Last posts on corruption

Will the GOP Election Theft Machine Do It Again in 2008?

2007-10-24T20:04:45+02:00

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

Friday 19 October 2007

With record low approval ratings for the Bush/Cheney regime and the albatross of an unpopular war hanging from the GOP's neck, do you think that a Democratic presidential candidate will win the White House, get us out of Iraq, and end our long national nightmare?

Think again - the mighty election theft machine Karl Rove used to steal the US presidency in 2000 and 2004 may be under attack, but it is still in place for the upcoming 2008 election.

With his usual devious mastery, Rove has seized upon the national outrage sparked by his electoral larceny and used it as smokescreen while he makes the American electoral system even MORE unfair, and even EASIER to rig. Thus the administration has fired federal attorneys when they would not participate in a nationwide campaign to deny minorities and the poor their access to the polls. It has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to install electronic voting machines that can be "flipped" with a few keystrokes. And under the guise of "reforming" our busted electoral system, it is setting us up for another presidential theft in 2008.

Thus it should come as no surprise that our exclusive investigations into the firings of eight federal prosecutors who refused to execute Rove’s plans for massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters reveal a pattern of illegalities and fraud aimed at reducing the number of minority, poor and young voters at the core of Democratic support. In the wake of major news breaks, two felony convictions have come from the rigging of the illegal Ohio 2004 vote count and recount that gave George W. Bush a second illegitimate term. Stunning new admissions from county election boards that illegally destroyed voter records will almost certainly lead to new convictions. And the multi-million-dollar electronic voting machine scam that made possible the biggest electoral frauds in US history is under massive new attack, with key states moving to scrap the machines altogether in a desperate attempt to restore American democracy - but with the job far from done.

Rove, Ney and the Undead

Indeed, the Rovian theft engine is far from dead. The media groundwork has already been laid out for the Republicans to claim that hordes of illegal aliens have registered to vote. The Bush administration has been caught ordering public agencies - possibly in violation of the law - to cease registering voters. In an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove openly alluded to the strategy of demanding photo ID and purging voter roles of poor, minority voters just as had been done in 2000 and 2004. And, as always with Bush/Rove, there is much more beneath the surface.

All that has happened to challenge the GOP death grip on the American vote count has been reported in the pages of Hustler and on the Internet at freepress.org, bradblog and elsewhere, and is being seized upon by a national grassroots movement determined to restore American democracy next year.

Nowhere has that movement been more in evidence than with the high profile firestorm surrounding Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors without legitimate cause.

Evidence continues to surface from throughout the United States about this blatant Bush abuse of executive power. But we have traced the roots of the firings to an obscure congressional hearing held at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on March 21, 2005, and to a shadowy GOP operative named Mark F. "Thor" Hearne.

The hearing was conducted by none other than former US Rep. Bob Ney (R-18th OH). The once-powerful Ohio congressman (who is now behind bars) was the godfather of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the national boondoggle that mandated electronic voting machines for the American electoral process.

That the machines would cost taxpayers billions was a big plus for Ney. They would come from Diebold and other companies that poured money into Republican coffers. Thanks largely to the manipulations of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these e-voting machine companies would help guarantee the GOP’s ability to steal elections.

Ney’s hearing featured a marquee appearance by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state responsible for delivering Ohio’s decisive 2004 electoral votes to Bush. Blackwell was a key operative for the Bush election campaign in Florida in 2000 and co-chaired the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign in Ohio.

"Haul Butt!"

Congressional protocol required that Ney allow Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland) to question Blackwell. Soon Blackwell and Jones were yelling at each other in a legendary exchange that ended with Jones telling Blackwell to "haul butt" out of the chamber.

Not quite so high profile was the ensuing testimony by Hearne, who identified himself as the head of the American Center for Voting Rights. Hearne is a long-time GOP dirty trickster, with a Rovian rap sheet dating to the 1970s. He did not explain that the ACVR had a post box in a Dallas mall, but no office, few staff, a board stacked with GOP operatives, no grassroots mailing list or much else to confirm the functioning of a real organization. Nor did Ney clarify that Hearne had served as election counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and had founded ACVR the previous month, at the urging of Karl Rove.

