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Thursday 19 January 2017

Peter Roebuck's Somerset agony

David Hopps in Cricinfo

The civil war that beset Somerset cricket more than 30 years ago was all the more remarkable because of the unimposing, bespectacled figure at its centre. Peter Roebuck would not have immediately struck a casual observer as a man capable of going to war. An unconventional loner, gauche even with close friends, he did not meld easily with either the old-fashioned administrators in charge of the club or the imposing superstars, Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner, who would eventually be expunged from a Somerset dressing room that had fallen on hard times.

The conflict that took hold of the sleepy market town of Taunton throughout the summer of 1986 dominated the sports pages in a way that now is hard to imagine. Until now, it has only been possible to hazard a guess at Roebuck's state of mind as he became the principal hate figure for rebel supporters who were campaigning against the county's decision to release their great, long-serving West Indians, Richards and Garner and, as a consequence, accept the ensuing departure of Ian Botham in protest.

Previously unpublished diaries, which were not made available to the authors of the excellent Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck in 2015, have now revealed the full extent of Roebuck's mental anguish. Condemned by his critics, increasingly reviled by Botham in a rift that would last a lifetime, and often left to flounder by Somerset's archaic administration, he presents himself as an honourable man who made his choice and forever fretted over the consequences.

"Lots of people are asking about my health," he writes as Somerset's warfare reaches its height. "I suspect they are waiting for a crack-up." Somerset comfortably won the vote to let go of Richards and Garner at an emergency meeting at Shepton Mallet in November 1986, and Roebuck took the spoils, but his life would never be the same again. Even as victory approaches, he rails at English society as "mean, narrow and vindictive" and falls out of love with the country of his birth for the rest of a life that was to end in tragic circumstances 25 years later.

By the time he wrote his autobiography, Sometimes I Forgot To Laugh, in 2004, Roebuck was able to tell the Somerset story with relative calm. Not so in his diaries, typed out contemporaneously in obsessive detail, complete with scribbled adjustments. Three unseen chapters of a book called 1986 And All That have been discovered and placed on the family website. "The truth can finally be told," is how the family puts it.

Roebuck was in his first season as Somerset captain, regarding himself as a more relaxed figure, at 30, than the intense batsman who had written the self-absorbed study of life on the county circuit, Slices of Cricket, a few years earlier. That self-ease soon departed. In midsummer he was informed at an emergency meeting of the management and cricket committee that Martin Crowe, not yet a New Zealand star, merely a young batsman making his way, and someone who had spent time with Somerset's 2nd XI with an eye to a future signing, had been approached by Essex.

Crowe, Roebuck writes, was "a man of brilliance rare in the game, a man of standards rare in the game". Roebuck's yearning to reshape a failing, ageing Somerset side has youth and work ethic at its core and encourages him to support the majority preference on the committee to sign Crowe and release Richards and Garner after many years of loyal service. One wonders how Botham will respond to Roebuck's allegation in the diaries that Botham viewed Crowe at the time as little better than a good club player.

In Somerset, Richards and Garner were far more than overseas players. They were part of their limited-overs folklore, as much a part of Somerset as scrumpy or skittles. As Roebuck, this cricketing aesthete, frets over the implications, he writes in his diary: "Echoes in my mind kept repeating that this Somerset team could never work, could never be worthwhile unless we abandoned the past and began to build a team around Crowe. Our chemistry was wrong. It hadn't worked with Botham as captain, and it wasn't working with Roebuck as captain. We'd lose Crowe to Essex."



Botham at the press conference announcing his decision to leave Somerset Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images


A couple of weeks later, that course of action was confirmed. Sworn to secrecy until the end of the season by a Somerset management and cricket committee of 12, a body which Roebuck naively imagines is capable of confidentiality, he ludicrously seeks to maintain discretion in the height of summer in a dressing room awash with rumour. Out on the field, "smiles hid hatred". In Roebuck's version of events, all those responsible for the decision keep their heads down and often fail to tell him what is going on. Rebels soon force an emergency special meeting, and at the end of the season virtually everybody but him seems to disappear for a prolonged holiday - acts, in some cases, of breathtaking irresponsibility. He delays his return to Australia, where he spends the close season, to see the job through.

"I was bound to be forsaken by friends," he writes. "It was all right for them, they were amateurs, committee men, they could leave this club and this game at any moment. It was my living, much more was at stake."

A cerebral and unclubbable man, he is ill-equipped for the task - whether the art of appeasement or politics. Lost in his own thoughts, he reads cricket books, watches movies, takes long baths, and makes impromptu visits around the county in search of understanding. Some imagined friends desert him, some of them quite cruelly, and, for the first time, he is assailed by scurrilous rumours about his private life. Tabloid journalists descend upon Taunton, enquiring about his relationship with the young cricketers he houses on an annual basis. Fifteen years later, his belief in the educative value of corporal punishment was to lead to a guilty plea, to his instant regret, to three charges of common assault against South African teenagers.

Roebuck's insistence that he will not surrender to "moral blackmail" is one of the most revealing passages in these freshly discovered chapters. "These tactics, this moral blackmail, this offer not to tell lies if I will not tell facts, must not rush me into a hasty marriage with attendant car and nappies. Through my life so far, I've tried to be as independent, financially and personally, as possible… I fear love for its invasion of privacy though now, at last, I begin to think about it. For the present, I have two lives (in England and Australia), three careers (cricket, writing, teaching), and a variety of ways of keeping the world, though not friendship, at its distance. I don't care a jot what anyone else does in private, so long as it does not hurt people. I want to help the young, something I've failed to do so far in my years at Somerset because I was too involved in my own game to care for anyone else."

The Roebuck family website goes as far as to suggest "a causal connection" between events at Somerset that fateful summer and the manner in which his life came to a tragic end many years later. You would have to be a believer in chaos theory to accept this conclusion without reservation.

Another 25 years elapsed before Roebuck fell to his death from a Cape Town hotel window in 2011 while being questioned by police about an alleged sexual assault, which remains unproven. A police statement at the time said that Roebuck, by then a celebrated author and journalist, committed suicide, a version of events that was accepted by a closed inquest, before last month South Africa's Director of Public Prosecutions responded to family lobbying and agreed to review the findings.

In mental turmoil he might have been, but Roebuck required no passage of time to see the mid-1980s as a period when county cricket's unwieldy amateur committees were no longer fit for purpose, unable to deal with the advent of the celebrity cricketer. It is no coincidence that the mid-'80s also saw county cricket's other great conflict, as Yorkshire descended into internecine strife over the future of Geoffrey Boycott.

"Somerset, a small county area with a small county cricket team is one of the battlegrounds upon which this battle is taking place. It is a battle between old-fashioned standards and celebration of stardom. It isn't really a battle between management and worker at all. Botham is not a worker, cannot pretend to be a working class hero. In this battle the management and the workers are on the same side. "



Roebuck bats in a benefit match for Botham in Finchley, London © Getty Images


Somerset's general committee is elderly white males to a man, and when Roebuck goes to an area committee meeting in the seaside town of Weston, where incidentally he finds warm support, he learns that a 26-strong committee has been extended to 27 just because somebody else asked to join. "We must change this old, male hegemony in charge of cricket," he writes. "A game cannot, in 1986, be run by genial, sensible pensioners. It is frightening how much cricket depends on the tireless voluntary work of old men."

Much has been made over the years about the enmity that grew from this summer onwards between Roebuck and Botham, polar opposites in character and cricketing approach, But it is Roebuck's fear of Richards' volcanic temperament that stands out most in these unseen chapters, such as an exchange during a Championship match at Worcester, after Somerset's intentions are known, a day that begins with Roebuck strolling by the banks of the Severn in search of rural bliss and soon becomes something altogether more tempestuous.

"Viv asked to see me in private, so we went upstairs where we wouldn't be disturbed. For the next 15 minutes he launched a tirade of abuse […] He said I was a sick boy, a terrible failure, an unstable character, someone who should never be put in charge of anything… He said I hadn't yet seen his bad side and he'd unleash it upon me from now on. During this torrent, I sat quietly, not angry at all though a little startled."

Tensions with Botham are also laid bare. "Botham is trying to form the players into a gang behind him," Roebuck writes. "He's shown little interest in these young cricketers on previous occasions, but he is a formidable warrior… If he can't win them over he'd certainly try to bully them into line." He even explores likenesses between Botham and Percy Chapman, an Ashes-winning captain in 1926, who "fell into decline, drinking heavily and putting on weight, ravaging his body". He questions Botham's desire to be surrounded by like-minded "chums", not stopping to reflect that he himself was also bent upon building a Somerset side in his own image.

"I am not a loner," he concludes, "rather my preferred pursuits (reading, writing, music) are solitary. I am private, it is true, and enjoy the companionship of my close friends much more than the conviviality of a loud, large group. As for splitting the team, the whole point of this struggle was that it had been split for years."

Monday 16 January 2017

Julian Assange - The Democrats scapegoat?

G Sampath in The Hindu

To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.

One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.

So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.


From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.

The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.

However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.

It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.

Flaws in the ‘trial’

For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.

In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.

Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.

It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?

One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.

Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.


It was about new information

What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.

In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.

If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.

Sunday 15 January 2017

Time to hold our lying leaders to account

Nick Cohen in The Guardian


Post-truth politics isn’t a coherent description of the world but a cry of despair. Propositions have not stopped being right or wrong just because of the invention of Facebook. Whatever the authoritarian cults who rage across Twitter say to the contrary, the Earth still goes round the sun and two plus two still equals four.

“Everything is relative. Stories are being made up all the time. There is no such thing as the truth,” cried Anthony Grayling. But unless the professor has abandoned every philosophical principle he has held, what Grayling and millions like him mean is something like this. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and other liars the like of which they cannot remember, have made fantastical promises to their electorates. They said they could build a wall and make Mexico pay for it or make Britain richer by crashing her out of the EU.






But instead of laughing at their transparent falsehoods or being insulted at being taken for fools, blocs of voters have handed them victory. Evidence could not shake them. Common sense could not reach them. Surely, their gullibility shows we have arrived in a new dystopia. You can see why they got that way. Trump is clear that the checks and balances that restrained power in the old world will not apply to him. His refusal to release his tax returns shows it. The Russian dissident Garry Kasparov put the urgent case for transparency best when he said Trump has criticised Republicans, Democrats, the pope, the CIA, FBI, Nato, Meryl Streep… everyone and anyone “except Vladimir Putin”.

What gives here? And more to the point, who’s on the take? I see an ideological affinity between Russian autocracy, the western far left and the western populist right: they band together against the common enemy of liberal democracy. But it has always been reasonable to ask whether the traditional inducements of sex and money have tightened Putin’s grip on Trump.

You could lay this canard to rest by publishing your tax returns, American journalists told their president-elect. You must know the American public wants to see them.

The public doesn’t care, Trump replied. I went into an election refusing to release my tax returns and “I won.” So now I can do what I want.

His spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, who could work for a Russian propaganda channel when she’s thrown out of politics, uses the same logic when asked whether it is “presidential” for her master to lie so often and so blatantly. “He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behaviour.”
The British are experiencing their own version of Trumpish triumphalism. In our case, too, the answer to every hard question is a brute proclamation of power. Are you seriously going to take us out of the single market? Leave won. And the customs union? Leave won. What about EU citizens here? Leave won. And British citizens there? Leave won.

Fighting back should be easy – if you cannot expose charlatans such as Trump and Johnson, you should step aside a make way for people who can. But a terrible uncertainty grips opposition politics across the English-speaking world. Trump’s victory strikes me as a far greater cause for self-doubt than Brexit. Because we never had to endure invasion by Hitler or Stalin, or government by Greek colonels or Spanish falangists, the British did not have the same emotional attachment to an EU that freed the rest of Europe from a terrible past.

Even if, as I do, you regard the decision to leave as a monumental blunder, it is not, given Britain’s lucky history, inexplicable. Trump’s victory, by contrast, overturns truths that western liberals felt to be self-evident. You cannot abuse women and ethnic minorities. You cannot lie in your every second utterance. If you do, the media will expose and destroy you.

I can’t find a better way of illustrating the demoralising change in the weather than by referring you to Alan Ryan’s history of western political thought, On Politics. I don’t mean to criticise Ryan. He has produced a vast and brilliant book that stands comparison with Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. But unlike Russell, who was gloriously waspish and prejudiced, Ryan is a careful writer and his rare opinionated judgments are all the more authoritative for that.

In 2013 he, like nearly every serious person, could say with absolute certainty that, despite its legion of faults, the 21st century was better than the 20th. For instance, Ryan explained, Governor George Wallace’s infamous battle cry of the 1950s – “I will never be out-niggered”, after he had been beaten by a politician who was even more of a racist than he was – “would today instantly terminate his career”.

Yet in 2016, Trump echoed Wallace and far from seeing his career terminated became president of the United States, an office that Wallace never came near, incidentally. After that, I can understand why the disoriented talk about a post-truth world, but it remains a sign of their trauma rather than a description of our times.

It is as dangerous to overestimate the importance of technological change as to underestimate it. There was no web in 1968, and US broadcasters had to be accurate and impartial. The old world of 20th-century technology did not, however, stop George Wallace winning millions of white, working-class voteswhen he ran for president as an open white supremacist. Wallace was beaten by Richard Nixon, a closet racist and crook.

