Blogoir: September

As the Vote fails in the US Congress and the grotesque political blame-game begins, we mere victims wondering what to make of it all have to listen to the core Democrats' slogan ("It's all the fault of Bush! And Greed!" But mainly Bush!").

This despite some pretty good Republican voting support for the Bill, which failed because so many Democrats themselves would not support it.

In this carnage we arguably ought to be relying on people who quite clearly saw it coming, and so can make some credible claim to have a clearer set of ideas/principles on what to do about it now.

Such as this eloquently Grumpy Economist:

Every economic crisis creates an opportunity to allow market order to reassert itself. The current case is no exception. But such crises are more often seized as opportunities to expand the level of state intervention in the economy, even when previous episodes of intervention caused the current crisis...

Another mediation for me looms. I am busy contacting the parties to get things ready for the mediation session itself.

In the UK it takes up to £20,000 to take a not especially complicated case to a final verdict in court.

Just say you are being sued for £50,000 over a business venture which went wrong. Your personal conscience is clear, but you do wonder if your employees might not have been a bit over-zealous and/or misleading in dealing with the customer who is now the plaintiff.

If you fight the case in court and you lose, you'll have to pay your own costs plus some two-thirds of the winner's costs. Not to mention any damages the judge awards.

So if you think that there is a reasonable chance that on the merits you are going to lose, it will pay you to offer at least £10,000 to cut your losses and avoid the costs/hassle of struggling on with the litigation.

On the other hand, a plaintiff too will not enjoy the stress and uncertainty of a protracted legal battle. Even if the odds of winning look overwhelming at 90%, would you go on a train if one in ten trains exploded?

A good mediator is paid by the parties to help them discreetly cut a deal they can both live with, and stop the process before the costs and worry escalate alarmingly for both sides. The earlier the parties accept mediation, the cheaper (and maybe more personally satisfactory) the outcome is likely to be for both of them.

Mediation is often called 'alternative dispute resolution'.

That's the wrong way round. The 'alternative' dispute resolution mechanism of last resort should be litigation, as it is just too expensive and unpredictable.

So, I am available to help you sort out those ghastly disputes, big or small. Hire me.

The Instapundit Glenn and Helen Show podcasts always hit a good note for me - the friendly and open-minded co-hosts letting interesting guests talk at some length about their ideas, many of which go way beyond the sort of thing we are used to hearing in Europe.

Here is a full list. Subscribe to them on i-Tunes and listen to them on a long boring journey somewhere.

Interviews which struck me as especially interesting were those with Robert Kagan (on global trends) and Amory Lovins on how much more can be done to save energy.

But try this one first. Self-made millionaire Troy Dunn describes how each of his seven young children are expected to be good at turning good ideas into making money, an object-lesson in fostering an entrepreneurial spirit and self-reliance.

Not for everyone, of course. But a very different view of what 'education' today is all about...

Denis MacShane reviews Chris Patten's book about future trends.

In it he swipes at Conservative policy on Europe:

In Berlin recently, David Cameron promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty were he to become prime minister and the Treaty were not to be ratified. That would mean that the first period of any Tory government unleashing, as its main contribution to international politics, a festival of xenophobic hate against Europe. The Tories, BNP, UKIP and the Daily Mail would win the vote – but at the cost of reducing Britain's influence across the Channel and Atlantic to zero.

Really?

Maybe not.

Maybe other EU members would start to grasp that the taxpayers of the second largest net contributor to the EU budget are getting deeply fed up, and that instead of pressing on with the clunky expensive institution-building envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty, EU leaders need to go for something much 'lighter'.

Or maybe we opt for 'special status' in some sort of semi-detached relationship with the EU, an idea which seems to be catching on in France. Quite how special that would be on practice will turn upon how much we continue to pay into the EU pot.

It's actually simple.

If the next Government are prepared to pay hardball with the next EU Budget - and not as Tony Blair did in 2005 throw away a magnificent negotiating position to keep the rickety current arrangements staggering on - we can have plenty of influence within the EU.

And if a fraction of the UK public money saved from opting out of poorly run and ineffective EU programmes were put into ambitious, energetic British foreign policy initiatives, we could have far more actual influence round the world than we have now.

Here is a frank - even brutal - account of Sarah Palin's weaknesses.

And another, but rather less brutal.

And these are from tough-minded conservative women wanting her to do well.

Her debate with Joe Biden should be something.

