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UK teachers forced to work 100-hour weeks

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Teachers in independent schools are being denied the most basic employment rights, with some not having written contracts and others forced to work more than 100 hours a week.

Growing competition to perform well in league tables, and pressure from parents paying fees as high as £25,000 a year, are forcing head teachers to get rid of staff for the flimsiest of reasons, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) heard yesterday.

John Richardson, the union’s national officer for the independent schools, said that one teacher had been hauled over the coals by his head after a parent complained that her child had achieved 90 per cent in a test instead of an expected 95 per cent.

“If a parent takes a child out of school, that’s £25,000 in income out the door. There’s a motivation not to treat employees as fairly as they should be,” Mr Richardson said.

“I’m sure we have had members sacked as a result of parents’ complaints. The school may take the view that they are taking a financial decision based on possible loss of fees and the school’s reputation. It is a business decision.”

Teachers were routinely dismissed on the last day of term. They were often paid off and asked to sign a confi-dentiality clause, Mr Richardson said.

Speaking at the ATL’s annual conference in Torquay, he said that while teachers in the biggest independent schools could expect to earn a third more than colleagues in the state sector, those in smaller schools that were not members of the Independent Schools Council or any other professional body, were likely to earn less.

He estimated that 15 per cent in the independent sector did not have a contract of employment. Contracts often did not state what hours teachers were expected to work. He added that some schools were introducing compensatory time off for those working around the clock to supervise boarding pupils.

The union will debate a motion this week calling for staff to be paid at least the same as the standard national pay scales operating in the state sector.

Danny Cooper, of the Independent Schools Bursars Association, said that the Association of Governing Bodies of Independent Schools had drawn up a model contract. He said: “I would be most surprised if teachers didn’t have a contract; we may be the independent sector but we are still governed by employment law.”

Hard lessons

— Peter Cash, the head of English at Newcastle-under Lyme School, Staffordshire (annual fees £21,000), was sacked over the school’s poor examination results and told not to work his notice period. He was reinstated after colleagues staged the first strike at an independent school

— Malvern College, Worcestershire (annual fees £25,000) paid £12,000 out of court to Barbara White, an assistant housemistress, who was paid an hourly rate of £3.75 – less than the minimum wage – to work more than 100 hours a week

— ATL won 90 days’ pay for staff at St Elphin’s School, Derbyshire, who were sacked when the owner landed his helicopter on the front lawn and ordered the school shut with immediate effect. Staff had to find accommodation for pupils from as far afield as Dubai.

Alexandra Frean

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Russia said to receive U.S. missile shield plan

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

MOSCOW - Russia received written U.S. proposals on Wednesday which Washington hopes will allay Moscow’s concerns over plans to deploy elements of a missile shield in Europe, Russian news agencies reported.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates promised Russian counterparts at talks in Moscow on Tuesday to offer a set of confidence-building measures aimed at easing Russia’s opposition to the project.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who reiterated Russia’s criticism of the Missile Shield plan, described the U.S. offer on Tuesday as “pretty serious and interesting” and said Moscow was waiting for it to be presented in writing by Tuesday night.

The U.S. proposals arrived in the Russian Foreign ministry on Wednesday, Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as saying.

“They are being studied now,” the source was quoted as saying by Interfax.

The confirmation on Wednesday afternoon in Moscow followed the Russian criticism of the U.S. delay earlier in the day.

“In spite of promises yesterday, written proposals from the American side have not yet been received by us,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said on Wednesday morning.

The United States wants to install parts of the shield in former Soviet satellites Poland and the Czech Republic to protect against missiles from what it terms “rogue states” but Russia opposes the plan, saying it will threaten its security.

Russia complained late last year that a previous oral suggestion from the United States on how to allay Moscow’s concerns on the shield had not been followed up in writing.

Gates committed the U.S. side on Tuesday to putting down on paper its suggestions on confidence-building measures before the end of the day.