While the press corps rushed to report the Jones-Blackwell dust-up, Hearne laid out for Ney and the few of us left listening the essential template for the new GOP strategy for disenfranchising millions of suspected Democrats from voting in future elections. In classic Rovian terms, Hearne bemoaned a litany of "voter fraud" abuses allegedly committed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association for Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) and other multi-racial coalitions working to register millions of new voters across the United States.

Among other things, Hearne told Ney the voter registration campaigns were using "crack cocaine" as an "incentive" for registering new voters. Adding the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio to his list of evildoers, Hearne warned that millions of "fraudulent" ballots would be cast in future elections unless something was done to curb the ability of ordinary citizens to vote without extensive identification papers.

Hearne’s testimony drew little press. But it has led directly to the national Bush/Rove push for new laws requiring voters to show picture IDs at the polls and other methods of mass disenfranchisement - and the firing of eight US prosecutors who apparently refused to go along.

The Cover-Up

References to Hearne’s ACVR have now mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. But the McClatchy Newspapers have reported that Hearne’s ACVR and the Republican Lawyers Association have actively campaigned - with a war chest of at least $1.5 million - in at least nine battleground states. They stump for voter ID laws and rigid registration restrictions and other tactics aimed at radically reducing the ability of Democrat-leaning organizations to register new voters.

The ACVR agenda embraces the administration’s illegal demand that public agencies stop registering new, mostly poor voters. And the pressure to rid our democracy of such voters has carried over to the offices of the nation’s federal prosecutors, even in the face of widespread investigations showing the numbers of people illegally trying to register and vote have been miniscule.

Emblematic of the firings is the case of David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has testified to Congress that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him to prosecute alleged vote fraud perpetrators. When he resisted, Iglesias was fired by Gonzales.

Rogers is listed as "secretary" of Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, as well as a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed its mandate by fighting to narrow rather than broaden the voting rights of minorities, and to prosecute voter registration operations without just cause. An ACVR director, Cameron Quinn, is now the division’s voting counsel.

A key target has been Project Vote, which registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. Five days before the 2006 election, Bush’s interim US attorney in Kansas City issued indictments against four ACORN workers under contract with Project Vote. Prosecutions that close to election day have traditionally been discouraged by the Justice Department. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. But ACVR’s "job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem," said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, they used "deception and faulty research" to help Rove’s GOP.

The common denominator in the firings of the federal attorneys has been an unwillingness to pursue prosecutions on the basis of such research. Iglesias, for example, told Newsweek magazine he "had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN" who were registering voters.

Media Missed It Again

The media have missed what DID happen when the attorneys complied with the Bush/Rove game plan. Just four days prior to the 2004 vote, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, the civil rights chief of the Bush Justice Department asked, a federal judge in Ohio to sign off on policies that would disenfranchise thousands of black voters. The move almost certainly had a significant impact on Bush’s subsequent victory in the Electoral College. Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, has called the Ohio scheme "vote caging," which is illegal.

The case arose when Republicans allegedly sent "caging" letters to thousands of registered voters in inner city districts. The letters had "do not forward" stamped on them, with a return receipt requested. When some 23,000 came back as undeliverable, GOP operatives demanded the right to get the names removed from voter rolls. Acosta argued in his letter that restricting such challenges would "undermine" the electoral process.

But an exclusive investigation by freepress.org found that at least 25 percent of the people being removed from the voter rolls were in fact still living at their registered address. Greg Palast has reported that the GOP deliberately targeted black soldiers fighting in Iraq.

Acosta says his letter endorsed the GOP challenges as "permissible" as long as they were not racially motivated, and that anyone whose eligibility was challenged could still get a provisional ballot.

