Category: Op-ed essay

Nice to see someone else asking about the responsibilities of the regulatory authorities in banking and financial service (cf. my earlier post on the regulators). Though disappointing not see cited John Braithwaite and Peter Grabosky, ‘Of Manners Gentle: Enforcement Strategies of Australian Business Regulatory Agencies’ (Oxford University Press, 1986). In this Australian empirical study the authors found there was neither enforcement nor strategy, but a great deal of ‘she’ll be right,’ while six-figure salaries were paid to the regulators, evidently on the assumption that nothing so untoward as enforcement would occur.

It seems little has changed. In the 1980s I was surprised to witness the hostile reaction to this book. I heard it denounced more than once as evidence that the authors did not understand the Australian way. That was about the same time the media was ridiculing Dutch bankers who had come to Australia to confront and complain about Alan Bond. The flag was raised and the Dutchmen sent packing. Hypocrisy is always amusing. The more so when it is wrapped in nationalism, since many Australians brag that they are not nationalistic in between bouts of hysterical nationalism frequently kindled by sports.

A propos of the regulators, I infer from what is not said in O’Brien’s piece that the Royal Commission is carefully steering clear of bringing their role(s) into question. Is that discretion itself another instance of manners gentle?

By chance the other night I spoke to a graduate who works for an unnamed regulator and asked about all of this. In reply I got the corporate line about the technicalities of the legislation. My informant pretended to believe it, and politely I pretended to take its seriously. Ah uh. Regulators who find that their legislation is inadequate have, often, a legal responsibility to point that out to parliament, and, always, a moral responsibly to offer some sort of warning. Sailing on is not an option.

O’Brien also omits the role of the media and those financial wizards in newspapers, on radio, and the television telling one and all about money in all its sizes and shapes. It seems that all those financial reporters were too busy pontificating to do any investigating and reporting. The independent ABC and the independent Sydney Morning Herald were as silent on this subject as all the other, numerous media outlets, despite their loud and frequent claims to superiority.

Not only are they passed over, but even let off the hook on reporting about the Royal Commission because the Commission publishes on Fridays. Evidently no reporter can be expected to examine material appears on Friday. Must remember that.

Cut and paste this link into a browser to see the article:
http://www.afr.com/business/banking-and-finance/justice-deferred-hubris-incompetence-and-lost-opportunity-in-the-australian-finance-system-and-its-regulation-20180522-h10efl

Since time began, or so it seems, Country Party, oops National Park politicians have been on high horses about the virtues of country life and country folk. While today they do not readily air those views on national news, they certainly do so when back in their constituencies. Chief among the country virtues touted is always family, family, and family. Cannot have too much family.
The implication is always that city folk are less wholesome, less virtuous, less trustworthy, less family. Ah, for the country life and family!
The reality is that farms are dangerous places for adults and children. All those chemicals that are handled, mixed, stored, and applied, and sometimes (sssh) applied in excess, often by people who disregard and deny unseen threats. Then there are the animals and diseases that attack them and that they carry. Finally, there is all that powerful equipment, occasionally operated by poorly prepared individuals since licensing is not required or enforced.
Some years ago a National Party leader proclaimed the evils of a Labor opponent with explicit reference to country life and family and invoked marital fidelity as an electoral standard. It was only later that all those chemicals got to this proclaimer of the virtues of the country life. As yet no ABC journalist has thought to re-air the archival video of this proclamation in the current context. Wonder why?
Self-appointed representatives of the Fourth Estate in Australia have also declaimed, more to convince themselves than any auditor, that the local media is too mature and elevated to invade the privacy of politicians, in so far as private life does not effect the performance of public duties. Yes, that has been said with a straight face, and I have heard it said by pundits more than once.
The reality behind this forbearance, which no one in the Canberra Press Gallery will admit, is that the many of the extramural activities of members of the political class are with members of the Canberra Press Gallery: member to member. The Gallery has its own version of omertà.
Despite my efforts to ignore reality, occasionally some of it seeps in.

Before I review the recent film, what follows sets the scene for the historical event, details largely absent from the film.
Staff work is never celebrated and when it works, it passes unnoticed. The Royal Navy began planning for a mass withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force, including directly from beaches, six days before the first lift occurred. Procedures were elaborated, the wording of simple and clear orders hammered out and communicated, beach wardens designated and briefings written for them, auditing began of flat-bottomed small craft on RN vessels, estimates made of rates of embarkation per hour under fire, distribution of medicine and field dressings to RN ships begun, drafting medical personnel and assigning them to ships started, listing civilian craft in southern ports was started, decks were cleared on RN transports, and so and on. Operation Dynamo started long before the first Tommie got wet.
Operating at the limit of the range of fighter aircraft from England, the Royal Air Force flew more than a hundred missions over Dunkirk during the evacuation. However, no one could guess at the timing of German attacks and so The RAF was often absent when the Luftwaffe was present and vice versa.
Nearly all of those evacuated were taken off piers and moles on RN boats and transferred to warships. The sea around Dunkirk beaches, by the way, is shallow, meaning the larger ships had to stand well out, and it was a long transfer from shore to ship. Six or more RN ships were sunk by German air attacks with much loss of life. At the initiative of their captains, some French ships also loaded troops, and likewise some French ships were sunk.
The French defence of a line around Lille resisted for four days against a superior force holding ten German divisions off Dunkirk, and that reduced the pressure on the perimeter. In the end much of Lille was levelled by house-to-house fighting. The town of Dunkirk itself was obliterated by artillery fire. By the way. These battles are seldom mentioned in the British accounts of Dunkirk. By the way, Lille was the hometown of Charles de Gaulle and members of his family died in this struggle.
Nearly all of the little ships that participated in the exercise had Royal Navy personnel on board, though often a very junior cadet, partly this was to honour the legality of impressing the boats into service and indemnifying the owners and civilian crew. The little ships ferried men from the beaches to the ships, and some sailed directly back to England, like that of Mr Miniver. One estimate suggests six thousand men were evacuated directly to England by little, civilian water craft. I have seen that said as ‘only six thousand’ out of the more than 330,000. True that is less than .02 percent. But it is 6,000 individuals welcomed home from the cauldron and as a whole they amount to a light division which later any general later would be glad to have.
While there was planning and preparation, there was also disruption and confusion. Much fell to the initiative to those on the spot. That initiative worked as well as it did in large part because of the planning that set the scene.
French troops had fallen back onto the line Dunkirk – Ostend which was slowly collapsing. There was no plan for them to do anything but fight. Communication between French field commands and headquarters were cut, and communication among the field commands was likewise nearly zero. (Much of the responsibility for the loss of communication must go to French High Command which refused the use of field radios.) Without communication, without orders, responsibility fell down the chain of command ever lower in an army that did not prize initiative.
When the British evacuations began, the French troops in the area had no orders. Some individuals made up their own minds and tried to join in. The best way was to change coats by peeling one off a deadman and trying to look English.
At times French officers on their own initiative tried to board their men in units, and some were successful and others were turned aside. This refusal to board some of the French was reported to Prime Minister Winston Churchill by British army officers, and Churchill immediately ordered that there be no discrimination but rather first come, first boarded. This applied to the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, and even some Poles and Czechs who were there.
There was the germ of a plan, hatched by the French Under-Secretary of State for War in the Reynaud Government to withdraw to the Cotentin peninsula in Western Normandy. Troops evacuated from Dunkirk could be fed into that plan. That Secretary of State was General Charles de Gaulle.
The 100,000 French troops disembarked in England from Dunkirk spent only two or three days there. They were entrained to Bristol, Swansea, and other western ports and shipped to Bordeaux while the war continued.
While French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud wanted to fight on, the generals at the French meeting table were defeated. They convinced the majority of cabinet that further resistance was futile. The cabinet asked the President, a figurehead, to empower Phillipe Pétain to ask what terms the Germans would offer. That was his mandate when named prime minister of a one-man government. Instead he surrendered without any effort at negotiation. Doubtless negotiation would have failed but the effort might have bought a little more time and much more dignity. But that surrender without the effort rendered the legitimacy of his claim to government suspect to many.
While 200,000+ men of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated at Dunkirk, thousands of others were evacuated about the same time along the north coast, and later more than 100,000 others from the west coast of France. These other evacuations were less heroic and are not well known as a result but each was done in difficult circumstances. The shallow waters off Dunkirk kept the U-Boats away but not so off Bordeaux.
That Dunkirk became a moral victory has a simple but overlooked explanation. With the impulses of a democratic politician, Churchill who had become prime minister on the day Dynamo started, went to Waterloo Station in London to see for himself the battered and wounded troops returning from the south coast. As he walked among them, they cheered him and he they; he put his hat on his walking stick, and his resolve to fight on multiplied. Democracy at work. They were beaten but not defeated and he got the message.
At Dunkirk the decisions were many. When the Germans broke through at Sedan, one prong drove to the sea to cut off the British Expeditionary Force there and the two French armies in Belgium, while another drove at Paris to decapitate the French government. The French resistance was stiff in some places, like Lille, yet in other places it dissolved. The RAF decided to withdraw its aircraft from Frenchg airfields to England, lest their airplanes, fall into the hands of the advancing Germans, to save its assets to fight another day. This RAF withdrawal outraged many Frenchmen who hoped they would fight on, come what may. Here national interests diverged among the Allies. It seemed all or nothing right now for the French, but the English could wait to fight again another day.
Hmm, but the French did have an alternative, one that Reynauld proffered without success. To take the government into exile to Algiers and continue the war from the vast French Empire with the imperial army. There might have been another day for them, too. One of his generals had an airplane fuelled and ready to do just that.
While some French officers thought the British evacuation was a betrayal, that sentiment is largely hindsight. At the time, a withdrawal kept those troops, a third of them French, in the war and not in prison camps which was the fate of those who remained. Most of the defence of the Dunkirk perimeter fell to the French who held longer than the Germans had estimated they could.
That the Germans did not go all out against Dunkirk seems to be the conclusion. Why not? Partly because the strategic goal was Paris, and not Dunkirk. Most of the Luftwaffe efforts were directed to that end. As terrible as the Luftwaffe attacks on Dunkirk beaches and shipping were, most of its efforts went to paving the way for the advance on Paris.
It is also true that the German forces attacking Dunkirk were at the end of an attenuated and nearly exhausted supply line. Petrol, ammunition, medical care, medicines, fresh water, tires and treads, field dressings, food, oil, replacement parts, boot laces, all of these were depleted, as were the men. Machines were breaking down from two weeks of continuous use. The Germans had to slow down to recuperate and re-new energies. The horses that carried the vast bulk of the supplies were knackered.
There are other explanations that seem less credible. One is that Hitler gave the stop order, rather than just agreed to it, to open negotiations with England. Some connect this speculation to Rudolph Hess’s earlier flight. It seems a long bow. The best way to negotiate with England would be from strength by capturing the British Expeditionary Force which had in its ranks the vast bulk of England’s professional army at the time, that part which was not in the impregnable fortress of Singapore.
Another explanation is that Hitler wanted his genius recognised and gave the stop order to show the generals who was in charge. It fits the man, but it does not explain why the stop continued as long as it did. What explains the duration is the re-supply of the Wehrmacht and also that the forces in the north had a second-order priority compared to the forces driving onto Paris. This latter offensive is neglected by British accounts because their were no British troops involved, only French, of whom thousands died.
There was no hurry because the German supposition, based on its own staff work, was that most of the men trapped in and around Dunkirk had no where to go. What surprised the Germans was that the evacuation worked. Their staff work concluded that an evacuation would lift about 40,000 men plus of minus ten percent, and leave the rest. Ergo, the German General Staff did not see any reason to spend its assets at Dunkirk.
While the Luftwaffe attacked the evacuating ships at piers there were few U-Boat in those waters. Most were patrolling in the North Atlantic. German planning did not anticipate the concentration of Royal Navy shipping in the channel and so the Kreigsmarine added little to the effort. Moreover, the shallow waters of the English Channel are not U-boat friendly. But the British staff work had created the naval concentration in advance, including pulling ships back from the Norway campaign and stopping others from sailing to the Mediterranean.
Among the heroes of the Miracle at Dunkirk are scores of RN staff officers who worked around the clock for a week of more to set it up.
These ruminations were stimulated by the release of the recent movie but I did not bother to see it on the assumption I would find its inaccuracy annoying, curmudgeon that I am. No doubt others who saw it will now feel they know the history, having ‘seen the movie.’
No doubt the account above is incomplete and perhaps inaccurate in part, and corrections are welcome.

Think about it. Free public education for more than a century and a half has brought us to this point.

The Twitter-in-Chief,
‘Top Gear,’
climate change denial,
Erich von Dänikan,
Faux News,
the NRA hegemony,
all those No voters, and
the demographic that watches Channel 7Mate.
Are these the fruits of all the time, money, effort, intelligence, good will, and energy put into free public education for 150 years? Now that is a depressing thought.
All those stalwarts who championed free public education did so in the belief that it would lead to an informed, intelligent, rational, patient, and capable citizenry and all those teachers who have laboured to realise that vision, all of that and yet….
Who is going to explain these results to the shades of Harriet Martineau and Horace Mann?

Eric Blair, we need you now more than ever. One of Blair’s biographers, Bernard Crick, says Blair was partly moved to write ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ because he feared that free public education would not prevent the society he portrayed in the novel.

The poet Robert Penn Warren wrote ‘The Legacy of the Civil War’ (1961). In it Warren asks readers to imagine General Robert E. Lee shaking hands and congratulating the strutting Southern governors of the 1950s and 1960s barring children from schools, encouraging baying crowds of Bible-grasping gorgons to shout abuse at children, licensing hissing mobs to burn churches, sanctioning lynch parties, raping and pillaging for sport, and praising masked men hiding in the dark. Would Lee approve such deeds done under that flag he served? No, he would regard such acts as the desecrations that they are, and he would have said so.
The old remains new.
A close examination of pictures from the March on Washington in 1963 will show Warren there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial come to give his own thanks. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work, living most of his latter years in New England, no longer welcome in his homeland, and it shows in the poetry.

A callow undergraduate, I heard him recite some of his poems and the memory has since remained bright. There are some short excerpts on You_Tube.

How is it that the USA Presidential incumbent retains the support of his voters when he acts repeatedly against their material interests?
Wake up! It is simple.
The President of the Electoral College of the United States delivers to his core supporters every day the two most important things they value. All else pales into insignificance against these two.
First, he is not a black man.
Second, he is not a woman.
End. It is primal. It is not about policy, not about politics, not about consistency, not about probity, not about government….
Politics is simple, until analysts make it complicated for their own reasons.
He also delivers to this constituency in other ways, too.
He is not an immigrant.
He does not have a foreign sounding name.
The title of this entry is taken from Vicente Fox, one-time president of Mexico, who has poked fun at Trump Donald on Facebook with more wit and zest than most others have done.

Every day for the last fifty years the Australian economy has been on the verge of collapse.

Not a week goes by but that the financial media offers dire warnings about increasing house prices, falling house prices, the high value of the Australian dollar, the low value of the Australian dollar, disastrous pay raises, long overdue play raises, the flight of capital, the threat of incoming capital, the burgeoning public deficit, credit card victims, exploited workers, impossibly high interest rates, perilously low interest rates, and on and on and on and on.

The slightest change in the cost of shoes or rent of 0.001% is described as a ‘massive leap.’ Any increase is crippling and any decrease is devastating.
Ad nauseam, indeed.
‘Wolf!’ has been cried so loudly and so often and in such contradictory terms that I have developed lupinophobia. Figure it out, Mortimer.
While all this nay saying occurs, the GDP, the GNP, calories eaten, the Per Capita Income, life expectancy, population growth, household consumption, superannuation savings, they have all increased to historically high levels and far above that of 95% of the world’s population. Most people in the Lucky Country are lucky enough to live like kings and queens compared to most of the rest of the world. compared to a their grandparents, compared to the entirety of history.
My conclusion is that hysteria is the only register for the journalist, who is completely detached from reality. Alternative facts have long had roots.

How low can Rupert go? Another new record.
I have noticed in the ‘Times of London,’ the ‘Wall Street Journal,’ and our very own ‘The Australian’ and no doubt Fox News (but I never watch fiction) that President Barry ‘Bomb ‘em’ Obama is now being sledged.
In an effort to suck up to the Blond Beast, and with Hillary Clinton sidelined, Murdoch Rupert’s organs are now devoted full time to blackening Barry Obama. [Get it?] The snide racism of that woman on Fox News, who has now gone to NBC to continue the bile, is not enough. (The business decision was no doubt that she would drag her audience with her to NBC in the main stream. How the mighty NBC has fallen.)
Now that Vladimir Putin is the Blond Beast’s best friend, Obama cannot be disparaged for being soft on Russia, so….
In a creative leap, the Organs of Rupert have decided — sit down — Obama is a closet, no not that, a closet Marxist! Yes, they have! It has been drumpeted as news, in feature articles, and one of the local hacks has slurred it out a keyboard in an op-ed piece. Piece, indeed.
Proof once again that there is no limit to hypocrisy. (Mitch McConnell has a long way to go to compete with this standard. Keep trying, Mitch! [He hasn’t got a chance, but it doesn’t hurt to see the pathetic clot try.] )
Hypocrisy yes, but hardly original. The Alt Right nut cases have been saying this for eight years. Or that he is an Islamic fundamentalist. Or an alien spawn. Or…… They cannot seem to make up their minds. Wait, ‘minds,’ maybe that is the problem.
But now the nut cases are in charge. H. L. Mencken was right.
Here’s a flash.
Putin and the Blond Beast will pair up as running mates in the next elections in each country.
Or, another:
The Blond Beast will sell, er, marry off one of his children to Putin to cement the alliance.

The post-mortems of the 2016 presidential election in the United States flow. It is all so simple, no wonder the PhDs could not see it coming and still cannot see it going. She is a woman. End.
[Warning, this post is all text. The graphics I reviewed to illustrate Hillary hatred were all so crude and stupid I chose not to include them. They make the programming on Chanel7MATE look refined and cultivated.]
By some mischance I stumbled onto some Hillary Clinton hating web sites the other day. I was so stunned by the cancerous bile that I could not immediately click on with my mouse finger. I have since recovered from the shock of a head-on collision with the whacko sickos. A brief digest follows.
Hillary Clinton has sold nuclear weapons to North Korea. (Evidently she carried them to Japan in her luggage when Secretary of State, and ducked into Chinese submarine in Tokyo Bay to hand over the goods.) In return North Korea paid millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. This is the form for many of the fantasies. As if North Korea had millions, apart from counterfeit.
Hillary Clinton has secret meetings with the Elders of Zion to collect still more dosh for the Foundation. As per the protocols of the Elders of Zion these meeting have included a banquet of roasted Christian suckling babies.
Want to know who has funded and armed ISIS? Look no further than Hillary Clinton. She did it.
Ku Klux Klan leader found dead. Guess who did it!
That tornado that destroyed Smallville, she brewed it in her witch’s cauldron.
Bill Clinton went vegetarian for no other reason than to destroy the All-American junk food business. Who put him up to it? Guess! Hillary!
It turns out she plotted with the Russkies to hack into the electoral system and puff up her vote.
The home team lost in the state finals because of referee’s call, well, she paid off the ref to favour the other team.
No villainy is to small for this one-woman coven.
I will not identify the websites since I have no wish to encourage visits.
I stumbled on these when I noticed an angry rejoinder to some innocent remark on the Facebook post about her lead in the popular vote. How, I wondered, could anyone dispute this fact. Little did I know.
It goes on and on, but I don’t.
These fantasies are so absurd, it would take forever to unwind and refute them.
Conclusions that are not reached by evidence and reason, in any case, will not be amended by evidence and reason.
That there is not one scintilla of evidence to substantiate these claims, which is readily and freely admitted in some cases, and cited as the ultimate proof of her guilt. She is so nefarious and spectral that she leaves no evidence in the mirror. (Figure it out, Mortimer.)
Hating Hillary meets some kind of emotional need in the haters. So it seems given the intensity of the SHOUTS. Yes, they are frequently in capital letters.
However it is not limited to the lunar right but can also be found on the lunar left. The King Street socialists in Newtown, the ones who tape their rants and dire warnings to the street light posts failed to predict the U.S. election result. The old crystal ball is not what it used to be.
For months these semi-literate damnations, each more outraged than the last, denounced Hillary Clinton as a soulless golem who eats proles for lunch and sups with the military-industrial complex.
Coda: The mystery to me of her defeat it how someone so smart, so organised, so well prepared, such a master of the game, did not clinch the states necessary to get the electoral votes. Maybe she listened too often to Al Gore. No wait, surely no one listens to Al Gore.

For years I have heard pygmies declare that ‘ein(e) Berliner’ is a pastry. This is said for the purpose of belittling Jack Kennedy’s use of the phrase, in a speech in Berlin in June 1963, and to deprecate him, too. A search on the web will produce many hits for examples. Enough to satisfy those easily satisfied.
Below is the index card he wrote to insert the phrase in the speech. Before pedants begin correction the spelling, note that it is phonetic and was jotted off in the car on the way to the podium.

Once or twice I have bridled at this casual derogation, based on my own study of German, but that was always dismissed by the interlocutors.
Then one thing was obvious ,,, to those who looked. The Berlin audience in 1963 understood the phrase in the way Kennedy intended.
A crowd of 450,000 according to Wikipedia.
No PhD ever had such a reaction from such a mass of listeners. At the time, at the place it was a message received five by five, loud and clear. There is plenty of evidence on You Tube.

The other thing is that it is a grammatically correct statement as even a beginning students of the language know. I have had that confirmed many times over the years by German speakers, and again recently in the image below, taken from a Deutsche Welle website after a murderous attack in Berlin in 2016.

Perhaps the pygmies will now mock these two woman, too, while they bury their dead.
The attacks of pygmies on giants are endless, often petty, always trivial, and seldom accurate. The attacks satisfy some need in the pygmies.
No doubt some entrepreneur in Berlin has been marketing donuts with this meme for years. No doubt someone will offer alternative-facts. It was ever thus.
The other sign says ‘Berlin will hold together.’ Perhaps the best rendering is ‘Berlin will remain.’