The two sides failed to agree on the missile defence shield, one of the key issues dividing them, at the talks on Tuesday. Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said that “on the matter of principle, the positions of our two sides have not changed”.

(Reporting by Conor Sweeney; Editing by Dominic Evans)

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Blues raided as part of corruption investigation

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Birmingham have been raided by police officers investigating football corruption.

The club has promised to co-operate fully with police after financial documents were taken away to be examined early on Wednesday morning.

The raid is believed to relate to the Lord Stevens inquiry, which concentrated mainly on illicit payments to agents.

Birmingham have made it clear they have done nothing illegal and that the investigation is not linked with any official club business.

“The club is fully co-operating with the police in their inquiries which relate to an unconnected third party or third parties,” read a statement on the Birmingham website.

“For the avoidance of doubt no-one connected with the club has been questioned or arrested. No further comment will be made by the club.”

Sky Sports

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Brown promises to meet Dalai Lama

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Gordon Brown has said he will meet Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama when he visits the UK.The prime minister has faced pressure from opponents to make the commitment after recent protests in Tibet.

During prime minister’s questions, he also said he had spoken to China’s premier on Wednesday morning and had urged an end to violence.

Tory leader David Cameron congratulated Mr Brown on reaching what he called the “right decision”.

The Dalai Lama has called for an end to the violence in Tibet and rejected accusations by China that he was responsible for the recent unrest.

‘Absolutely clear’

China says 13 people were killed by rioters in Lhasa. Tibetan exiles say 99 have died in clashes with authorities.

Mr Cameron said: “Does the prime minister agree that our relationship with China is vital… But we must be absolutely clear in telling the Chinese that this is unacceptable.”

Mr Brown said he had spoken to Chinese premier Wen, telling him “there must be an end to violence in Tibet”.

He added: “I also called for constraint and I called for an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties.”

Mr Brown also said: “I will meet the Dalai Lama when he is in London.”

Mr Cameron replied: “Can I congratulate the prime minister on making the right decision… I congratulate him for doing the right thing.”

Mr Brown said: “We make the right decisions at all times.”

The protests began on 10 March - the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule - and have gradually escalated.

They come ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.

BBC

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Human rights groups slam EU over Tibet stance

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have slammed the European Union’s stance over Tibet, calling the reaction “tepid” and demanding much more robust pressure on China from the 27-nation European bloc.

“Once again, this is a test for the European Union, which needs to decide whether it’s going to be a serious player or just sit on the sidelines,” Human Rights Watch’s Asia director, Brad Adams, told the EUobserver.
“The EU’s reaction has been tepid and needs to be much stronger,” he said, criticising the statements from both the European Council and European Commission calling for restraint from both protesters and the Chinese authorities.

“While there has been violence on both sides, the ultimate responsibility lies with China. They’ve created the conditions for the unrest.”

“You can see the difference between how they are dealing with China and how they dealt with Burma, when there was a similar crackdown,” he said, referring to the autumn 2007 assault by the Burmese military junta on high-profile dissidents and Buddhist monks in which thousands of protesters were rounded up and unknown numbers killed.

At the time, the EU banned imports of gemstones, timber and metal from the country.

“The EU shouldn’t just take strong action in response to human rights violations of small states, but also strong states, like China,” said Mr Adams.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International echoed their fellow human rights campaigners. “We’ve seen a very weak statement from the council,” said Susi Dennison, the group’s external relations officer at its Brussels office, in an interview with the EUobserver.

“And the EU presidency statement called on China to respect international democratic principles, but China actually needs to go further and adhere to its international legal obligations, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Convention Against Torture.”

“The EU needs to be pushing for the Chinese government to account for detained citizens in particular, and in the run-up to the Olympics, while the world is watching, they need at a minimum to press China to live up to the human rights commitments that it made ahead of winning the games.”

“Specifically, Amnesty is calling on the EU to push for China to allow an independent investigation, letting in international observers.”