But due to the actions of former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, more than 16,000 provisional ballots from the 2004 election remain uncounted. Independent observers have testified that thousands more may have been discarded right at the polling stations. (Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.) Read more

The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal

2007-10-17T22:45:00+02:00

By Norman Solomon
Common Dreams

Tuesday 16 October 2007

Blackwater scandal has gotten plenty of media coverage, and it deserves a lot more. Taxpayer subsidies for private mercenaries are antithetical to democracy, and Blackwater’s actions in Iraq have often been murderous. But the scandal is unfolding in a U.S. media context that routinely turns criticisms of the war into demands for a better war.

Many politicians are aiding this alchemy. Rhetoric from a House committee early this month audibly yearned for a better war at a highly publicized hearing that featured Erik Prince, the odious CEO of Blackwater USA.

A congressman from New Hampshire, Paul Hodes, insisted on the importance of knowing "whether failures to hold Blackwater personnel accountable for misconduct undermine our efforts in Iraq." Another Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney of New York, told Blackwater’s top exec that "your actions may be undermining our mission in Iraq and really hurting the relationship and trust between the Iraqi people and the American military."

But the problem with Blackwater’s activities is not that they "undermine" the U.S. military’s "efforts" and "mission" in Iraq. The efforts and the mission shouldn’t exist.

A real hazard of preoccupations with Blackwater is that it will become a scapegoat for what is profoundly and fundamentally wrong with the U.S. effort and mission. Condemnation of Blackwater, however justified, can easily be syphoned into a political whirlpool that demands a cleanup of the U.S. war effort — as though a relentless war of occupation based on lies could be redeemed by better management — as if the occupying troops in Army and Marine uniforms are incarnations of restraint and accountability.

Midway through this month, the Associated Press reported that "U.S. and Iraqi officials are negotiating Baghdad’s demand that security company Blackwater USA be expelled from the country within six months, and American diplomats appear to be working on how to fill the security gap if the company is phased out." We can expect many such stories in the months ahead.

Meanwhile, we get extremely selective U.S. media coverage of key Pentagon operations. Bombs explode in remote areas, launched from high-tech U.S. weaponry, and few who scour the American news pages and broadcasts are any the wiser about the human toll.

With all the media attention to sectarian violence in Iraq, the favorite motif of coverage is the suicide bombing that underscores the conflagration as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. American reporters and commentators rarely touch on the U.S. occupation as perpetrator and catalyst of the carnage.

One of the most unusual aspects of the current Blackwater scandal is that it places recent killings of Iraqi civilians front-and-center even though the killers were Americans. This angle is outside the customary media frame that focuses on what Iraqis are doing to each other and presents Americans — whether in military uniform or in contractor mode — as well-meaning heroes who sometimes become victims of dire circumstances.

Many members of Congress, like quite a few journalists, have hopped on the anti-Blackwater bandwagon with rhetoric that bemoans how the company is making it more difficult for the U.S. government to succeed in Iraq. But the American war effort has continued to deepen the horrors inside that country. And Washington’s priorities have clearly placed the value of oil way above the value of human life. So why should we want the U.S. government to succeed in Iraq?

Unless the deadly arrogance of Blackwater and its financiers in the U.S. government is placed in a broader perspective on the U.S. war effort as a whole, the vilification of the firm could distract from challenging the overall presence of American forces in Iraq and the air war that continues to escalate outside the American media’s viewfinder.

The current Blackwater scandal should help us to understand the dynamics that routinely set in when occupiers — whether privatized mercenaries or uniformed soldiers — rely on massive violence against the population they claim to be helping.

Terrible as Blackwater has been and continues to be, that profiteering corporation should not be made a lightning rod for opposition to the war. New legislation that demands accountability from private security forces can’t make a war that’s wrong any more right. Finding better poster boys who can be touted as humanitarians rather than mercenaries won’t change the basic roles of gun-toting Americans in a country that they have no right to occupy.

The new documentary film, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title, is being released directly to DVD in mid-June. For information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, go to: http://www.normansolomon.com/norman_solomon/war_made_easy/index.html.

