Lots of people, including me, are waiting for Barack Obama’s speech tonight.
Much has been made of the fact that this speech will be delivered on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington. The venue for Obama’s acceptance speech has been changed to accomodate all the people that want to watch him deliver it.
There is so much anticipation, I am reminded of how I felt around the time of the Live Earth concerts. The constant analysis (how will this affect the polls; will he deliver?; &tc) threatens the moment. How many people are watching for the sake of the speech and for the sake of the election, compared to those who are watching only to analyse, and to say that they had been there as history was made?
On the other hand, perhaps that is the entire point of going to such an event. Not to be persuaded, but to say that you were there, that you were part of the moment.
An unwelcome characteristic of this age is the scarcity of genuine communal moments. It is a feature, I think, of a culture that is recorded and analysed to death. Instead, nostalgia is commodified and sold to us at expensive music festivals, or third hand on wide-screen TV screens in pubs. Is this presidential campaign a genuine historical moment, or is it just being packaged as such?
Observers in Martin Luther King’s day would not have worried about this. They would not have bothered with the ‘meta’. They could allow themselves to be less cyncial, and genuinely sincere. Anyone who tries that these days is mocked. When Obama and his team attempt to create a genuine moment in history, they are accused of hubris, elitism, messiahnism.
But that is the quest. Our yearning. For sincerity. We think we see in Obama what we do not see elsewhere. Not in John McCain, who has become a cranky, walking contradiction. Not in Gordon Brown, who smiles with half his face. Not even in David Cameron, who, in coming the closest to being convincing, unfortunately slips down into the political equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.
Month: August 2008 (Page 1 of 3)
Like Conor at the Liberal Conspiracy, I can’t really get behind this clamour for a windfall tax on oil companies. I would love to have a dig at Big Oil, but something grates.
Its not that I am like Tim Worstall, who has barrels of faith in the market to sort the problem out fairly. Oil extraction and distribution is a sort of cartel, not a free market. In any case, such a market takes time (maybe measured in decades or centuries) to do its ‘thing’, and in the meantime it is probable that excess profits will accumulate while everyone else is suffering from a recession.
No, my problem is that arguing for a windfall tax is surely another way of saying that you want to change the rules retrospectively.
Economists often argue that to change the rules, and to impose a windfall tax, simply breeds uncertainty in the market, and cause the oil companies to under-invest. Its an irritating argument against taxation, because it has an air of a threat about it: “don’t tax us, or we will mess up your economy”. In the case of a windfall tax, which everyone (even the oil companies) assumes will be a very rare occurrence, it is less believable than (say) the case of top-rate tax-payers. So I can see how the campaigners might discount this economic argument.
But leaving aside the economic risks that a windfall tax entails, surely changing the rules is simply wrong wrong wrong, no further discussion required? Imposing some kind of law (in this case, a tax law) retrospectively is the stuff of wild-eyed dictatorships, surely. Windfall taxes are short-cuts. An easy, lazy solution to a complex situation.
Play by the rules… and if you feel you must change the rules, do so only at the start of the game. If we percieve a problem with the way our country operates, its fine to legislate so that it doesn’t happen in the following tax year. Nationalise the oil companies if we must, or tax them at 99%. Whatever. Only this: we must to legislate for the future, not the past.
There’s a familiar saying, which goes something like “you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable”. Well, an alternative might be that we should judge ourselves by how we treat our most despised. The oil giants are certainly some of the most resented institutions in the country, but to subject them to anything other than the rule-of-law is not, I would suggest, cricket. Compass should leave the oil companies with this year’s profits, and get busy lobbying for a law that would redistribute future profits. That’s the right way a democracy should approach this problem.
Update 3rd September
The only counter argument that has piqued my interest has been that a large portion of the oil companies profits have arisen because of preferences in the system of allocating carbon credits via the European Emmissions Trading Scheme. However, while this is a definite argument for going after excess profits, I’m not sure it justifies doing so retrospectively, as a windfall tax would.
Here’s an interesting alternative medal table (h/t KiwiClaire). It ranks the countries not by how many Beijing Olympic medals they have won, but by their ratio of medals to population, and to GDP.
Britain does not do quite as well in this analysis, and the lead over Australia we have been boasting about vanishes.
What’s noticeable, however, is India’s lack of impact. With only one gold and one bronze medal to share amongst a population of 1.1bn, the planet’s second most populous nation sits at the bottom of the table for both population and GDP measures.
Now, gold medals only really matter if they contribute to a sense of national pride and happiness, as they clearly do here in the UK. If the Indians don’t really care about the Olympics, and are instead focused on their cricket (say), then maybe this underperformance will have no effect. However, if sporting actually results in some kind of increased cultural capital, then surely India is losing out?
And I would say that sporting excellence does increase your cultural influence abroad. With Ussain Bolt’s victories in the 100m and 200m sprints, we have been treated to highly positive coverage of Jamaica and Jamaicans, a welcome change from the terrible impression of the carribean islands we have experienced in recent weeks.
Perhaps India needs another decade or so before it can exploit its Olympic potential. As the New York Times interactive map shows, the now-dominant China were Olympic minnows before 1984.
A while ago, I wrote about how interesting it is to watch small pieces of information, and bite-sized opinions on a blog, coalesce into longer pieces of ‘propoer’ journalism, for wider consumption in print. I cited Andrew Sullivan as the most obvious purveyor this technique.
The issue of the Bush Administration’s morally dubious approach to the torture of detainees is something that Sullivan has been pursuing for months on The Daily Dish, collecting and documenting the various admissions, euphamisms and subtle shifts of language that the American goverment have employed when asked, or confronted. His post yesterday, juxtaposing the ordeal of John McCain in Vietnam, with the situation of current detainees caught up in the so-called war on terror, seems to me to be the culmination of months of blogging:
The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?
According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.
How does the President answer that one? Dodging it, lying, or employing another euphamism, would simply call down a rain-storm of fact-checkers, pointing out the contradictions.
Alternatively, he could simply admit that the USA does torture. The worry here is that such an admission might actually be endorsed by a large proportion of the punditocracy, the politicians, and the public, a frightening thought. Its a can-of-worms, cat-out-of-the-bag type question. Are we ready for the answer?
Dear me, dealing with some companies can be quite traumatic.
I signed up with TalkTalk earlier in the month, seduced by their phone and broadband offer for a tenner a month. Today, however, I phoned to cancel the service, and was subjected to a continual barrage of questions about why I would dare do such a thing. I have my reasons – some logistical, some financial, and some technical – but when I’ve firmly stated my decision, all I really want is to sever the relationship as quickly and as painlessly as possible. What I do not want is the customer service team moralising about how wrong I am, probing my decision for false lemmas. The last time I was subjected to such interrogation was in a Moroccan carpet shop, and at least then they gave me tea.