Mirroring Amnesty’s demands, the Human Rights Watch official said: “We’ve called for China to let in the UN to conduct an independent probe into alleged abuses, and we’d like the EU to echo that call.”

European Parliament president opens door to boycott
There have been stronger statements coming out of some member states, such as France and Italy, said Ms Dennison.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said that the EU should put forward a common denunciation of the events in Tibet. “What is happening is deeply worrying, and there are no doubts that what we have said so far will be reiterated more vigorously.”

Meanwhile, the country’s foreign ministry summoned the Chinese ambassador to Rome for talks on the unrest.

French Socialist leader Francois Hollande said Monday (17 March) that his country should consider boycotting the games, while France’s foreign minister said he was considering boycotting the opening ceremonies.

But the EU collectively has been ineffective, said Ms Dennison, while other member states have hidden behind the EU statements.

“When the EU speaks with one voice, it is at its most powerful. Unfortunately, this is similar to our criticisms we had of the EU over Darfur.

“The EU has the ability to speak with one voice, but too often, it doesn’t use it.”

Hans-Gert Poettering, the centre-right president of the European Parliament, who, speaking on German public radio on Tuesday (18 March), said that politicians should reconsider attending the opening of the Beijing Olympic games if the attacks from Chinese authorities continue.

“One has to say to the Chinese: if the repression continues like this, it will cause political leaders who plan to attend the opening of the Olympic Games, as I plan to, to consider whether such a trip is a responsible move,” President Poettering told Deutschlandfunk radio.

He also said he did not rule out a wider boycott of the games. “We must send a signal to Beijing,” he added.

Mr Poettering’s words are a departure from the president’s initial comments on the topic, who the day before had repeated the other European institutions’ call for both sides to show restraint, adding that he hoped that the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing would be a success.

Christina Gallach, spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, responding to the complaints from human rights groups about double standards regarding Burma and China, said: “The relations between the EU and China are totally different from those between the EU and Burma.”

“The EU has bilateral agreements with China and various human rights dialogues with the country. Our relationship with China goes back 30 years.”

“Whereas we have expanded sanctions on the Burmese junta. There is no comparison with Burma.”

She also said that it is not foreseen that the EU will have a special envoy for Tibet, as they do with Burma, a key demand of Tibetan protesters.

‘Classic Chinese lock-down on information’
Meanwhile, European and International journalists’ associations are calling on the EU to beef up its language around freedom of the media in Tibet. International and Hong Kong journalists have been banned from the region, while foreign television news reports have been blacked out in China, along with access to stories and video about Tibet on the internet.

“The EU should immediately press the Chinese authorities to open the door to scrutiny by the international media,” said Aidan White, general-secretary of the International Federation of Journalists. “What we’re witnessing is a classic Chinese lock-down on information, a cordon sanitaire to stop journalists reporting and the world from knowing what’s going on.”

France-based Reporters Sans Frontieres on Tuesday urged political officials to boycott the 8 August Olympic opening ceremony.

“China has not kept any of the promises it made in 2001 when it was chosen to host these Olympics,” the press freedom organisation said. “Instead, the government is crushing the Tibetan protests and is imposing a news blackout.”

The Peoples’ Republic of China say that demonstrators have killed 13 civilians in protests in recent days, while exiled Tibetan leaders in India say some 100 people may have been killed by the Chinese authorities.

© 2008 EUobserver, All rights reserved

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Human rights activist on trial in China

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

BEIJING - Hu Jia, a human rights activist and commentator, was tried in a Beijing court yesterday on charges of inciting subversion against the Chinese government through his writings on the Internet.

Hu’s lawyer, Li Fangping, said the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court would probably hand down its sentence in about a week. Hu, 34, who faces up to five years in prison, pleaded not guilty.

Li said he was given only 20 minutes to defend Hu, which he said was not enough time to mount a persuasive case. “When the prosecutor spoke, the judge let him finish,” Li said. “But when I spoke, the judge stopped me and said time was short.”