”The fuel that keeps the war going is us”

2007-09-30T23:13:39+02:00

    Interview With Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh: "The President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing"
    By Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith
    Der Spiegel

Friday 28 September 2007

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam, and how the US press failed the First Amendment.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?

Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what (IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?

Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?

Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What interest does the White House have in moving us to the brink with Tehran?

Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for going to war in Vietnam. You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again. I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even after Iraq? Aren't there strategic reasons for getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?

Hersh: Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?

Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?

Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" (eds. The "Surge" refers to President Bush's commitment of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security in the country.) as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?

Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the lessons of the Surge?

Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have the Shiites in the South.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?

Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but they don't care...

This is really scary, people...

2007-09-28T23:36:32+02:00

Hired Gun Fetish
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 28 September 2007

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it's a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we've learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming - giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take - went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as "useless and dangerous" more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, "the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined."

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They're heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they're private employees who don't answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don't seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn't get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely consistent with many other documented incidents involving security contractors.

For example, Mr. Singer reminds us that in 2005 "armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also U.S. Marines." The contractors were not charged. In 2006, employees of Aegis, another security firm, posted a "trophy video" on the Internet that showed them shooting civilians, and employees of Triple Canopy, yet another contractor, were fired after alleging that a supervisor engaged in "joy-ride shooting" of Iraqi civilians.

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq's Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren't the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren't for the hatred such incidents engender.

Which raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits still playing such a big role in Iraq?

Why we shouldn't fear the (Muslim) fanatic (in the Muslim world)

2007-07-15T18:45:00+02:00

Harris, L. 2007. Why we fear 'fanatic': The lesson of the red mosque. TCS Daily. July 12, 2007. Available online: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=071207A (emailed in my Michael DeWitt of Spooky Action).

Joseph Goebbels was proud of being a fanatic. To him, fanaticism was a term of praise, and not abuse. The Hebrew Zealots looked with contempt on those who were unwilling either to die or to slaughter their own families. In the culture of the modern West, however, to call someone a fanatic is to insult, and not commend, him. Yet, as the incident at the Red Mosque makes clear, our own attitude toward fanaticism is simply an example of ethnocentricism. By refusing to use the word fanatic to describe Ghazi and his followers, we are approaching them through the standards and practices that are observed in our culture, but not in theirs.

Indeed. "Extremism in defense of liberty...."At the Boyd Conference, William Lind made the good point that the Arab world has been in a cycle of corruption-internal reform movement-revolutionary-corruption. By supporting corrupt states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, we interrupted this cycle, between the generation of the internal reform movement (primarily the Muslim Brothers) and the revolution which would bring on either their corruption... or possibly a way out of the cycle. Assuming the old governments of the Middle East have our, or their own people's, best interest at heart is foolish. As I've said before, Islam is the answer. The governments of the Muslim world are the problem.Of course, not all of Lind's points were so flattering or helpful...

The Libby Clemency: Men of Law, Men of Principle, Men of Cash

2007-07-04T02:54:56+02:00

No comment on the Libby Clemency/potential-pardon other than this: Corrupt Republicans tend to be corrupt out of principle. Corrupt Democrats tend to be corrupt out of greed.(Which is more dangerous for our Republic?)Most Republicans who get into trouble did their deeds, like Libby, out of dedication to the Party, the Administration, or some other higher ideal. Most Democrats who get into trouble, like Representative William Jefferson, are looking to cash in.If Republican officials tend to be men of principles, and Democratic office-holders are men of cash, then who are the men of law?

