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By Dan Byrnes (2-2-2010)
Lately I've been wondering where is the leading edge of civilization? I suspect this is a topic that too few people think about.
Civilization is much-vaunted. A charming variety of countries including Australia are taken to be "civilized", although Germany allowed Hitler to seriously blot its copybook. The idea that an entire country is civilized at any one time is utter nonsense. (Just look awhile at British Imperial History or US foreign policy.) In any country, some people are civilized and some are not, independent of any country's set of institutions. No country has a uniformly civilized population, criminals, and corruption amongst and between "the civilized", see to that. As for linkages between "civilization"and "development", visit Papua-New Guinea any year you find convenient!
Some historians angst about the rise and fall of civilizations, in a misgided way I think. The more I learn, the more it seems that civilizations fall due to usual stresses plus inability to adapt to problems arising from climate change, not moral rot, not military softness, not decadence. It's climate problems which teach civilizations their use-by dates, it's just that historians are not yet good at explaining this. But leave aside the fall of civilizations, what about the rise?
What prompted these thoughts was reading the weekend newspaper finance pages. "I never read the finance pages", my adult son tells me, "they're all lies and crap." He means, hyperbole and puffery. He is correct.
I never used to read the finance pages either, but older now, I read them out of a morbidly growing curiosity about where the mistakes creep in. (And falling for lies is a mistake, no?)
You see, in a truly civilized society, mistakes should survive only a short time. By any such criterion, few nations are well-civilized. I don't mean that mistakes will never happen in a civilized society, I mean that if mistakes are made, they'll be recognised quickly and rectified.
What propelled me into this today was yet another claim that Australia is suffering a skills shortage. Really? All my lifetime in Australia, there have been plenty of technical colleges in small cities and suburbs in the largest cities which can train tradesmen; probably underfunded. Governments in my lifetime (state and federal) have routinely failed to support traditional systems and customs of industries supporting apprentice. We hear this nonsense about a skills shortage with monotonous regularity, as we hear about the death of proper religion, proper government, serious theatre, serious poetry, rock and roll, the serious novel, all of which are signs of declining civilization, apparently.
Apparently, Australia has a mismatch between where the employers are, and where the workers prefer to be. Apparently, no one wonders if it's the employers who put themselves in the wrong place (just as a theatre company can put a good production in front of the wrong audience, or the right audience in front of the wrong production).
But the finance pages assume that the employers' opinions have the most weight. And in today's case, where the story arises in Western Australia, it might just be that the complaining employers have put themselves in inconvenient places. Like deserts.
I suspect that Australia doesn't have a skills shortage at all, it has an excess of cowboy-minded capitalists running extractive industries who want to deploy their capital in places inconvenient for families, but who don't want to bid-up wages for workers wanting to help them. It's the grandest old false problem in the histories of civilization.
The "civilized" employer wants to expand the frontier, but finds himself short of labour. Since his desire to expand frontiers is not curtailed, more likely it is encouraged, the labour has to appear from somewhere. This would be a good way to encourage the spread of the use of coerced labour, of slavery, and it was.
Here's the conundrum, societies expand their frontiers by mixing the civilized with the less-than-civilized. Whether or not the civilization in question denies that this is the methodology is a measure of how civilized it is becoming. (The classic movie, The Mission, is deeply and eloquently, unforgettably preoccupied with this conundrum.)
Any civilization has a multitude of economic drivers to be considered, extent of "development", size of population, willingness to trade, types of output (costs of production versus levels of profit), levels of education, weaving enough give in the class structure to allow upward social mobility, frequency of war, adjustments to new technology, competitiveness with rivals.
I'd observe, that a lot of people I'd regard as well-civilized are not especially adventurous. Most of them will enjoy civilized society, but will contribute relatively little to its advancement because - maybe quite properly - they refuse to mix the civilized with the uncivilized. They're scrupulous.
Whereas, my reading of history, particularly the history of European exploration and colonization since 1550, tells me that it isn't the safety-conscious who expand civilization, it's the risk takers. And risk-takers are often not especially nice, sensible, scrupulous or civilized people. (Consider the genocidal activities of Pizarro and Cortes in South America, No More Mr Nice Guy, surely.)
So what did the risk-takers of England, France, Spain, Portugal do to advance the spread of "civilization". These nations' risk-takers were not necessarily all behaving in civilized ways all the time. They included serial adventurers, pirates (on the water, but including armies of them on land), gold-seekers, get-rich quick merchants, impetuous risk-takers, plain fools, mixing in dashes of spiritual arrogance, insatiable curiosity, a deal of technological leverage, or superiority. A little expertise in impressive sciences, interest in languages or travel, a love of the exotic. And very often an insufficient budget provided by their own employers, as with the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in the time of Pocahontas.
The Renaissance was propelled by risk-takers. Leonardo da Vinci, engineer, artist and corpse-dissector. Michaelangelo, another marvellous artist, also a corpse dissector, who took the theological liberty of depicting the finger of Adam touching the finger of God in The Sistine Chapel. The Medici of Florence, bankers turned politicians and sometime warmongers during Italy's long, insane and pointless period of warring city states.
The famous poet Dante, for example, took risks by insulting a good many of the notables and/or worthies of his day. (Dante had strong views on how corruption might flourish amongst and between "the civilized".)
So as I read the finance pages and watch the mistakes creep around in affairs and in the economy, both, my respect for those with excessive respect for civilization recedes because they are not vigilant enough about mistakes.
I've changed my definition of what civilization is about. It's about the safety-conscious eating the fruit of trees planted by the risk-takers. (This by the way fits deftly with Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian philosophy, taking steps to spread the greatest good for consumption by the greatest number. It also tends to fit long-term Chinese history. The respected Chinese tradition of filial piety tended to inhibit risk-taking, especially by younger men.)
That is, civilized people are more or less continually engaged in the sin of Adam and Eve, mixing the benefits of the fruits of the knowledge of good and of evil.
I think I see now. Being civilized is being able to see where the mistakes occur. It's about the arts and sciences of the examination of the behaviour of mistakes made by human beings and then correcting them.
It's the risk-takers who make a lot of mistakes and the safety-conscious who notice. Each needs the other, but it's more the risk-takers who are the leading edge of a society, in the sense that they renew the age-old issues for each new generation.
And our civilization today? It's under threat from climate problems. This won't bother the risk-takers much at all. It may just worry the safety-conscious to death.
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Preamble: This essay is prompted more than anything else by the shenanigans of Australia's Liberal Party of the week-ending 28 November 2009. (All quotations below are from Australia's major newspapers of the weekend 28-29 November unless otherwise indicated.)
On Tuesday 1 December 2009 at 9am, the Liberal party will have a meeting to decide yet again on its leadership. It seems the party is in self-destruct mode, and some party pundits say it might be out of government, languishing in opposition, for two or even three more parliamentary terms. In Australian terms, this is a sweet prospect for Labor Party voters, my kind of voter, more so, so early in a new century.
But on quick reflection, this is very bad for good government in Australia. Our parliamentary system needs a good strong opposition to keep any incumbent government restrained, this is the Australian way.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
Unfortunately, the Liberal Party has just sabotaged this along with sabotaging itself as a viable party, and are sabotaging themselves as individual politicians representing a constituency. So this is not the time for party-political gloating.
Power, the exercise of? Australia's Labor government now in power cannot even successfully command that more housing shall be built for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. The exercise of political power is about getting things done, not merely talking. Talk is cheap, but it appears that today, action in Australia is very expensive.
Along with some friends, most of us with no party-political affiliations, I've anyway been wondering for some time ... just how much power do politicians have today, anyway, over anything? I think politicians have decreasing power. But it's hard to describe just how this is. Apart from wondering if their lack of real eloquence, the deadness of their speech, might be a signal that they'll do no real good.
Historically, the easiest way to put it -- and this has been the case since the great British Reform Act era of the 1830s -- is that if universal suffrage is assumed in voterdom, then a well-educated, universally-enfranchised voterdom will gradually take more and more power from politicians. As well, if encouraged by their democratic system, this voterdom might widen opportunities for education to the point of insisting that university education be free for citizens. Which in turn might mean that the state bears the cost of widening educational opportunity in a context where a more-educated society will then arrogate itself more power and further reduce the power of politicians.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
My point is that the Australian Liberal Party in late November 2009 is suffering from precisely this problem. Their voters know as much about climate change problems, if not more, than politicians appear to. I think they are suffering from it in ways which many governments in the Western World, including the USA, could well learn from. As follows ...
The paradox is that if a well-educated voterdom (some of whom enter the governmental bureaucracy, of course) slowly reduces the actual power that politicians used to have, does there arrive a point at which the politicians (but not the voters who put them where they are) find that they live in a power vacuum? This seems to be precisely the problem that the Liberal Party is responding to so badly.
A Melbourne blogging friend quotes a line getting about in the media – that if the Liberal Party agrees that asylum seekers on their way to Australia should not sabotage their own boat, should asylum seekers agree that the Liberal Party should not sabotage its own boat? And, does the Liberal party now understand the mindset of suicide bombers, since it is doing what the suicidals do, taking things so seriously that they feel moved to destroy themselves to gain part of their objective.
And their objective is ? To avoid the implications of climate change. To rush into irrelevance and into the past that existed before climate was widely perceived as a problem.
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| Australia's Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong. Original portrait (and a superb one!) by Adam Knott. |
Remember, Australia has a Minister for Climate Change, a lawyer, Ms Penny Wong, who reminds the Senate that the emissions trading market is “politically constructed”. This website agrees, and find this is precisely the problem. The ETS is not a creature of economic demand at all, it's the opposite. It is a deluded attempt to make money from a problem without trying to solve the problem. It is not the way to discourage levels of demand for products/services which in a climate-change scenario will seem unhealthy.
We might also observe that the industries presently under most threat from any ETS-type measures are extractive – they are the the Australia-as-quarry view of Australia. There are other definitions of Australia to be re-examined. The Lifeboat Australia view; how many people can we find water for, feed and house?
There is the old White Australia view about population composition here, which might not take kindly to the arrival of large numbers of climate-change refugees from the Pacific or anywhere else. A hefty argument here would be quite ironic, Moslems might think: fine, this will distract attention from “Moslems”. But what about an argument about electricity supplies? One big attention-getter in Australia is security of baseload electricity supplies. What's at risk here are our beloved air-conditioners, for example.
There is a lot to argue about – such as, lifestyle. The last thing politicians want to talk about is real change in lifestyle now or in the future.
Many in the Liberal Party wish to avoid making a decision on the Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS, CETS) or Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The Liberals seem set to give themselves a climate-change Christmas. This year they don't believe that any conference in wonderful wonderful Copenhagen could possibly be wonderful.
It's fascinating. The Howard (Liberal) government for a decade thrived on spreading the politics of fear and loathing, and used “wedge politics” on its opposition. (A way of dividing issues into two or more sections to divide the opposition's energies.) Several years after Howard departed the scene, and ironically, his party is wedging itself, opposing the ETS for business reasons, dividing itself due to fear of climate change, wishing for business as usual.
But the ETS gives this website a problem. We think it is a very bad policy indeed. This website thinks that the ETS will provide incentives for society to invest money, time and effort in what is causing the problem, reducing or redirecting money time and effort to be invested in climate change adjustment reactions or in new and better technology. We think that responses to climate change problems should be mediated through modification of existing Federal and State tax systems, which can be adjusted/readjusted relatively quickly in response to events.
Here we can note the fetish in democracies for new legislation when modification to old legislation might suffice just as well. (There was no real need in the UK, Australia or the USA for new “anti-terror laws” after 9/11. The ordinary criminal law was enough of a legal arsenal for use against actual or aspiring terrorists. It might even be far better, for Westerners at least, if any apprehended terrorists were regarded as ordinary criminals and not dignified by new legislation which gave them added status as “special threats”.)
The ETS will generate various investment schemes (or is that, disinvestment schemes?) which will take time to shape themselves. But whether this is the case or not, the Liberals are now splitting their own party to avoid climate change problems by the simple expedient of not believing it is being made worse by human activity. If climate change is occurring, it's part of some natural cycle they insist, while assuming that business will be as usual. Even so, they are failing to propose any measures to be taken in Australia or elsewhere. So they condemn themselves to irrelevance. and one wonders if they actually read today's newspapers.
The headlines are egregious, and dismaying. What might this weekend's newspapers tell us? Sydney Morning Herald says that getting the Liberals to an ETS proved more difficult than herding cats, and adds that current Liberal dilemmas are “a plot written and directed by Nick Minchin, with Tony Abbott volunteered to be the suicide bomber”.
“Howard's legacy: Without a shepherd, Liberals find themselves in the dark”.
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| Photo by Dan Byrnes |
In the Australian, Lenore Taylor is headlined “Rambuctious conservatives put reason, facts and history off to one side - The Liberal Party has cynically changed its mind, then shot itself in the foot”.
