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| Afghan President Defends Decision on Cabinet Nominees Hamid Karzai gives his list of proposed Cabinet ministers to parliament on Saturday with eight new faces www1.voanews.com |
Tunnel economy How Gaza's economy has gone underground news.bbc.co.uk |
Georgia's mutiny leaders jailed A court in Georgia sentences more than a dozen soldiers and civilians to lengthy jail terms over a brief military rebellion. news.bbc.co.uk |
A simpler protest than Billy Bragg's wheeze: switch banks | John Harris You don't have to do a Billy Bragg to register your outrage at bonuses. Just join the Co-opHere we go, yet again: bonus season at the banks, and wails of outrage from everyone beyond the City walls. After Fred the Shred's pension, Stephen Hester's salary package and the fuss last summer about huge rises in bonuses and salaries at Barclays, we all know the script: screaming hostility that unites everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail, and the usual claims that those endless zillions are needed to secure the "best people". The latter is surely proof of a world that has long since moved well beyond satire: the history of the last two years, after all, comes down to what happened when those self-same "best people" got slightly too full of themselves.Still, as with those movie monsters who swat away artillery fire like buckshot, nothing so far tried has stopped either them, or their paymasters. The government's one-off bonus tax has apparently been taken on the chin, leaving big remuneration pots intact. New obligations to reward execs and traders in staggered tranches of shares are surely weakened by the fact that hundreds of them will be able to cash in the equity almost as soon as they get it – which, in the case of high-rollers at the Royal Bank of Scotland, means handsome windfalls from the now-infamous bonus pot of up to £1.5bn, timed to arrive each summer between this year and 2012.All the chicanery leaves mere politicians looking feeble, pleading for restraint while their measures are arrogantly knocked aside – despite the fact that so much of the banking sector is state-owned, and its largesse is being subsidised by the public. Meanwhile, the axe hangs over schools and hospitals, and come the election of the Tories we can expect the gap between hand-wringing rhetoric and effective action to grow even wider. Needless to say, none of this is good news for mainstream politics, and when the age of austerity bites, the problem may yet turn poisonous.So what, to quote a famous Marxist, is to be done? The public seem outraged, but simultaneously disconnected: proof, perhaps, that advanced societies are so filled up with noise and distraction that even glaring moral outrages have no real traction. Even stereotypical leftie-liberals are often prone to think of the banks as a law-unto-themselves: present on the high street, but somehow immune to the actions of ordinary Joes. That plenty of these people still dutifully avoid Israeli fruit and veg, or zealously buy Fairtrade food, seems not to have led to the obvious conclusion: that for the time being, politicians may have to be circumvented, and co-ordinated individual actions might hold part of the answer.Hats off, then, to Billy Bragg, who this week served notice that he won't pay his taxes until bonuses at RBS have been capped at £25,000. By the end of day one, his NoBonus4RBS Facebook group had around 300 members – but word spread via such unlikely outlets as the Luton Town Supporters' Forum and the New York Times website, and at the time of writing the number was nearer 10,000.Yes, his potential constituency is limited to those who see to their own fiscal affairs – and at the risk of sounding hopelessly po-faced, people on the left should arguably think carefully before threatening to withhold their taxes. There again, Bragg sees the threat of non-payment as a counterpoint to all those threats from financiers to leave the country – and besides, as evidenced by appearances on Radio 2, 5 Live and TalkSport, this is chiefly a neat bit of campaigning that pushed his take on the bonuses question into places that would usually be off-limits. His intention, he told me yesterday, was "to act as a lightning rod for the sense of powerlessness that seems to be there whenever this issue gets debated".For those who either meet their obligations via PAYE or fear heat from the Inland Revenue, there is another route: more simple than the Bragg wheeze, and potentially more effective. If you have money in a bank whose pay structures strike you as iniquitous, put it somewhere else. As an RBS customer about to jump ship, my own choice is the Co-operative Bank, freshly merged with the Britannia Building Society. Their executives are hardly paupers (last year, the chief executive of Co-operative Financial Services was paid a salary of £590,000, with a bonus of £183,000), but their pay policy falls short of arrogant insanity – and as proof of their bona fides as both progressives and prudent operators, they make a lot of their ethical investment policy and proud avoidance of the financial instruments that got most other banks into such a mess.I'm making the move because a friend did, which underscores the crucial point. If even 50,000 people took their custom away from the usual big-hitters, the banks would notice, and the idea would surely spread. So what's stopping us?Banks and building societiesExecutive pay and bonusesCo-operative GroupSir Fred GoodwinStephen HesterBarclaysRoyal Bank of ScotlandJohn Harrisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Thanks