Veil is Women's Freedom

2006-10-24T08:05:00+02:00

Life is very simple but it is we who have complicated it with all the corruption in the minds and with the diseases of jealousy, hatred, pride, arrogance in our hearts. Same is the case with the issue of veil. Is this matter not as simple as choosing to wear a suit and cover your legs instead of exposing them by wearing a mini skirt? If a women wishes to cover her body and face from the X-ray eyes of other men, what wrong is she doing? She is not bringing loss to anyone. We all have the fundamental right to protection and she is making use of the same.A veil is a protection for any women who desire to be modest, well mannered and saved from evil eyes. It is not just a piece of cloth which covers her body from head to toe but a clear message to the men around that this is the boundary which they cannot trespass. Signaling that she is not interested in any vain talk and opposes any immoral proceedings. Any verbal communication with men is short, firm and to the point, as she should not become the source of any temptations arising in the hearts of men.When communicating with children, a woman can of course lift her veil so that she can teach them properly as in this situation her facial expressions may be important depending on the subject. A veil is not a confinement but a freedom for women. When covered in an abaya, women can move freely without worrying about others looking at her curves, as there is nothing to see except the loose long black dress. Women can be very modest, properly covered and well mannered even without wearing an abaya, but what is the remedy for the temptations arising in the hearts of many men when they see a beautiful figure in charming colors and a glowing face. Does she not become the source for a big problem, which has started in a small way with no fault on her side? Islam is a religion with deeper wisdom than what we can perceive. By asking the women to cover herself, Islam eliminates the source of the problem and rewards her with blessings for killing her natural desire to showcase her beauty.I am sure no decent man would ever tolerate another man staring at his beautiful wife. God did not create the feeling of jealousy and possessiveness in his heart without reason. A woman has great responsibility in this society, as she is the one who closely grooms the future of the world. Competing with men is not success for her. Her success lies in molding the future with her soft and firm hands, a task which man is not privileged to accomplish. What respect can she command if she throws away her own Nobel Prize and strives to steal away somebody else’s prize. She is the one who has to teach the children to stay away from nudity and illegal sex as it corrupts minds & hearts of complete societies. To stay away from homosexuality as it is against human nature and even animals refrain from it. Is man worse than an animal? If she understands human behavior and works intelligently towards uprooting the evils right from the source then she will bring to the whole mankind the gift of peace and happiness, which all the riches of the world put together, also cannot buy. Only a fool can say that a veil is a danger for the society of Britain? In fact this is the best way to curb the immoral activities in the society, which occur due to lack of a value system. Free mingling of the sexes creates a fertile ground for the growth of passionate desires, which ends up in rape, out of marriage sex, homosexuality and even murder.I have failed to understand why the Britain’s open society will stop being so if the women folk expose less of their skin in public. Is openness linked in any manner to the exposure of the fair skin for the feast of the men’s eyes or openness has a better meaning. I am sure that for Europeans the word ‘openness’ does not mean kissing another’s wife. Is openness not the free flow of constructive, beneficial and intelligent ideas across people and societies? It is highly stupid to think that the veil closes the doors of progress and prosperity for the people. It will in fact lead to a better utilization of resources, which are today going down the drain in the name of satisfying man’s sexual hunger.

Corruption versus Zarqawi

2005-07-20T01:25:00+02:00

"Concerning Cruelty And Mercy, And Whether It Is Better To Be Loved Than Feared," by Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513, http://www.drizzle.com/~jcouture/1_world/zzz_the_prince/0405a%20Prince%2016%20to%2018.htm.

"Sunnis Working on Iraq Constitution Slain," by Sameer Yacoub, Associated Press, 19 July 2005, http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050719/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq (from Captain's Quarters).

Iraq is corrupt. This helps us.

Deaths are tragedies. Murders are monstrosities. But in our souls, we ultimately accept these things as part of the world. God calls people, and they come home.

But money, that's a different matter. Murders are forgiven. Thefts aren't.

As Machiavelli wrote centuries ago:

Men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their inheritance

It is this force that is hurting Zarqawi in Iraq.

Take the recent news that two Sunni Arab lawmakers were recently assassinated

Gunmen assassinated two Sunni Arabs involved in the drafting of Iraq's constitution Tuesday, another blow to U.S. and Iraqi efforts to draw members of the disaffected community away from the insurgency and into the political process.

Mijbil Issa, a committee member, Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidi, an adviser to the group, and their bodyguard died in a hail of gunfire from two vehicles as they left a restaurant in Baghdad's Karradah district, police said.