Hu was detained Dec. 27 in what was seen as part of a crackdown by Chinese censors and security services to rid the Internet of dissidents in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing this August. Formal charges were filed a month later. His wife, Zeng Jinyan, and their infant daughter, Qianci, were restricted from leaving Hu’s Beijing apartment.

Zeng had worked with her husband on an Internet site that gathered and relayed dissident reporting and opinion on Chinese websites. She was a witness in yesterday’s trial and was allowed a brief meeting with her husband on the sidelines of the 3 1/2 hour proceedings.

Human Rights Watch, a US-based advocacy group, denounced the legal proceedings against Hu and said the charges were inconsistent with international law because they sought to punish peaceful criticism of the Chinese political system.

“Hu Jia’s case has been marked by grave rights violations from the start,” Sophie Richardson, the Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “His arrest was political, the charges are political and his trial is political.”

Premier Wen Jiabao, in a news conference, denied that Hu’s case was part of a party campaign to put away dissidents in advance of the Olympics. “I can make it very clear to you that China is a country under the rule of law,” he said.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Pentagon Destroys Guantanamo Evidence

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

The Pentagon “likely” overwrote or deleted video recordings of a Guantanamo detainee that were subject to a court preservation order, according to a Department of Defense lawyer.

In a declaration Monday night in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, associate deputy general counsel James Hourican said that “it is likely” that Yemeni detainee Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah was monitored by video recorders in the naval base set up to automatically overwrite old material when they reached capacity. As a result, he wrote, “it is likely that recordings of petitioner Abdullah were overwritten and/or deleted.”

Hourican said the footage “potentially” falls within the scope of records the government was required to preserve in a 2005 order by U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts, who is adjudicating Abdullah’s habeas petition.

Hourican’s declaration comes about a month after a Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, who oversees the detention center, described the monitoring system in another declaration. He wrote that the recorders used in at least four camps at Guantanamo automatically overwrote old material every few weeks when they reached capacity. The Department of Defense has since begun storing the material, he said.

The monitoring system was set up to “oversee activities in the camp for the purpose of ensuring good order and discipline,” Buzby wrote. He did not say whether detainee interrogations were included in the deleted footage.

Roberts ordered the Bush administration last month to submit a report detailing whether any evidence relating to Abdullah had been destroyed or spoliated. Abdullah’s lawyers requested it after the CIA disclosed last year that taped interrogations of two suspected terrorists were destroyed in 2005.

The report, filed Monday along with the declaration, says Pentagon officials found no other evidence that records were destroyed in violation of Roberts’ order. The CIA also filed a classified declaration with Roberts, apparently describing the agency’s efforts to determine its compliance with the order.

The report says that the CIA “has not exhausted its search” for records, and that officials plan to submit to Roberts its findings next month.

First reported in The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

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Blackwater sells itself as a peacekeeper

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Blackwater Worldwide, the private security company whose guards are accused of shooting dead 17 Iraqi civilians last year, is attempting to reposition itself as a peacekeeping force as work in Iraq begins to dry up.

Adverts have appeared in security industry journals featuring mothers feeding babies and Blackwater guards smiling as children play in the street.

The US-based company has also set up a subsidiary, Greystone, which is seeking to win peacekeeping and security work from the UN, aid organisations and foreign companies. The improved situation in Iraq combined with a withdrawal of troops and less reconstruction spending means that there is less need for private security companies (PSCs).

Blackwater insists that it is business as usual. But, for everyone else, profits have collapsed and companies are looking for mergers or moving into new regions.

The crash has come after a short but very lucrative boom in Iraq. Blackwater is reported to have earned $1.5 billion from the US Department of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has spent about £178 million on PSCs during the past five years. The boom was triggered by Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, who decided to outsource semi-military work so that the US and UK could deploy smaller forces.

Tasks such as guarding bases, convoys and government officials were given to PSCs, and dozens of companies run by former military officers sprang up to fill the void. They hired other soldiers, sometimes at rates of $1,000 a day, but the new outfits operated under almost no supervision or chain of command.

Blackwater, set up by Eric Prince, a former US Navy Seal, remains under investigation for an incident in Nisoor Square, Baghdad, last September when guards protecting a convoy allegedly opened fire, killing 17 and injuring 24. In another incident, in 2004, four guards were ambushed in Fallujah and their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge, prompting a counter-attack on the city by US forces.

Symon Hill, spokesman for Campaign Against Arms Trade, said: “They are irresponsible, unaccountable and a danger to the reputation of anybody employing them.”

The idea of an outfit such as Blackwater moving into corporate and humanitarian work has been scoffed at by both competitors and campaigners. John Holmes, a retired major-general in the British Army and now a director of Erinys Security, said: “Blackwater is going to have a stigma about them now.”

Mr Hill added: “Private security firm is a worrying euphemism. It would be more honest to call them mercenaries.”

A spokeswoman for Blackwater said: “Blackwater’s only role in Iraq is to provide defensive security, which we continue to do. We have always looked globally for opportunities to serve the US government and we continue to do so.”

The Iraq boom was lucrative while it lasted but for many former soldiers the private security business is no longer the path to riches that it once was.

David Robertson
The Times

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DNA database will not be extended, says minister

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

MPs told that calls from senior police officers will not be answered.

The government has no plans to extend the DNA database despite the wishes of senior figures within the police force to do so, home office minister Tony McNulty told MPs today.

Speaking at a Home Affairs Committee inquiry, Mcnulty said he thought the balance of the number of people on the DNA database is “about right”.

Calls from the police service for a universal DNA database were not going to become government policy, he said.

“I’m not convinced by the notion of a universal DNA database,” he said. ” Where we are now is where we should be.”

The minister said he would be inclined towards not allowing the DNA of those who commit non-recordable crimes to be put on the database, though the matter was still open to debate.

Over the weekend Gary Pugh – who will soon become the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) lead on the DNA database - said children could be put on the database if they showed behaviour indicating criminality in later life.

Acpo has since distanced itself from the comments, saying that they do not reflect any official policy line.

Tom Young
Computing

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CCTV may soon ‘identify’ criminals

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

· Offenders’ faces tracked through CCTV images
· Scheme part of ‘hi-tech revolution on the beat’

The police are developing the first national database of mugshots so that they can use face recognition technology to match CCTV images with details of offenders, MPs were told yesterday.

The system is being developed in a pilot scheme involving the Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Merseyside police which has generated a database of more than 750,000 facial images over the past 18 months. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA), told MPs yesterday that the development of a national facial images database is just one element of a technological revolution in neighbourhood beat policing.

Neyroud, former chief constable of Thames Valley, hopes that by the time of the 2012 London Olympics beat officers will be equipped with advanced “second-generation” hand-held computers which can take and transmit fingerprints, download mugshots and details from the police national computer, and access images from local CCTV cameras.

His hi-tech vision of the future of policing was given during the final evidence session of a year-long inquiry by the Commons home affairs select committee into the “surveillance society”.

The development of an electronic mugshot database is still at an early stage. In the pilot scheme areas the digital photographs are logged of everyone who has been arrested for a criminal offence, with the image linked to the criminal data held on the police national computer. While each force is able to search the electronic mugshots in its own area to match them with CCTV images, the technology does not yet exist to search on the scale needed for a national database.

The NPIA said the database would allow forces around the country to search for, retrieve, store and transmit facial images or video images with scars, marks and tattoos if appropriate. The idea is that each force will store its images on a central national database to give all forces immediate access to the mugshots for intelligence and investigative purposes.

So far only three police forces have been involved in contributing and viewing images, but several other forces, including Greater Manchester, North Wales, parts of the Metropolitan, and the immigration police have been given “read-only” access. So far £6m has been allocated on developing the technology with a national launch date of 2009 pencilled in.

NPIA evidence to the committee raises the prospect of “automated face recognition” to identify known offenders or terror suspects. But Neyroud said trials around the world had shown that there was still a long way to go before such systems could be used reliably.

The police are also developing “behavourial matching” software to pick out odd behaviour in a crowd using CCTV picures. “That might be particularly useful in counter-terrorism or tackling street crime,” he said. “The proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK - with about one for every 14 people - means that we are now accustomed to our movements being monitored in this way and for most people this is not an issue.”

The Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, told the committee that people’s fears over a “surveillance society” were the “meat of myths”. He said that the regulatory oversight of surveillance was far more robust than many assumed. “The idea of big brother or big sister sitting on everybody’s shoulder makes great copy for the newspapers but it is simply not the case.”

lan Travis
The Guardian

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VIDEO: Blockade of the World Biofuels Market

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Thursday March 13th 2008, the World Biofuels Market was blocked by an international group of activists that want to show the world that the Agrofuel Industry is heavily into greenwashing, and is not saving the world as they pretend she does.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns1JS92fugk[/youtube]

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The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

“They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – “Mission Accomplished” – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or “terrorism” – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”.

Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”.

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.

America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.

Robert Fisk

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Dalai Lama threatens to quit over Tibet violence

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

The Dalai Lama has rejected claims by the Chinese government that he orchestrated the demonstrations in Tibet and said he would stand down as head of the country’s exiled government if the violence continued.

The spiritual and political leader yesterday called on both sides to end the violence that has rocked many parts of Tibet in what has been the biggest protest against Chinese rule for two decades.

Speaking in Dharamsala, India, he said: “I say to China and the Tibetans – don’t commit violence. Whether we like it or not, we have to live together side by side,” adding that “if things become out of control then my only option is to completely resign”.

The Dalai Lama’s comments came as the Chinese authorities accused him of masterminding the protests, which resulted in a crackdown by troops and police that killed an unknown number of people.

Speaking at a news conference held to mark the end of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said that the Tibetan Buddhists’ spiritual leader was attempting to undermine China’s hosting of the forthcoming Olympic Games. “There is ample fact – and we also have plenty of evidence – proving that this incident was organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique,” he said.

A witness in the Tibetan capital said it was quiet after a midnight deadline for a lockdown by security forces ended days of unrest. With Lhasa now firmly in the grip of Chinese security forces, the back and forth between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese represented the political battle that both sides are desperate to win.

In a move underlining a carefully developed image of a peaceful power, Mr Wen also called for talks with its long-time foe Taiwan, which China considers an inalienable part of its territory since Chiang Kai-shek’s losing Nationalist Kuomintang fled there after the civil war in 1949, saying China was willing to resume talks with the government.

The olive branch to Taipei serves to further confuse China’s critics. The Tibet unrest has triggered a significant stepping-up of security in China in areas where ethnic groups are seeking greater autonomy.

There were reports of heavy weaponry being loaded on to cargo planes destined for Tibet and the restive province of Xinjiang, where separatist Muslims were recently involved in plots to undermine the Olympics. Troops are being deployed in large numbers in trouble spots.

But China’s international reputation has also suffered as a result of its violent response to the unrest, jeopardising the goodwill Beijing has generated in the run-up to the Games. Tibetan campaigners say hundreds may have died, while the Chinese government puts the number at 16. It sees itself as very much the victim in the upheaval.

There have been growing calls for a boycott of the Games, although the Dalai Lama has rejected such calls, saying that a boycott would achieve nothing.

The International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, has also said that there have been no calls for a boycott although Richard Gere, the high profile pro-Tibetan campaigner, said that it would be “unconscionable” to attend the Beijing Games if China did not find a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

“To host an Olympics is a dream shared by people of many generations in this country. I also hope that by hosting the Olympics we will be able to further friendships and co-operation with people from all over the world,” Mr Wen said.

Clifford Coonan and Andrew Buncombe

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Bush Still Spinning Nukes in Iran

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

The unanimous conclusion of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, that Iran ceased pursuing a program of nuclear weapons in 2003, has dealt a severe blow to the Bush-Cheney agenda of forcible regime change in Iran. For several months, the rhetoric emerging from the White House escalated to the point that many observers predicted Bush would attack Iran before he leaves office.

But although the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) makes it more difficult to carry out his agenda in Iran, Bush is trying to publicly undermine its conclusions. “I have said Iran is dangerous,” he declared, “and the NIE estimate doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world - quite the contrary.” Will Bush provoke an incident with Iran and then respond in “self-defense”?

Bush “rewarded” Iran for its help in consolidating U.S. power in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks by inaugurating Iran into his “axis of evil” in January 2002. The following year, Iran offered the U.S. government a comprehensive plan for negotiations and cooperation, which addressed all of Bush’s claimed pet peeves about Iran. In Iran’s 2003 memorandum, sent to the U.S. government via Swiss diplomats, Iran proposed a “dialogue in mutual respect.” It sought negotiations with the United States on the concerns Bush has repeatedly expressed.

Iran proposed “full transparency” to show “there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD.” It also sought to guarantee “decisive action against any terrorists (above all Al Qaida) on Iranian territory, full cooperation and exchange of all relevant information.” In Iraq, Iran proposed “coordination of Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government.” Iran agreed to discuss the “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad etc.) from Iranian territory” and “pressure on these organizations to stop violent action against civilians within borders of 1967.” And Iran listed its “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration (Saudi initiative, two-states-approach).” This meant Iran would recognize the state of Israel.

The Iranian memorandum also offered to negotiate the following with the United States: “Halt in US hostile behavior and rectification of status of Iran in the U.S.: (interference in internal or external relations, ‘axis of evil’, terrorism list)”; “Abolishment of all sanctions: commercial sanctions, frozen assets, judgments (FSIA), impediments in international trade and financial institutions”; “Iraq: democratic and fully representative government in Iraq, support of Iranian claims for Iraqi reparations, respect for Iranian national interests in Iraq and religious links to Najaf/Karbal”; “Full access to peaceful nuclear technology, biotechnology and chemical technology”; “Recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region with according defense capacity”; and “Terrorism: pursuit of anti-Iranian terrorists, above all MKO.”

This 2003 offer by Iran to negotiate these pressing issues with the United States was an incredible opportunity, which Bush, who claims to pursue diplomacy, should have seized. Yet the White House thumbed its nose at the Iranian offer and then tried to cover up the story.

Why did Bush reject Iran’s 2003 offer and now seek to discredit the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate? Because even if all his stated gripes with Iran were resolved, Bush’s hidden agenda would not be addressed. That agenda comes into focus on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank that claims Paul Wolfowitz, Lynne Cheney, Richard Perle and John Bolton as members. Under the AEI’s list of “Research Projects” is “Global Investment in Iran.”

Just as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was about corporate control over Iraq’s oil, Bush’s strategy on Iran is about making Iran safe for global investment. And just as Bush lied about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein, he is now lying about the perils Iran poses.

U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei has consistently said there is “no evidence” Iran has ever maintained a program of developing nuclear weapons. Yet even though Bush learned about the NIE report in August or September, according to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, he invoked World War III in the same breath with Iran in October. On December 4, Bush lied about when he learned Iran had no weapons program, saying, “I was made aware of the NIE last week.”

Hadley’s report on the timing of Bush’s knowledge of the NIE is corroborated by a shift in the rhetoric emerging from the White House. During the last two months, Bush stopped talking about Iran possessing nukes, and began referring to Iran having “knowledge” of nuclear weapons, which he linked with World War III.

