The Notion

British Censorship Chills US Reporting

By Maria Margaronis

They say that when Wall Street sneezes, London catches a cold. But it seems that when London puts a freeze on facts, the chill can spread just as well the other way.

What I'm about to tell you was censored in Britain until yesterday night because of a "super-injunction" won for the oil-trading company Trafigura by the famously aggressive media law firm Carter-Ruck. Super-injunctions, for those unfamiliar with Britain's baroque libel and media law, are gagging orders which cannot themselves be mentioned, thus allowing corporations and oligarchs to carry on their business untainted by public suspicion. They have become increasingly popular with both British and foreign litigants who have something to hide--and with lawyers who make fortunes squeezing foreign libel cases into the British courts. Such is the chilling effect of these dubious legal instruments that even The Nation, First Amendment champion par excellence, felt obliged to hold an earlier version of this post for two and a half days while its lawyers considered the risks of publication. It's only because Trafigura has lifted the injunction in Britain after an outcry on the internet, in the press and in the House of Commons that you are reading this now.

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October 17, 2009

Greece Votes Socialist

By Maria Margaronis

Going against the European grain, Greece has voted George Papandreou's center-left PaSoK party to power in a landslide. Promising a new political culture, an end to cronyism and a 3 billion euro stimulus package for the economy, the president of the Socialist International has at last won the job that was held by his father and grandfather before him. But despite being to the manor born, Papandreou is neither a lightweight nor a populist demagogue in the style of his father, Andreas, who took such pains to be a thorn in Ronald Reagan's side. Mild-mannered, thoughtful, modest, he is a new Papandreou for the age of Obama: an American-born, European social democrat with a green conscience and a commitment to markets as well as democracy.

Nor is his victory a sign that Europe is leaning left: witness Angela Merkel's recent triumph in Germany. It is a local phenomenon, the product of Greece's recent political history. PaSoK lost power to the conservative New Democracy in 2004 after eleven years in office, during which it squeezed Greece into the Eurozone, put through a patchwork program of modernizing reforms, mended relations with Turkey, staged a grand (and exorbitant) Olympic Games, and became a byword for paybacks and corruption. New Democracy's Kostas Karamanlis (also a scion of an old political dynasty) took over with a promise to clean out the Augean stables.

But New Democracy's carryings-on made PaSoK's scandals look like minor pecadilloes. Overpriced government bonds were sold to state pension funds; cabinet ministers dreamed up lucrative property scams with abbots from Mount Athos. On Karamanlis's watch, vast tracts of the country literally went up in flames; the fire service, weakened by political interference, did too little much too late, and the promised restoration of forests, farms and villages fell victim to the usual toxic mixture of incompetence and graft. For a few days last December, violence in Athens gripped the world's TV cameras. The shooting of a 15-year old boy by a trigger-happy policeman seemed to sum up the state's indifference to a whole generation; broken promises were repaid with smashed shop windows and hopelessness with rioting in the streets.

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October 5, 2009

Copenhagen in Crisis: How Much Does it Matter?

By Maria Margaronis

Diplomatic anxiety about the Copenhagen climate summit is reaching fever pitch. UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon has issued an urgent warning that the talks are stalled; UN development chief Helen Clark is already engaged in damage control and lowering expectations. Ed Miliband, the British climate change minister, is shuttling around the world to try and oil the wheels ahead of next week's New York meeting. What's at the root of the problem? There's the long standing tension between rich and poor countries: the rich don't want to take responsibility for their expensive life styles, the poor don't want the ladder pulled up while they're still on the ground. There's China and its coal plants. And then there's You Know Who.

The front page of this morning's Guardian trumpets an exclusive: news of a fracas between European and US negotiators about the shape of the treaty to be negotiated. Man Bites Dog, perhaps; but it's still worth paying attention. According to unnamed officials, the Obama team plans to scrap most of the Kyoto framework for reducing carbon emissions and replace it with a new system of its own devising. Eighty-one days before Copenhagen, we don't yet know what that system's going to be--except that it seems to give the US a neat way out of any international agreement by making emission reductions subordinate to domestic laws. Think about it: would you negotiate an arms control treaty that could be scuppered by some pork-barrel filibuster?

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September 16, 2009

England's Green and Pleasant Land

By Maria Margaronis

Britain's Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband (the former Nation intern who said that we need a mass movement to push for action on the environment), has just published a hugely ambitious plan to cut Britain's carbon emissions by 34% in the next decade, working towards 80% by 2050. The target is non-negotiable; it was voted into law last year. But until now, nobody had a clear idea of how we were going to get there.

Miliband's plan is based, as he puts it, on "green hope, not green despair." Its first step is to return control of the power grid to the government, which will allocate connections to producers of renewable energy. Forty percent of Britain's electricity will come from wind, tidal and nuclear sources--and the nuclear share will fall from 13% to 8%, in spite of lobbying by the Confederation of British Industry. The government itself will be put on a tight carbon budget; energy companies will have to invest in home insulation; there will be subsidies for low carbon vehicles. Energy prices will increase, but with Britain's North Sea oil and gas running down that would happen anyway. Miliband predicts the creation of 400,000 new green jobs; Prime Minister Gordon Brown has hailed his plan as the engine that will drive economic recovery. Two hundred years ago Britain gave birth to the industrial revolution's dark satanic mills; the hope is that our boffins can now lead the world to a clean green Jerusalem.