Issa, a prominent lawyer, was among 15 Sunni Arabs appointed last month to the 55-member constitutional committee — made up mostly of Shiites and Kurds — to give the Sunni minority a greater voice in building a new Iraq. Ten other Sunnis, including al-Obeidi, were named as advisers to the committee.

In Iraq, a high-ranking government job does not just mean that you are on the people's payroll. It means work for your brothers and cousins as advisers and senior secretaries, it means work for your smarter nephews as junior secretaries, It means work as bodyguards for your "regular guy" nephews. It means money for their wives and things for their children.

In a non-corrupt Iraq, these murders would be seen merely as murders. Merely a premature departure from the mortal plane by elder statements. But in a corrupt Iraq, murder of government officials means theft from dozens, if not hundreds, of family members.

Zarqawi's attempt to eliminate Sunni participation in the drawing of the Iraqi Constitution means theft from hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis.

Corruption will hurt Zarqawi, and there's no easier way to "hearts and minds" than that.

Bribery as a Form of Horizontal Control

2005-04-20T23:50:00+02:00

"Side Payments in Marketing," by John R. Hauser, Duncan I. Simester, and Birger Wernerfelt, Marketing Science Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1997, http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/centers/MKS/abstracts/hausersimesterwernerfelt.html."In Random Regional Business - Reflexions," by Collounsbury, Lounsbury on MENA, 19 April 2005.Collounsbury continues to provide the best arguments in favor of bribery (at least in international markets) that I have heard. After discussing impacts of the Sarbanes-Oxley (anti-corruption) Bill, Col writes

One begins to wonder how publicly listed US firms will be able to compete in emerging markets where ... ahem standard and legal practice departs from the increasingly absurdly prissy standards in the United States.In particular, I draw attention to this observation:"To those tempted to see this as American smugness, she points, in contrast, to sharply lower prosecution rates across much of Europe for similar international bribery cases. The problem is particularly acute in industries or regions of the world where a degree of modest generosity has always been seen as a polite way of building long-term relationships."Indeed, emerging US standards are absurd and cold in the context of where I am at

Bribery is interesting in the context of horizontal controls. It is clearly a form of strong (because money talks) explicit (because it is obvious) horizontal control. Becuase horizontal controls are preferable to vertical controls, it is questionable whether bribery should be a crime. Fortunately, a better solution than Sar-Ox may have been form: good horizontal management

Side payments, known politely as gainsharing and pejoratively as bribery, are prevalent in marketing. Indeed, many management schools have added ethics modules to their basic marketing courses to discuss these issues and there is much discussion of side payments in the literature (e.g., Adams 1995, Borrus 1995, Mauro 1997, Mohl 1996, Murphy 1995, Peterson 1996, and Rose-Ackerman 1996). We seek to provide insight with respect to one class of marketing side payments. We hope that our analyses clarify some of the issues and suggest how these side payments affect marketing activities....We next show that the firm can anticipate these side payments and design a reward system to factor them out at no loss of profit. The intuition is straightforward. The firm first adjusts the marginal returns in the reward functions for sales support and for the salesforce such that they will each take the "optimal" actions even though they engage in side payments. Then the firm adjusts their fixed compensation so that the firm extracts its full profit. The proof is difficult because we must show that adjusted reward systems exist and we must show that they allow the full profit to be extracted.

Market-based solutions tend to be better than government solutions. Col is onto something.Update: He comments further

Quickly from an internet cafe: I have no problem with sidepayments that are transparent and subject to disclosure. Obviously there has to be a line between criminal behaviour and greasing the wheels. People are people, and trying to run human interaction without a little grease only ends up criminalizing what should be open.So long as there is disclosure, that should help keep keep distortion to a minimum, without overloading commerce with wrong headed regulation (and as you know, I am not against regulation per se, regulation is good when it is market making - which is more often than market purists admit, far less often than Big Gov people would have it either.)