When his crimes caught up with him, Nixon declared that he could not be prosecuted because “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”, a line that Conway might have written for him.

Post-truth world or not, a Republican abolition of Obamacare will still leave white, working-class Americans who voted for Trump to rot without decent treatment, a hard Brexit will still hurt the British working class more than their rightwing leaders, the Earth will still go round the sun, and two plus two will still equal four.

To pretend that we are living in a culture without historical precedent is to make modernity an excuse for the abnegation of political responsibility. The question for the Anglo-Saxon opposition is not how to cope with a world where truth has suddenly become as hard to find as Trump’s tax returns. It is the same question that has faced every opposition in the history of democracy: how can we make the powerful pay for the lies they have fed to the masses?

Fateh ka Fatwa 2 - Should the burqah / purdah be permitted?



Saturday 14 January 2017

Main Bhi Kafir, Tu Bhi Kafir by abducted teacher, poet and activist Salman Haider

Salman Haider reciting Main bhi Kafir, Tu bhi Kafir




History of the muzzling of the freedom of expression in Pakistan - by Hamid Bhashani

All those in developing countries please look away now - Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries

Jason Hickel In The Guardian


We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nation cheats of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill.

This story is so widely propagated by the aid industry and the governments of the rich world that we have come to take it for granted. But it may not be as simple as it appears.

The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken.


The flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction


What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States

What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

What do these large outflows consist of? Well, some of it is payments on debt. Developing countries have forked out over $4.2tn in interest payments alone since 1980 – a direct cash transfer to big banks in New York and London, on a scale that dwarfs the aid that they received during the same period. Another big contributor is the income that foreigners make on their investments in developing countries and then repatriate back home. Think of all the profits that BP extracts from Nigeria’s oil reserves, for example, or that Anglo-American pulls out of South Africa’s gold mines.


But by far the biggest chunk of outflows has to do with unrecorded – and usually illicit – capital flight. GFI calculates that developing countries have lost a total of $13.4tn through unrecorded capital flight since 1980.

Most of these unrecorded outflows take place through the international trade system. Basically, corporations – foreign and domestic alike – report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing countries directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, a practice known as “trade misinvoicing”. Usually the goal is to evade taxes, but sometimes this practice is used to launder money or circumvent capital controls. In 2012, developing countries lost $700bn through trade misinvoicing, which outstripped aid receipts that year by a factor of five.

Multinational companies also steal money from developing countries through “same-invoice faking”, shifting profits illegally between their own subsidiaries by mutually faking trade invoice prices on both sides. For example, a subsidiary in Nigeria might dodge local taxes by shifting money to a related subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, where the tax rate is effectively zero and where stolen funds can’t be traced.

GFI doesn’t include same-invoice faking in its headline figures because it is very difficult to detect, but they estimate that it amounts to another $700bn per year. And these figures only cover theft through trade in goods. If we add theft through trade in services to the mix, it brings total net resource outflows to about $3tn per year.

That’s 24 times more than the aid budget. In other words, for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows.
These outflows strip developing countries of an important source of revenue and finance for development. The GFI report finds that increasingly large net outflows have caused economic growth rates in developing countries to decline, and are directly responsible for falling living standards.

Who is to blame for this disaster? Since illegal capital flight is such a big chunk of the problem, that’s a good place to start. Companies that lie on their trade invoices are clearly at fault; but why is it so easy for them to get away with it? In the past, customs officials could hold up transactions that looked dodgy, making it nearly impossible for anyone to cheat. But the World Trade Organisation claimed that this made trade inefficient, and since 1994 customs officials have been required to accept invoiced prices at face value except in very suspicious circumstances, making it difficult for them to seize illicit outflows.


FacebookTwitterPinterest Protest about tax havens in London in 2016, organised by charities Oxfam, ActionAid and Christian Aid. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Still, illegal capital flight wouldn’t be possible without the tax havens. And when it comes to tax havens, the culprits are not hard to identify: there are more than 60 in the world, and the vast majority of them are controlled by a handful of western countries. There are European tax havens such as Luxembourg and Belgium, and US tax havens like Delaware and Manhattan. But by far the biggest network of tax havens is centered around the City of London, which controls secrecy jurisdictions throughout the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.

In other words, some of the very countries that so love to tout their foreign aid contributions are the ones enabling mass theft from developing countries.

The aid narrative begins to seem a bit naïve when we take these reverse flows into account. It becomes clear that aid does little but mask the maldistribution of resources around the world. It makes the takers seem like givers, granting them a kind of moral high ground while preventing those of us who care about global poverty from understanding how the system really works.
Poor countries don’t need charity. They need justice. And justice is not difficult to deliver. We could write off the excess debts of poor countries, freeing them up to spend their money on development instead of interest payments on old loans; we could close down the secrecy jurisdictions, and slap penalties on bankers and accountants who facilitate illicit outflows; and we could impose a global minimum tax on corporate income to eliminate the incentive for corporations to secretly shift their money around the world.

We know how to fix the problem. But doing so would run up against the interests of powerful banks and corporations that extract significant material benefit from the existing system. The question is, do we have the courage?

Friday 13 January 2017

Sex-for-rent is the hidden danger faced by more and more female tenants

Penny Anderson in The Guardian

The private rented sector is broken and house-hunting is a dreadful task fraught with abject desperation. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, to the list of nasties (the grasping letting agents and truculent and capricious buy-to-let owners) whom tenants confront can now be added creepy, predatory rentiers offering homes in return for sex.

In the weird swamp world of online portals, everything is so much more dangerous. Female tenants are especially vulnerable when flat-hunting, and some landlords are quite open about what they expect, while others hide in plain sight. The basic act of flat-hunting often involves wandering into an unfamiliar neighbourhood, then entering a flat for guided viewings with strangers: a man you have never met before, who could assume or imagine that signing a rental agreement entitles him to sex. Remember, too, that this man might ultimately be in possession of the key to your home, and, if he’s a live-in landlord, could occupy the adjacent bedroom. 

Some ads are overtly soliciting sex, while others are coy. During a bizarre viewing tour of a tiny flat with a friend, the drunken landlord, having first claimed that he was moving out to live with his girlfriend, changed tack. He explained: “She’s not really my girlfriend and would it be OK if I visited?” I left.

An especially odious case involved a friend who moved out after her landlord offered to reduce the rent if she were “nice to him”. He then accused her of prudery and had the effrontery to pursue her for the income he lost after she escaped his lair. (And frankly, it was a lair, wasn’t it?)

Let’s be clear: this isn’t an issue about consensual sex or self-empowered, independent “sex-workers”. It is exposed women seeking a safe place to live, who are then ruthlessly compelled to have sex with their landlords in order to keep a roof over their heads. Many are trying to escape homelessness – and encounter vile men offering to house vulnerable women in return for sex. And by vulnerable, I don’t just mean women who are poor, but also exploited asylum seekers, those fleeing domestic violence, care leavers and victims of “the right to rent”, where potential tenants must show documents proving they have the right to remain in the UK.

I endured some troubling encounters when using a website popular with flat-hunters, having placed a carefully worded flat-wanted ad. One response sounded positive, but when I called, the landlord was evasive about terms, thought my self-description (“professional female”) odd, and then asked if I wanted “male company”. I hung up. To my amazement, a male friend found this hilarious, doubted my story, then checked to unearth a whole new world of abuse of women (and some men) simply looking for a home.

Yet still coercive homes-for-sex is too often seen as bit of a laugh. It isn’t. It’s not merely undermining but hazardous. A friend home-hunting with her toddler was contacted by one man who offered her use of his home, eventually explaining that he didn’t require rent; rather he “enjoyed light, consensual anal intercourse”. She was both terrified and appalled.

The private rental sector in areas of high demand (especially London) is growing sleazier by the day, and many men are brazen about what they expect. A supporter of tenant support group Acorn shared one man’s response to a female flat-hunter: “Can you pay with sex twice per week?” In a moment of dark levity, a male commenter offered to provide the sex, reasoning this probably wasn’t what sleazebag-guy was expecting.
Many platforms seem slow or unwilling to deal with such abusive posts, or else tacitly tolerate them. Shelter has picked up on the situation, noting the power imbalance and the distorted sense of entitlement: man provides home, man deems himself entitled to sex with isolated, scared, sofa-surfing young woman lacking genuine alternative options.

The answer is of course for offenders to cease and desist. But failing a mass changing of ways and renunciation of sordid sexual bullying, it seems women must take steps to ensure our own safety. So, when flat-hunting, do not go alone. Always let somebody know where you are. If possible, arrange a guided viewing with an agent (if an agent is being used to let the property). And if you are being coerced into sex, inform the police.

The internet has opened up a whole new fresh hell of sleaze and importuning. On the plus side, it’s also excellent for naming and shaming. And hopefully those women so desperate that they have felt as if there were no choice but to submit can be empowered to summon enough courage to report these abusers.