Here is the Guardian describing Americans of different political persuasions furious at 'Fraud Street'.

Buried deep in the story is this sentence:

In the UK, the red mists of anger have been slower to appear but the frustration is emerging with millions of savers and shareholders in Bradford and Bingley recognising that it will become the latest high street bank to fall victim to the financial contagion that has its roots in sub-prime lending to poor American homebuyers.

So if we want to avoid this fiasco happening again, we need to look at the roots of this sub-prime lending, namely large numbers of loans to people who were (for one or other reason) poorly placed to repay them.

What brought that about? One answer is here:

The feuding as to cause and effect will go on, hopelessly entangled in party politicking.

But maybe the emerging rescue plan has some unexpected advantages?

Welcome Britblog Roundup 189 Visitors

Here is a summary of the European Parliament's latest pronouncement on the media (including bloggers). You'll recall the original pernicious idea to 'validate' bloggers.

The full text of the ghastly resolution - 4352 words long - is here.

It is an exemplary Liberal Fascist document. Everyone should read it to see the full horror of the blandly oppressive collectivistic thought-processes dominating EP discourse, which is not legally binding but steadily contaminates Europe's governance instincts and outcomes.

Let the fisking focus on the EP's own press release:

MEPs defend media pluralism and call for discussion of blogs

As you'll see, apart from the fact that this is not what they in fact do, what is 'media pluralism'? This sounds very different from 'media freedom' or indeed just good old plain freedom.

Media pluralism must be safeguarded and all citizens should have access to free media, MEPs underline in a resolution adopted on Thursday.

What?! Why should all citizens have access to free media? What does that mean? Nothing man-made is free - there has to be a cost and an opportunity cost somewhere, so if 'citizens' are not paying for 'free media' someone else - not a citizen? - must be doing so.

And it gets worse. Much worse:

To prevent owners, shareholders or governments from interfering with editorial content, MEPs advocate creation of editorial charters.

Why should not owners and shareholders 'interfere' with editorial content? They own the goddam content! If I want to set up a newspaper and hire an editor to emit exactly the views I like and no others, that's my business and no-one else's. If the public like the product, they'll buy it. If not, they won't, and I'll lose my money. Validation by the free market. Sorted.

To shed light over the aims and background of the broadcasters and publishers, the resolution also encourages the disclosure of ownership of all media outlets.  

Why should light be shed on such matters any more than happens anyway under business practice?

MEPs also voice concern over the media's ability to carry out the role of a watchdog of democracy, when private media enterprises are motivated by financial profit, and warn that this could lead to loss of diversity.

Bang!

My brain has just exploded. Sorry. Let me scrape it back together to get this straight.

MEPs with their miserable electoral mandates are lecturing us on democracy? They dare to insinuate that the motivation of financial profit which pays their fat salaries and dodgy expenses somehow threatens 'diversity?

The nasty profit motive of course skews media quality. Hence deep in the resolution itself is this call for

... high-quality public broadcasting services which can offer a real alternative to the programmes of commercial channels and can, without necessarily having to compete for ratings or advertising revenue, occupy a more high-profile place on the European scene as pillars of the preservation of media pluralism, democratic dialogue and access to quality content for all citizens

Just like the BBC?

Having ensured the independence of journalists, the MEPs move on to bloggers.

Weblogs represent an important new contribution to freedom of expression and are often used by both media professionals and private persons.

A bit patronising, as if we bloggers would have a lowlier existence without this munificent EP blessing?

Therefore MEPs encourage an open discussion on all issues relating to the status of weblogs.

Sorry, I can't understand the 'therefore'. Who are these people to 'encourage an open discussion'? Have they never had a look round the Internet/blogosphere to see that it offers unending discussion there about blogs and their role/status? I have just typed in blogging legal status into Google, giving 260,000 links.

On this point the resolution is slightly different from the proposal from the Committee on Culture and Education, that suggested a 'clarification' of the status of weblogs and sites based on user-generated content, assimilating them for legal purposes with any other form of public expression.

What a relief.

Here, MEPs, is my status.

I say and write what I like, subject to the usual laws of slander/libel.

And the fact that I do so is none of your business.

In my opinion, the fact that you have wasted my taxpayer money to debate and then pass this bloated, sinister resolution by a comfortable majority shows that you both treat voters with contempt and represent a direct threat to my freedom and 'status' alike.

Update: Welcome Bruges Group readers, sent here by Helen. NB her absolutely central point:

Media pluralism, on the other hand, suggests a structure that is actually defined by the powers that be. Rather like a charter of rights that is graciously awarded to people by the state.

Doesn't the EP's usurpation of this new paradigm of 'media pluralism' remind me of ... something?

Ah yes. Got it:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

When you come to think about it, isn't it just a bit old-fashioned that when you buy a jacket you are required to accept with it the boring insulating material chosen by the manufacturer?

The Archbishop of Canterbury wants us to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose.

And lo, it comes to pass that the Market delivers.

My posting Manzi On Money wrongly attributed an article by Jim J Manzi to my former college friend Jim P Manzi.

Thanks to Jim J himself for pointing that out.

Anyway both Jim J and Jim P (and for all know many other Jim Manzis) are smart people.

Here is a nice article about Jim P Manzi and his larger than life success in running with Lotus Notes in the early days of the Internet.

And here is Jim J Manzi from August this year on why those demanding Action Now on climate change may be just wrong:

The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative ... Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.

But to force massive change in the economy based on such a fear is to get lost in the hothouse world of single-issue advocates, and become myopic about risk. We face lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity. A regional nuclear war in Central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of HIV, or a rogue state weaponizing genetic engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.

In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options...

The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.

Hard to argue with that?

Ar a time of such uncertainty, even danger in the planet's financial system (the oil keeping the global engine running) it is always comforting to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury as a shining source of Moral Insight and Spiritual Leadership.

He invariably shows us the right path to follow.

Namely the opposite of the one he proposes.

Here he is in the Spectator (via his website, which helps us behold his priorities in listing his Interviews, Articles and Speeches above his Sermons):

We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make.

They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors.

If this is a mistake, surely those who talk about 'society' and 'the community' are making the same error?

Such as the Archbishop:

The biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality — the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.

The wider that sense is, the more senseless it becomes for any practical purpose?

On he goes:

Of course business is not philanthropy, securing profit is a legitimate (if not a morally supreme) motivation for people, and the definition of what's good for the human community can be pretty widely drawn.

He needs to brush up on Ayn Rand, who argues that free men and women selling their minds and labour for exactly what other free people are prepared to pay for it is in fact a/the supreme moral norm. What is the alternative - slavery or looting or mooching? Not that Rand's is necessarily the winning argument, but it needs to be taken seriously.

It's true as well that, in some circumstances, loosening up a financial regime to allow for entrepreneurs and innovators to create wealth is necessary to draw whole populations out of poverty.

Boze, boze. In which circumstances is it not true? When has anything else worked, eg in Africa?

But it is a sort of fundamentalism to say that this alone will secure stable and just outcomes everywhere.

Who says that anyway? The point is not that the Market 'secures' stable and just outcomes - rather it is more likely to do that than any other system. See eg the fates of two small islands, Singapore and Cuba, over fifty years. Or the greatest social science experiment in human history, S Korea v N Korea.

Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else.

Disgraceful. Methinks the Archbishop would not quote Hitler who said much the same against capitalism, even though he was 'right about that, if about little else'. So why his sly puff for the greatest Antichrist of modern times?

We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.

At last, something sensible to finish off.

The point about our having something to choose is that we need to learn through experience that poor choices have poor consequences.

Which is why (a) plundering taxpayers to pay for the excesses of private institutions, and (b) plunging in with more 'regulation' which necessarily diminishes personal and corporate choice and responsibility may not, in the decades to come, be seen as the best move to have made?

Remember Jethro Tull?

They were the first rock band I ever saw, back in Oxford in late 1974 or thereabouts.

One hit was Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll, Too Young to Die.

Now we have the largest European banks being "too big to fail, but also too big to be saved":

... the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to about €2,000bn (more than Fannie Mae) or more than 80 per cent of the gross domestic product of Germany.

This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the European Union’s stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency.

Such European behemoths are in some way other supportable by the European Central Bank as "the only institution that can issue unlimited amounts of a global reserve currency". Unlimited? Presumably not - printing money on the scale needed will not be brilliant either.

However:

the authorities in the UK and Switzerland – which cannot rely on the ECB – can only pray that no accident happens to the giants they have in their own garden.

Gulp.

Iain Dale makes a trenchant observation:

According to Woodward and his Cabinet colleagues, the banking crisis is almost entirely down to the effects of globalisation and the US sub prime mortgage market. I completely acknowledge that this is at least in part an entirely reasonable argument.