Of course there are fudges, caveats and plenty of stumbling blocks. The government plans to go ahead with new coal-fired plants on the gamble that carbon capture technology will be viable in the next few years; it also intends to press on with the controversial third runway at London's Heathrow Airport. Miliband is right to say that going green shouldn't mean wearing sackcloth and ashes, but there is political expedience as well as class solidarity in his support for cheap air travel for working people. The projected increase in wind-generated power will mean more giant turbines towering over rural landscapes and bitter arguments over where they should go. The Severn Barrage, which would harness the tides between England and Wales, is opposed by many of the big conservation groups. And the whole plan's sheer ambition and expense is daunting--though climate scientists say it doesn't go nearly far enough.

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July 16, 2009

Europe Lurches Right

By Maria Margaronis

Trying to divine the political future from the results of European Parliamentary elections always involves an element of entrail-gazing. Across the continent, people take the opportunity to register protest votes; this year, the turnout (43 percent) was at a historic low. But as the final results come in, two things are becoming clear: the center-right has gained at the expense of social democrats, even in France, Italy and Germany where voters might have been expected to give ruling conservatives a kicking; and the collapse of the left vote has let in an unprecedented number of far-right and neo-fascist candidates.

Far-right parties made gains in the Netherlands, where the anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders came second with 17 percent of the vote; in Hungary, where the anti-Roma party Jobbik took three out of 22 seats; in Austria, where the Freedom Party polled 18 percent; in Slovakia, where extreme nationalists won their first seats; and in Britain, which elected not one but two candidates from the British National Party--a racist, neo-Nazi group committed to white supremacy and to "reversing the tide of non-white immigration."

What explains this ugly result? Obviously, it's partly the economy: hungry creatures tend to turn against their neighbors. But it's also a loss of faith: in the idea of Europe; in mainstream politics (seen as disconnected and corrupt); and particularly in the center left's ability to come up with any alternatives. (A sliver of silver lining: in France, former sixty-eighter Daniel Cohn-Bendit's green coalition, Europe Ecologie, outpolled the Socialists in greater Paris and in the south-east.) In Britain, BNP leader Nick Griffin actually won fewer votes than he did five years ago; the reason he is now an MEP is that the Labour vote spectacularly collapsed. Because of the expenses scandal and Labour's recent implosion, Britain might be seen as something of a special case, but the pattern in Europe is similar. In Germany, France and Italy the center-left has been on the defensive, offering no alternative routes out of the recession.

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June 8, 2009

Mother of Parliaments in Mother of All Messes

By Maria Margaronis

London

It began with what looked like a minor leak, the kind you'd call a plumber for but hope you could contain: reports that Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, had charged two porn films bought by her husband as professional expenses. It has turned out to be a major flood that threatens to bring the roof down on both houses of parliament, exposing the whole rotten edifice of British politics.

For those who've been too busy to focus on a scandal in a small client kingdom, here's the story in a nutshell. A couple of weeks ago the Daily Telegraph, Britain's conservative broadsheet, began to publish the results of an investigation into expenses claimed by members of parliament. (The investigation may have started as a piece of checkbook journalism: the information was apparently obtained and offered to various papers for £300,000 by a Westminster mole; the others were too stupid, scared or scrupulous to bite.) The Telegraph began by exposing the misdeeds of Labour MPs, but soon turned its attention to the Tories and smaller parties. A collective gasp of outrage rose from the British isles: it seems our representatives have been fiddling the public purse for hundreds of thousands of pounds. While businesses closed and jobs went up in smoke, while pensioners waited months for a few quid to fix the boiler or a draughty door, our taxes were being used to service swimming pools and clean out moats, for fancy furniture and plasma screens and Christmas decorations.

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May 19, 2009

Let's Hear It For the National Health Service

By Maria Margaronis

"Dr. Sikora, do you feel there is a need to expand competition and choice for people in this country?" asks the interviewer. "Absolutely," says Dr. Karol Sikora, a senior British oncologist and former head of the World Health Organization's cancer program. "There's no incentive to offer people services in a state monopoly."

Dr. Sikora's interview is part of a TV ad campaign that's using the tragic stories of patients failed by Britain's National Health Service to block Obama's health care reforms. The ads are made by a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights, set up this year by the medical entrepreneur Richard Scott, who ran the $23 billion Columbia/HCA hospital chain until it was charged with massive Medicare fraud in 1997; the PR firm is CRC Public Relations, which masterminded the Swift boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004. Other segments feature a young woman whose cervical cancer went undiagnosed because NHS cervical screening starts at age 25 and who now may not make it, and another whose mother had to wait too long for kidney cancer surgery and subsequently died. This, they claim is the kind of thing that will happen to Americans if the medical business is made to contain its costs and open its doors to the poor.