to this 'illegal' war, Iraqis at last have real hope for the future | William Shawcross Blair will never satisfy those who demand some ritual sacrifice. But he was right to join an invasion that rid Iraq of tyrannyTony Blair's testimony Âbefore the Chilcot Âinquiry on Friday will no doubt demonstrate his usual self-assuredness. But he will never satisfy the legions who demand some kind of ritual sacrifice of him. Yet Blair was right to join the invasion of Iraq despite the Âaccusations that he "lied", "sealed a pact with Bush in blood" and fought an "illegal" war. Despite the killing of thousands of Iraqis (mostly by other Muslims, not coalition forces), and despite the unforgivable failure of the coalition to plan for post-invasion chaos, Iraq today has a far better future than under Saddam Hussein.Remember the context in which Blair joined the US against Saddam. It is crucial. Even before 9/11, Saddam was a massive threat in the region as well as to his own people. He had twice invaded neighbours – and WMD were a favourite tool. He had used them at home and abroad, gassing Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurds in 1988.In March 1991, after Iraq was expelled from its brutal occupation of Kuwait, resolution 687 of the UN security council demanded that Saddam destroy or hand over all his WMD to the UN and empowered Unscom, a new UN body of inspectors, to verify his compliance. Over the next 12 years Saddam's regime lied to Unscom, and defied 14 other binding resolutions. The inspectors uncovered a series of weapons and programmes. Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who became head of Unscom in 1997, said that to Saddam "chemical warfare is as normal as crowd control".In 1998 the frustrated inspectors left Iraq. In their final report they stated that Saddam had still not accounted for enough chemical and biological Âweapons to kill millions of people. No wonder President Clinton warned that the Iraqi tyrant was covertly building "an arsenal of devastating destruction" and must be stopped.Accordingly, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act – regime change was now US policy. But the UN did almost Ânothing. And the longer Saddam defied the UN, the more some leading members – France, Russia and China – helped him break the sanctions intended to secure his compliance with UN Âresolutions. Such behaviour revealed the hollowness of UN claims to the moral high ground.After 9/11 Blair understood at once that the world had changed. States must be judged on their actions, intentions and capabilities: and the US was no longer prepared to take risks with Saddam. The possibility of the ultimate nightmare – a terrorist attack involving WMD – was too great, especially after the US discovered that al-Qaida had been researching dirty bombs in Afghanistan. Remember, the intelligence agencies of virtually all security council members believed that Saddam still retained WMD, and was determined to obtain more.In September 2002 (over the advice of Vice-President Cheney) George Bush agreed to Blair's request to go to the UN again. In November the council passed resolution 1441, which gave Saddam "a final opportunity" to co-operate or face "serious consequences". Only now, because allied forces were building up around Iraq's borders, did he allow the inspectors back. Over the next three months they made some progress – but were still denied unfettered access.In early 2003 opposition to war grew through much of the western world. Washington had no wish to return to the UN. But, more sensitive to public and party opinion, Blair sought another resolution before the US and UK troops invaded. In the corridors of the UN, arms were twisted brutally; France, China and Russia ensured there would be no majority in the council for another vote in favour of "les Anglo-Saxons". This gave Saddam false assurance.In parliament on March 18 2003 Blair argued passionately that the world could not back down before Saddam yet again. He won the vote easily. But ever since he has been accused of waging an illegal war because of the failure to secure an additional resolution.Only two wars since 1945 have been fought with the legal blessing of the UN – Korea and the first Gulf war. The US-led Nato interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s were given no UN mandates. Blair's intervention in Sierra Leone was unauthorised – but saved countless lives, not to mention the state. And Kofi Annan said he only wished that in 1994 a "coalition of the willing" had intervened in Rwanda to stop the genocide.In the years since Saddam's overthrow tens of thousands of Âinnocent Iraqis have been killed. Most of them were victims of the brutal confrontation between Sunni and Shia extremists, in particular al-Qaida and the agents of Iran. The woefully inadequate post-invasion planning by the coalition added to the chaos. Yet the seeds of this conflict were sown by the devastation wrought by Saddam's despotism.Despite the continuing vicious attacks of suicide bombers, Iraq is now bravely inching towards a much more open society. Indeed, on many measures it is one of the freest countries in the Arab world.Overall, violence is much reduced and opinion polls show that support for democracy is overwhelming. New elections with many competing parties are to be held this year. The dinar is strong, the economy is growing. The Iraqis I know say they have hope for the future, and they thank Blair and Bush for that.Tony BlairIraqIraq war inquiryWar crimesUnited NationsUnited StatesMiddle EastWilliam Shawcrossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |