against Islam and anything of a sexual nature. What was made abundantly clear is that with the internet comes freedom of choice, although some countries were and still are engaging in grand firewall projects.

When Google set up google.cn, it agreed to respect the censorship policies of the People's Republic of China. Google argued that participating in the Chinese market would be more positive for free speech than ignoring it. However, whilst Google would explicitly not include certain results in its google.cn searches, it was clear savvy users in China could find ways around this.

Since then, the Chinese government has expressed concern that Google facilitates access to pornography, and has called for Google to step up measures to help with its censorship efforts. It is trying to pursue an endless game and losing.

So the announcement by Google that it will pull out of China unless it can provide a free open uncensored service is astonishing. It has justified it on the grounds that there have been hacking attempts at Gmail accounts from China, and presumably it has little recourse to the Chinese authorities to prosecute this. However, it is a brave move in the country that has now got the largest number of internet users in the world.

Google has apparently stopped censoring google.cn, which must be causing great angst amongst the Chinese government and the Communist Party. Previously censored articles and images of Tiananmen Square, critiques of Mao Tse Tung and support for Chinese dissidents, Taiwan and indeed much porn will now be easily accessible.

More important than that, Google has let all users in China know of its policy. It has called upon the 300 million or so Chinese internet users to note what their government is doing, and how Google will walk if things don't change.

It is a calculated risk. In China, Google is not the leading search engine. A local variant, Baidu, (a blatant copy) is. However, it will not take long before its users learn they can access what was previously forbidden. Google risks losing advertising revenue in China, now the world's second biggest economy. Yet Google also will gain publicity elsewhere and support from millions in the free world.

So what is the likely response from Beijing? I suspect it will seek to wave Google farewell and seek to ingratiate itself with Yahoo and MSN. It is terrified of free information, protests and calls for political reform, so will itself seek to block Google. After all, the odds that millions of Chinese will revolt over this is low. Yet it will put a stumbling block in the growth of the internet in China.

However, kudos to Google. It will have declared its hand as being the search engine for a free world, it will have shown how a private company can frighten the world's largest authoritarian government. After all, look at how sanitised this report from Xinhua (the Chinese state news agency) is about the issue.

Peter Foster, the Beijing correspondent of the Daily Telegraph says: "Interestingly, for all the nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment that typifies China’s more vocal netizens, the majority of comments on Chinese web discussions forums seem to be extremely worried about what Google’s potential pull-out signifies for China in the longer term."

China has made massive progress though its own hard work and ingenuity, but it has also leant heavily on a global knowledge economy whose well-spring is the free-flow of information.

Google is a potent symbol of that idea and while China can get along just fine without Google in the short-term, a decision to shun Google (which at this point looks the likely course) would expose the inherent limits of the Chinese ‘miracle’.

Yes, the relative economic freedom China has experienced in the past 30 years has been matched by much less individual freedom, particularly when it comes to holding government and more specifically the Communist Party to account. It would appear that the Communist Party can no longer demand obedience and surrender by foreign companies seeking to reap rewards from the ample Chinese market.