But if you don't acknowledge the failures in regulation and in public policy in this country and place the whole blame on external issues, you are implicitly, or tacitly acknowledging that if you were powerless to stop it, you are powerless to solve it. In short, you hold up your hand and say 'there' nothing we can do'. That is, of course, patently ridiculous.

The moment a government surrenders to external forces and says it can do nothing is the moment it also surrenders the right to be called a government.

Heartfelt. But is it true? Or wise?

Is not part of the problem that we have no real way of knowing what an 'external issue' actually is these days?

Being hit by a meteorite presumably still counts. But even natural disasters such as floods or hurricanes are ascribed by some people to the negative effects of human activity.

How much of the financial mess has been caused by Greed? Probably quite a lot. But given that Greed is quite a handy motivator much of the time, maybe the underlying problem was an unwise regulatory framework set by government(s) which enabled that greed to spin off in weird directions?

And if governments 'do something' now, what new heavy negative effects will that in turn cause down the line?

One of the deepest problems of our time is the idea that anything that happens which we do not like requires state intervention of some sort.

This feeds the socialist collectivist ideal that in principle government controls/owns us, not the other way round.

Plenty of people are denouncing the loathsome hypocrisy of financial Fat Cats who (it is said) rush squealing for help to the government when times get tough.

Yet think about what is happening here.

Huge private financial institutions - who raised their funds through myriad private transactions of people and business by voting freely with the funds lawfully at their disposal - are being gripped by the state, the only power in the land which can use violence to force people to pay into its coffers.

The money of people who wisely did not invest in these institutions is being seized through taxes to bail them out. Is that so great? It certainly is not a point which Polly and Co dwell on.

As Jim Manzi points out, the threat that an unprecedented wider collapse might ensue arguably justifies this state/collectivist intervention. But he reminds us that the philosophical and practical downsides are also terrific.

So, to return to Iain. Of course governments can always 'do something'.

But maybe it does no harm to keep explaining to the public that markets can and do correct themselves; that state intervention means taking choice away from millions of people and giving it to tiny numbers of bureaucrats largely insulated from the costs of getting anything wrong; and that where the state does weigh in, it should do so not to micro-manage via regulation but to set transparent intelligent standards so that citizens themselves can help create the right outcomes through their own daily choices.

After that, let the chips lie where they fall.

If government is to do anything strategically useful in all this, it should set incentive structures to encourage intelligent risk-taking - and loss-accepting.

Doing Something in the form of 'saving' badly run private institutions through state intervention encourages stupider risks.

And so will end up being massively wasteful, sooner or later.

The article accompanying the Total Politics UK Political Blogs Top 50 argues that "the right-of-centre hegemony, which has dominated the UK blogosphere for several years, seems to be at an end".

Why? Because, according to TP, over half the top 500 political blogs incline to the left.

That's as maybe. Pity so few people are reading them.

The Top 20 or so blogs with significant numbers of readers skew severely to the Right (and Libertarian).

Huh? Libertarians? In the UK?

According to the TP classifications, three Libertarian blogs are in the Top 20: Guido (in a towering first place), Devil's Kitchen (No 6) and Tim Worstall (No 13).

Oddly one of my favourites Samizdata (No 40) is marked as a Lib Dem blog. I think not.

These TP ratings are not exactly scientific. But they may be the best we have for now.

And they suggest that those in Brussels who fret that the blogosphere is too 'anti-European' ("Apart from official websites, the internet has largely been a space left to anti-European feeling....") may be correct.

If there were a referendum in the UK on either joining the Eurozone or the Lisbon Treaty, the sharp end of the UK blogosphere as it stands now would be powerfully in the No camp.

And their collective energy would sway a lot of voters in that direction?

When one is an idle student messing around with studentish things, it is hard to imagine the other idle students as future leaders of vast importance.

No, it's not hard. It's impossible.

My student years had some people who would go on to do remarkable big-scale things.

At Oxford University during my time there was Benazir Bhutto who became Prime Minister of Pakistan and was assassinated late last year as she ran again for office.

And Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister of the UK and has not been assassinated (yet).

With me at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy was Jay Pollard, who became a spy for Israel and is still in prison in the USA.

And Jim Manzi, who went on to get wealthy. Very wealthy. Interesting that he read Classics at undergrad.

So when we are looking for guidance on the world's financial sector woes, the insights of someone who has made a lot of money - and understands the stuff - are well worth reading:

Here’s the problem with having lots and lots of debt and no savings, whether in the form of passbook savings or equity in your house: Sooner or later Tuesday comes around when you happen to have had a bad week, and the guy who sold you your hamburger wants his money, but you don’t have it...

Normally this would have been bad for both the homeowner and the guy who wanted to get paid for his hamburger, which might very well be the mortgage lender, but not really a big deal for you or me. (If enough of this occurred, of course, it could lead to a general slowdown and hurt pretty much everybody.)

But this impact was magnified by the fact that most of the mortgage lenders sold the right to the payments under the mortgage to third parties. These third parties broke up the rights to the payments from the mortgages into lots of little pieces, combined these pieces with the rights to payments for little pieces of lots of other mortgages, repacked these in “creative” ways, and re-sold them to fourth, fifth and sixth parties.

Four, five and six then used these promises as their own equity in order to raise further debt of their own. This would be like you using an IOU from your neighbor as your down payment for a mortgage.

So when lots of these over-leveraged homeowners started to miss mortgage payments, parties four, five and six had less money than they expected, and they had problems making their own debt payments if they themselves had taken out enough debt. Oh yeah, many of these debt contracts are in fact between parties four, five and six.

Unfortunately for you and me, parties four, five and six are the financial institutions where we have our life savings deposited...

Read on.

He explains it all elegantly. And has some terse things to say about the solutions now being proposed.

My previous piece on the ECFR Report about the EU's growing ineffectuality at the UN quoted this:

... The assembly kicked off this week in New York with the west bracing itself for another debacle. Serbia is to use the session to demand a vote on the "illegality" of the secession last February of Kosovo, whose breakaway was strongly backed by the US and most of the EU, and to refer the dispute to the UN's international court of justice.

Despite strenuous lobbying by the Europeans to prevent the vote, they have conceded defeat. Only 46 of the 192 UN states have recognised Kosovo's independence. And western attempts to rally support for Georgia in the Caucasus crisis will be rebuffed by the Russians.

Here is HM Ambassador in Belgrade Stephen Wordsworth attempting to persuade Serbia not to press on with that Kosovo vote at the UN:

... we made clear our concerns over Serbia's intention to seek an Advisory Opinion on Kosovo's declaration of independence from the International Court of Justice, which we believed to be a mistake, which would only force us to continue to focus on what divides us, rather than on what we can do together.

Unfortunately, Serbia has not yet responded positively to these approaches ...  it is not always easy to think of a country as a partner when its representatives, almost daily, publicly accuse us and most of the rest of the EU of violating international law.

True.

But maybe so many EU member states - and their esteemed diplomats - should have been more prescient in anticipating such a messy and embarrassing outcome for their policy of imposing a partition of a European country in the face of so much international unease?

Thus Serbia sails blithely on.

Although as and when the ICJ pronounces in the case, I wonder what Serbia will do if the ICJ's advisory opinion favours Kosovo independence?

A long report by the 'European Council on Foreign Relations' describes how the EU is losing ground at the UN in terms of mobilising support from other countries for votes on human rights issues.

A summary is here. See also the Guardian account.

The general problem? Thus:

"The EU is suffering a slow-motion crisis at the UN," says the report, noting that the west is now being regularly outwitted in global diplomatic poker by the Chinese and Russians. "The problem is fading power to set the rules. The UN is increasingly being shaped by China, Russia and their allies ... The west is in disarray. The EU's rifts with the US on many human rights issues at the UN in the Bush era have weakened both."

... The assembly kicked off this week in New York with the west bracing itself for another debacle. Serbia is to use the session to demand a vote on the "illegality" of the secession last February of Kosovo, whose breakaway was strongly backed by the US and most of the EU, and to refer the dispute to the UN's international court of justice.

Despite strenuous lobbying by the Europeans to prevent the vote, they have conceded defeat. Only 46 of the 192 UN states have recognised Kosovo's independence. And western attempts to rally support for Georgia in the Caucasus crisis will be rebuffed by the Russians.

... The poor European record on winning the world's hearts and minds contrasts with Brussels' habit of talking up the merits of its "soft power" attractiveness, and indicates that the EU's huge financial investment in being the world's biggest aid donor and the UN's biggest funder is not translating into political gains.

Well.

All this is not surprising.

The point is that ineffectiveness in EU 'foreign policy' is not a problem. It's a feature!

Once a decision is taken to try to coordinate views on difficult foreign policy issues between 27 countries (many lacking any serious analytical/operational capacity) and then try to swing resources into play to pursue the decisons finally taken, a crashing dumbing-down and sluggishness are inevitable.

As the report points out, instead of getting stuck in lobbying in UN corridors, EU diplomats in New York spend huge amounts of time 'coordinating' ... with each other.

Of course the EU tries to compensate for this by proclaiming that it uses nice, palatable 'soft power' rather than all that nasty 'hard' power deployed by the Americans, Russians and Chinese.

The EU prides itself on being a cheery, unthreatening Fotherington-Thomas, its blonde curls shining as it dances gaily on the world stage and urges everyone else to look at climate change: "hullo clouds, hullo sky!"

To the surprise of no-one but EU ideologues, a punch on the nose attracts global attention in a way that the busy waving of a powder-puff does not.

These are deep waters, swirling around the viability of the EU's external efforts as now designed.

The ECFR report contains this astonishing inept sentence:

The EU has to develop a political narrative around creating momentum for new human rights initiatives while protecting established principles against sovereignty hawks.

That n-word again. Followed by a long list of windy bureaucratic let's-keep-digging suggestions whose beneficial effect will be exactly nil (more human rights envoys, a new independent fund for campaigns run by NGOs!)

Wrong.

What the EU should do is stop sitting down at the UN or anywhere else to pronounce on human rights with countries who fail to meet basic human rights standards.

This means above all walking out from and de-legitimizing (and ideally collapsing) the so-called Human Rights Council at the UN, a body whose substantive role is to validate regimes which abuse human rights.

It also should start to use the aspect of hardish power where it has real weight, namely money. Countries which vote against key human rights positions at the UN get no more EU assistance. Create a different incentive structure. At the moment too many countries think the EU is a group of weak suckers.

To do this, take foreign policy and assistance policy out of the EU structure altogether, ie deliberately retreat from the Lisbon Treaty. Give back to member states their assistance money to spend in support of hard-headed objectives.

Stop all those debilitating coordination meetings. Start working hard and well to get what we want.

Redefine European power away from a slow, portly, doomed Hindenburg to become a series of small mobile attack helicopters.

Those member states which are generally strong at foreign policy can set up light-touch ad hoc coordination where it makes sense. Those member states which add something on specific issues can buy in if they like.

Above all, stop thinking in outdated categories.

Start looking at whether the 'concert of democracies' idea (which even Timothy Garton Ash thinks worth considering) is a better way to exert muscle.

Bottom Line:

There are two basic ways to advance the cause of intelligent pluralism.

One is persuasion - and the UN system is designed to make that work incredibly badly. So European states need to be extra smart and nimble.

The other is by creating sharper incentives for countries to move in an intelligent pluralist direction. And the EU as such is designed to make much of the effort we devote to achieving that neither smart nor nimble.

The point about EU-style intelligent pluralism is that it needs to be itself intelligent.

What we have now - and what the ECFR recommends - are not.

A fine post by Guido, quoting Warren Buffet back in 2002:

When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running.

And if you can't understand that, then the whole basis of capitalist judgement - namely weighing rival costs and benefits judiciously with an eye to maximising competitive advantage now and in the future - is rendered impossible.

Mind you, at least one politician seems to have had some prescience. But his legislative attempt to try to fix a growing problem did not get far.

Amidst the tsunamis of words being emitted about this vasty financial drama, some simple messages make the most sense:

There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians.

I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity.

What politicians can do is ensure that the rules and context provide for thorough transparency, so that we all can do our best to understand what is happening when we pay over our money to some or other financial institution. Knowledge underpins discipline.

Meanwhile poor Polly is railing against Ayn Rand:

Gordon Brown's stewardship of the Treasury over the past decade is now under scrutiny. He followed Alan Greenspan, worshipper at the feet of Ayn Rand, a free marketeer whose extreme and influential libertarianism let markets rip, kept interest rates too low and failed to regulate the banks' wild lending.

Greenspan of course was favoured by Republicans and Democrats alike over a long period of expansion for the world economy.

But has Polly actually read Atlas Shrugged?

If she did, she would fine that the libertarian philosphy of its hero John Galt and heroine Dagny Taggart is founded squarely in personal responsibility and self-discipline of the highest order.

The fact that Governments, high-paid financiers and even journalists don't always live up to those noble standards is not Ayn Rand's fault.

Luckily all those sick of McCain and Obama alike have another winning option.

This is a handy summary of Wall Street's woes:

...investment banks rely heavily on borrowed money, called "leverage" in financial lingo. Lehman was typical. In late 2007, it held almost $700 billion in stocks, bonds and other securities. Meanwhile, its shareholders' investment (equity) was about $23 billion. All the rest was supported by borrowings. The "leverage ratio" was 30 to 1.

This looks like an inverted pyramid balanced ingeniously on the tip, not the base.

And really a lot of clever people thought it was stable (enough).

Hmm.

But this article contains this curious line:

This year, Lehman lost nearly $8 billion in "principal transactions." Otherwise, it was profitable.

Well, sure!

Most businesses who lose a feeble $8 billion would probably be more profitable had they not done so?

Anders Aslund is a direct, reasonable and perceptive analyst of Russia's economy.

He lays it on the line here:

Russia's isolating itself politically and you see this, this extraordinary crudeness [with which] Putin and [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov talk to everybody. And that of course means that people are less inclined to deal with them. Each crude statement by Putin and Lavrov now increases the political risk for Russia. And also that Russia now repeatedly promises things and doesn't do [them].

It means that Russia's word is today considered to be worth nothing whatsoever. And that's Russia's problem, rather than anybody else's problem.

And the test of the soundness of a country's policy is:

When a big boom is ending, that's when the quality of your economic policy is being proved. And any serious mistake costs a lot.

That thought applies rather more widely than Russia and the CIS states, of course...

Update: a good FT piece on Russia's problems:

If you were two times leveraged and the underlying stock has gone down more than 50 per cent, that’s it, you’ve lost everything,” says one market insider, speaking on condition of anonymity. “A lot of minigarchs are very rapidly becoming nanogarchs.”

James Barbour from deep Moscow has tagged me in a new Internet game of One's Three Inspirational Communicators.

The idea originated as (of course) a New Wave PR meme, but is none the worse for that.

So at the risk of being earnestly irrelevant as the world's financial system totters, here goes.

What makes a great communicator?

Castro/Hitler/Mussolini etc all could hammer out a virulent message with vigour. But being good at spreading poison does not count.

Partly it is about Content - making profound thoughts come over as simple but powerful.

And about Style - how one gets those thoughts across, on the day and to history. Wonderful words not quite matched to the occasion float into oblivion. 

Sometimes for no immediately obvious or expected reason the communicator somehow becomes the message in himself/herself - look how Sarah Palin's Republican convention speech almost within hours has knocked huge chunks off the bastions of contemporary feminism, with all sorts of implications whatever the election's final outcome.

Many people achieve fleeting fame, deservedly or otherwise.

Sustaining high levels of communication impact over many years is another matter. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary TV broadcast when the Challenger Shuttle exploded lives in my memory. His formidable letters show another side of his optimistic wit and open-mindedness. 

My choice? Three people who delivered sustained, comprehensible wisdom, and so helped change the way we look at the world.

1   Lord Denning, the former legendary Master of The Rolls. He created a vast collection of insightful, clear and above all easy to follow legal judgements, delivered in a rich Hampshire accent. Written up in the Law Reports they often feature short, direct sentences.

Here is a neat little example about a hire purchase deal for a car.

Lord Denning's body of work over many decades was influential and inspiring. In defining his decisions he kept in mind not just the dusty formalities of the law but also his (sometimes quirky) view of the human issues and fallibilities at stake. And a robust sense of a fair outcome.

2   George Orwell. Another master of the short, clear sentence in English. And like Lord Denning (but of course from a very different political worldview) he wrote a huge bloc of impassioned but controlled work whose influence echoes on down the decades. 

One favourite is this blunt essay about what boys were reading back in 1940:

Naturally the politics of the Gem and Magnet are Conservative, but in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the Gem of 1939 Frenchmen are still Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy, though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the Punch tradition. (“The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,” said Inky. “Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks.”)

3   Ayn Rand. A Russian-turned-American who wrote two colossal, complicated, unwieldy but yet brilliant novels (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) which together define the core moral and philosophical case against socialist collectivism and in favour of individual freedom. Buy them.

She makes my list because her work has shaped Western (especially US) consciousness in a remarkable way. Plus she wrote so many sharp and timeless insights into politics and human motivation. Thus:

• We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
• So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
• The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Sounds familiar?

So, over to your choices Craig Murray, Brian Barder and James Rogers.