While watching the ads on the web this morning I was also taking care of a piece of domestic business, trying to get through to our GP's office on the phone. Our ten-year-old son may need minor surgery; the appointment letter from the surgeon I chose with our doctor three or four weeks ago hasn't yet arrived. I had to call a couple of times before someone picked up, and I began to get irritated and read some of the endless news stories on the internet about the failings of the NHS. Then I spoke to the practice secretary. Ten minutes later, I got a call from the surgeon's office, offering us an appointment for next week. Sorted.

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May 14, 2009

Caught: Ian Tomlinson Assaulted by UK Police

By Maria Margaronis

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes --who will watch the watchmen? We will, it turns out, with cell phones and digital cameras, with Flickr, YouTube, Indymedia and, on this occasion, some help from the old media in the form of the Guardian newspaper.

The death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson on his way home through this month's G20 protests in London was dismissed at first by the police as an unfortunate coincidence; a post mortem showed that he had died of a heart attack. Protesters, officers claimed, had pelted them with bottles as they tried to give first aid. Those of us who experienced the police's tactics on that day--the "kettling" of demonstrators, journalists and passers by, the baton charges in full riot gear against peaceful protesters, the German shepherds straining at the leash--found it hard to credit this quick and anodyne explanation. Three days later the Guardian printed photographs of Tomlinson lying at the feet of riot officers with testimony from named witnesses who had seen him being attacked. The Independent Police Complaints Commission criticised the paper for upsetting Tomlinson's family.

Then, almost a week after Tomlinson's death, the Guardian published on its website footage shot by--of all things--a New York fund manager who was there out of curiosity, which clearly shows Tomlinson being pushed roughly to the ground from behind by an officer in riot gear. The video put a girdle round the earth in less than forty minutes. Overnight, the IPCC took control of the investigation. A new post mortem was ordered; the policeman in the video eventually came forward and was--eventually--suspended, though he has not yet been questioned.

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April 12, 2009

London Calling

By Maria Margaronis

In London today, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev agreed to make cuts in their nuclear arsenals; Obama and Gordon Brown announced that the G20 were "within a few hours" of agreeing a global plan for economic recovery; and Nicholas Sarkozy, in cahoots with Angela Merkel, threatened to scupper the whole show if his calls for tighter financial regulation are not met. But at 11 am, outside the Bank of England, we waited under an eggshell sky for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: red against war, green against climate chaos, silver against financial crime and black (the website said) against borders and land enclosures, in memory of the Diggers.

War got there first, escorted by a small crowd offering the usual British cocktail of whimsy ("Queers against capitalism and other nasty things" "Eat the bankers") and testosterone ("We are fucking angry"). There were fists in the air, and singing, to the tune of "Clementine": "Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, Put the bankers on the top…" Small knots of anarchists in black drummed up a rapid rhythm; police in day-glo green formed equally rapid cordons; the last red double-deckers tried to nose through the crowd. Everyone was taking pictures, with cameras and mobile phones: if it isn't mediated, it isn't happening. "Jump! Jump!" people shouted up at the windowless bank, and "Where's our money?" and "Shame!"

The protest seemed a broad bricolage of causes: a young man waving a red flag allowed that we're not in a revolutionary situation yet, "but I think we might be soon"; three feet away, a woman holding one end of a banner ("Capitalism isn't working") said she was furious with Gordon Brown for saddling her children with debt and may well vote for the Tories in the next election. But Mary--retired, with a "Wage Slave" label on--rebuked my cynicism. "I refute the idea that we're all talking about different things," she said. "The kind of world we want to see is the same world---a world where money is used to help people. We're all just talking about different bits of it."

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April 1, 2009

Only Connect: Environmental Justice

By Maria Margaronis

Melissa's post on Van Jones made me sit straight up; I hit the links and discovered a whole network I didn't know. In Britain we don't hear much talk of environmental justice; it tends to be a term buried in policy papers, not a rallying point for action. The government is officially committed to green jobs, cutting emissions, the UN's green "New Deal"; climate change is a cross-party issue here. But that doesn't mean there's agreement about what to do--or the political will to do it.

The economist Nicholas Stern, Gordon Brown's man on the impact of climate change, issued his most desperate warning yet this week from an emergency meeting in Copenhagen, where 2,500 scientists had yet more terrifying news to report. Politicians, he said, aren't getting it. Unless we do something now, climate shift could be "abrupt or irreversible." A temperature rise of 4 degrees centigrade--which seems increasingly likely--could see southern Europe reduced to a desert and 85% of the Amazon forest lost. I won't go on--the scenarios make me numb.

Of course, that's part of the problem. The predictions are so dire they don't bear thinking about. So we go on driving the kids to school, leaving the laptop on, eating raspberries in winter. We've got no narrative, no handle on this thing. If China keeps building coal plants, how much difference can my low energy light bulb make? It's a commonplace now that the recession is a golden opportunity to green our economies. There are vital conversations to be had, about international equity, about jobs, about energy choices, about fair carbon trading. But we're not having them publicly or urgently enough.

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March 13, 2009