The Australian's editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, who makes up his own mind, is headlined “Rebels with a lost cause – The test is whether this wilful contest is the party's political suicide or the means of its salvation”. Kelly thinks that Rudd will construe matters as the Liberals having ceased to be a mainstream political party and retreated into introspective denial.
Some quotes are funny. Dennis Shanahan in Weekend Australian says that never has the Liberal Party so lacked authority as now, and he quotes a “senior Liberal”, “The Liberal Party is now a circus without a tent.” Shanahan asks, can the Liberals settle policy differences without tearing their party apart?
“Liberals wallow in sceptic tank”, says Miranda Devine in Sydney Morning Herald, but she thinks the ETS is a dog and that the anti-Turnbull forces will prevail. So just to be more amusing, the SMH places beside Devine a column by Susan Butler, editor of Macquarie Dictionary, who outlines changes in our language usage as the risks of climate change dawn on us. Possibly, Butler thinks that a consensus about climate change will arrive via changing language use, not necessarily by “politics”. Which seems a very good way to look at it. Yet another reason for the world to be watching Australia's dysfunctional shenanigans just now.
One wonders, if climate change denial is somewhat similar, as a form of denial-of-real-threat, to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938?
A Sydney Morning Herald columnist reminds us that Turnbull is perceived, at least, as lacking sincerity. The wider problem here is that most of Turnbull's enemies in his own party are sincerely wrong, or at least wrenchingly out of touch with public opinion.
In the SMH, a UK columnist, George Monbiot, is quoted as saying that climate-change denial is now spreading like a contagious disease (while climate-change sceptics say that climate-change alarmism has spread like a contagious disease).
One view scuttling about like a pair of ragged claws on the sea bottom is that climate change deniers, who are now being serviced by a brand-new mini-publishing-industry, have room-temperature IQs. Which could well be said of the Australian Liberal Party today.
Monbiot notes that a lot of climate change deniers are older people. The psychology of which is interesting. Just maybe, older people have a longer experience of “normal” weather variations and are more tolerant of weather oddities?
On the other hand, this website is interested in maritime history, and notes that regarding the famous and non-existent North-West Passage that Captain Cook sought, it has never till recent years ever been predicted that the Passage will one day be free of Arctic ice. But it now seems the Passage might open up in 20 years or so when the summer Arctic is ice-free. Which means, the long-fabled North-West Passage, enabling cheaper transport by ship, will only appear because of climate disaster!
Yes, today we need to read geography globally, not just locally, while we react to mere slogans and think globally and act locally - another paradox likely to encourage political meltdown in your local area quite soon.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
Monbiot goes on to speculate that a scenario like climate change will only remind people of our frailties, of the reality of death. Since older people are closer to death anyway, they reject notions about climate change due to their personal psychology. Certainly with climate change, if it happens severely, water and food supplies will seem frail, and the world already refuses to supply all its populations with food; while over-population is not discussed usefully.
It's all getting curiouser and curiouser, turning very peculiar and pear-shaped. This website feels anyway that the pointiest ends of climate change problems in Australia right now are questions of water supplies for all purposes, drought, extra risks of bushfires and the idea, already growing, that beachfront and near-beachfront real estate development in Australia should cease. Or be greatly slowed. (Noosa Heads in Queensland and Byron Bay in NSW being the mostly-publicized beachfront case studies so far available.)
Reported in this weekend's Australian is the case in Victoria of a dark shadow being cast over the future of beachfront development due to the state's planning tribunal deciding that the risks of sea-level rises and extra flooding are too great. And there's a hint of a republican management question of Australia here: why not have uniform regulations about such matters nationwide, not piecemeal, state by state? Given Australia's small population, why not have uniform regulations about everything? But that's a broader story.
The Liberal Party has proposed nothing new, interesting, creative or viable about any of these problems. The only way out for any of the Liberal Party is Stalinist in style: it is for one side or other of the argument to win, enabling the winners to purge the entire party of dissenters, and get back to being a successful opposition. (While Sydney-based forces in the party seem to dominate over Melbourne, presumably a legacy of the Howard years). Whichever side wins, half the party and half its talent will be lost.
The current Liberal leader, Turnbull, would rather die on his feet than live on his knees, praying to the right wing, climate-change deniers in his party. Is this an argument about the Liberals' philosophy and future direction, a battle for the party's soul, or plain self-destruction (led by a right-wing) of the kind that ruined the Labor Party in the 1950s. If these problems bring on a double-dissolution, many commentators feel that the Liberal-National coalition in opposition will be annihilated, which seems correct.
All this is very Catch-22 in style, no one would want to lead the Liberal Party (as it is now), for fear of being thought insane, the risk of political death is high. It seems clear that whoever becomes Liberal leader, the party will have to change in the light of the most divisive issues, which are those posed by apparent climate change. First of all, due to voter anxieties (if not “green politics”), the Liberals had better be seen to be actually thinking clearly about climate change. And this is where the paradox rubs again and causes political friction. If an educated voterdom feels anxious about climate problems, right now they don't even have to vote. They just have to watch Liberal Party politicians reduce their own power of their own volition.
The voters will have their say in due course, more so if this Liberal self-destruction brings on a double-dissolution of parliament and an election has to be held.
If we need some more precise terminology here, where do we find it while so many disagree that the science is “in”? No one in Australia pretends to fully understand the ETS (or, Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme, CETS), not even Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who remains quite unconvincing as she tries to sell the ETS.
There is an alternative phrase to ETS, CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) as discussed in the Australian case on a Wikipedia page. This is “a cap-and-trade system”. About which, this website thinks, cap (demand for carbon) by all means, but trade in what, exactly? What is there to trade but finally, a reduction in demand for carbon-based products and services? (It seems risky, what participants in any Australian ETS will probably be trading will be the crumbs of marginal price differentials as carbon-based goods and services change. fall, or try with the aid of public relations to rise in price.)
So despite new entries in Macquarie Dictionary, we rather lack the vocabulary for discussing our problems. Certainly, Australia's Liberal Party is demonstrating how we need vocabulary to express our thoughts, while they are not thinking anyway. And here's the point. The rest of the world can learn much from Australia in late 2009 about the ways an educated national electorate can neuter the power of politicians – just at a time when better leadership is required. Certainly, most Australians now seem highly sceptical about the ETS/CPRS.
The whole world should be watching, because when Kevin Rudd, Australia's prime minister, attends a Copenhagen meeting about “environmental matters” in December, he will be representing a nation that is a perfect disgrace. He contents himself with saying that the Liberal chaos is undermining his presentation. It's more the case that in terms of Australia's settlement patterns, we have been shockingly prodigal of space and resources. We dislike living in residential density, so for two centuries we have spread infrastructure everywhere, and now we find it becoming more expensive to maintain.
Rudd will be speaking for a nation which has just seen a major political party neuter itself due to its avoidance of environmental issues. A nation which lets its Murray River basin decline in quality, and has done for decades. A nation with capital cities becoming more nervous about assured supplies of water and country towns more nervous about bushfires. Nationally, irrigation-based industries are becoming more nervous.
A nation which ignores its own solar power resources and technologies, if it admires other nations' solar technology or not. A population increasingly nervous about electricity pricing.
A nation which is a world-scale litmus test signalling alarm for all measures by which all issues can be measured, more so since Australia is stand-alone and has no land-neighbours. A nation with indefensible coastlines, with a population moving more to the coasts, now due to rising sea-levels becoming nervous about have to slow near-coastline real estate development.
Once again, Australia turns out to be a social laboratory, but right now, nervous that the most serious experiment yet undertaken on its soil is in train while the coal underneath that soil continues to be mined so enthusiastically.
World-wide, there is only one thing to be hopeful about from any of it. That something like this could happen with the right wing of the USA's Republican Party.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
The outcome: And on Tuesday morning from 9am, with three contenders for its leadership, the Liberal Party excluded Joe Hockey from consideration, and votes were 42 for Tony Abbott and 41 for the previous leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Which is ridiculous. The Australian Liberal Party is now of at least two minds, to say the least. All this website can do now is track the Liberal Party closely as it tries to cobble together a climate change policy. (Ends)
(Parliamentarian Wilson Tuckey surprised this website on Tuesday morning by saying he had "some" climate change policy items on his website. He does indeed, at least, have an idea that wave power could be developed on the Kimberley Coast area. His material is mostly available as downloadable PDF files. Meantime, Liberal MP for North Sydney, Joe Hockey, has nothing prominent about climate change on his personal website. -Ed)
And after we have looked up a variety of the personal websites of a variety of MPs, we find there is something easy that the webmasters of Australia can do to help keep the Liberals honest after their embarrassments of late November 2009. Keep a list on which of them have a section on climate change issues, and which do not. This way, it ought to be easy, nationally, to induce Liberal MPs to train their webmasters to update on climate change issues and keep us all informed. Very, very informed.
So some survey results. Tony Abbott (2-12-2009) has nothing prominent re climate change issues on his personal website, apart from his usual anti-ETS opinions.
Today's feeling/Blog emotion 21 October 2009: Law of the Sea: We have earlier loudly complained that leader of the Australian Liberal Party Malcolm Turnbull keeps speaking tosh. Lately we find his party is complaining about "illegal migrants" appearing freshly in boats off the n/w Australian coast. They are not "illegal" till proved so: they may be ordinary asylum seekers or stateless persons. The current Liberal Party stance on such folks is a moral and legal abomination in terms of the age-old Law of the Sea. Which is, that if any shipped party on the water has the wherewithal, they shall duly assist any other parties in trouble on the waters they become aware of, if it interferes with their own current business or not. It is an age-old standing human/moral obligation of maritime life. The current Liberal Party rhetoric is in dire breach of this convention and has been since John Howard's day. This website cannot understand why Australia's newspapers have not been pointing this out for years!
20 October 2009: Blog emotion: A Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is like re-investing in the cancer you are suffering from, feeding it. It is socio-political nonsense and an avoidance of real issues. Any ETS adopted should be monitored through taxation systems, with rewards given for emissions reductions, or commissioning of replacement energy-producing technology. Climate change itself will help penalize non-reductions. Read a rare article arguing such a line in Weekend Australian, 17-18 October, 2009, page 12, by Rebecca Weisser. "Tax carbon rather than trade in it". Highly recommended by this website.
By 5-10-2008, Has massive fraud been perpetrated by investment bankers? By 8-10-2008. Britain declares itself in recession. By 8-10-08, US, TV reports that policy makers are making it up as they go along, all this is unprecedented, is of historical dimensions. By 15-10-08, Lateline TV news (Australia), Australian PM Rudd criticises "extreme capitalism" and its ills, an obscenity brought about by greed, obscene failures in US regulations on corporate governance ... rating agencies are now up for inspection in Rudd's views, there is a need to reign in executives greed. By 16-10-08, NY Stock Exchange nose dives again. Markets are uncertain and unconvinced. By 16-1-0-08, There will be recession and it will be deep. Negative feedback loops are setting in, Gasp. The real economy is suffering, and is America on the skids? By 16-10-08, Interesting question arises, How would anyone quickly tell if China was experiencing a speculative bubble or a downturn? By 25-10-2008, Another day of market turmoil, but are things becoming more subtle? Greenspan's mistake, versus Bob Dylan's line, the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle. By 13-11-08, Germany and UK now in recession, Japan is predicted to go to recession. By 14-11-2008, the entire developed world is in recession.
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| Photo by Dan Byrnes |
US admission by 9-4-2008, in a new book, that WMDs were not the pretext of the Iraq war but a pre-emptive strike against any further problems from Iraq, or with Saddam Hussein's regime, and a special case re Hussein's regime, a case reigned of anticipatory self-defence. (By the way, see the Oliver Stone movie, "W" on the life of the man who became US President G. W. Bush. -Ed)
Bernie Madoff by 7 February 2009 is causing fresh worries which attack egos and create angst over privacy issues. Madoff's A-list clients were not as exclusive as they thought. Lists have been found of almost-ordinary folk who've been defrauded by Madoff, their names and addresses, and they include mere retirees, housewives, a plumber's union and a high school. Upper echelon names defrauded by Madoff include actor John Malkovich, US baseball giant Sandy Koufax. One of the names listed seems to be Madoff's own lawyer. Some of the lesser names listed, contacted by journalists, now worry that they have been "outed" and that they may now be mistaken as rich, and hence become targets for thieves. (Well, once rich, then defrauded by Madoff.) See www.madoffsearch.com/. (By November 2009, Madoff is still routinely derided on The David Letterman Late Show from New York, which advertises how many years he still has in jail [149].)
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Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. John Wiley and Sons, 2009, 336pp. Simon Adams, The Unforgiving Rope. UWA Press, 2009, 285pp. (On capital punishment in Australia) |