In spite of the unanimous conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate and ElBaradei’s informed judgment, we cannot trust Bush-Cheney to abandon their imperial designs on Iran. Bush will probably provoke a military confrontation with Iran, then invoke the language in the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq that says, “The President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

Congress must support Rep. Neil Abercrombie’s resolution stating that Bush has been given no authority to go to war with Iran.Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law. She lectures throughout the world on human rights and US foreign policy.  http://marjoriecohn.com/

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Is this the end of traditional governments?

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In the first chapter of David Rothkopf’s “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making,” the author quotes Mark Malloch Brown, a British minister of state and former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, recalling what it was like to walk with his wife through a reception in New York for the World Economic Forum. The WEF puts on the famous annual meeting of business leaders, political figures, NGO heads, scientists and other movers and shakers, nicknamed after the small Swiss alpine town where it takes place, Davos. After crossing the room and shaking countless manicured hands in the process, the couple turned to each other and marveled that “we walk though the Davos party and know more people than when we’re walking across the village green in the town we live in.”Brown is far from the only one who could tell such a tale. “Davos man” is an epithet coined by the conservative scholar Samuel Huntington to describe the very specific type that attends the conference. These are people who, as Huntington wrote, “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in “Superclass” is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward “the global power elite” he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town’s frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he’s greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, “an icon of the global literary scene”! (The literary scene? I don’t think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)

Rothkopf’s credible, if not especially original argument in “Superclass” is that over the past several decades a “global elite” has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly — to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a “class without a country,” as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are “the new leadership class for our era.”

A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of “advisory” firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. “Superclass” isn’t as condemnatory as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization manifesto “No Logo,” let alone the conspiracy theorizing of “The Iron Triangle,” Dan Briody’s exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn’t merely fawn over its subjects, either.

Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified “just over 6,000″ people who match his definition of the superclass — that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine “the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide.” These include heads of state and religious and military leaders — even the occasional pop star, like Bono — but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.

Money alone doesn’t cut the mustard. A fabulously wealthy widow living out the end of a quiet life isn’t in the superclass; you must not only possess power, but also freely exercise it. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, is the paradigm: In addition to running a huge private equity firm, he sits on the boards of a half-dozen cultural foundations and belongs to a laundry list of forums and councils, including the WEF. (He also granted Rothkopf a lunch interview at the Four Seasons Grill Room, as the author takes pains to inform his readers.)

The pope is a member of the superclass, as is Osama bin Laden, who can undoubtedly claim influence over current international affairs, even if he sometimes lives in a cave. The Russian illegal arms dealer Viktor “Merchant of Death” Bout is a member, as are Rupert Murdoch and Bill Clinton, who, while no longer commander in chief of the world’s remaining superpower, nevertheless heads the Clinton Global Intiative, a brand new dynamo in the area of international philanthropy.

Rothkopf’s outlook on these players is roughly Clintonian. He believes in capitalism as an engine for prosperity, but he’s leery of the free-market gospel that dictates that “market reforms” ought to be imposed on faltering economies whatever the social and political costs. “It is true,” he writes, “that governments have been unable to do much of what they should do to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more.” But the “free-market” moniker is misleading, since such a thing doesn’t really exist. All markets are tweaked by governments to some extent, and what the preachers of the free-market religion never acknowledge is that their own favorite case studies are surreptitiously finagled to benefit the already rich.

Taking a dinner party at the home of Chile’s finance minister, Andres Velasco, as an example, Rothkopf describes his uneasy response to the oligarchs around him. He realizes that they embrace the market-oriented philosophy of the “Chicago Boys,” Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago disciples, but only so long as the attendant suffering is limited to Chile’s lower classes. They quietly resist reforms that might nibble away at their iron control of the nation’s industries. “While many of the most powerful people in the country embrace ‘progress,’” Rothkopf observes of Chile, “they use their energy and political capital primarily on behalf of the changes that benefit them most directly. Elites in Chile have implicitly or explicitly resisted the changes that might create more competition, more entrepreneurship, more access to capital for the poor and middle classes.” As a result, though Chile is touted as Latin America’s great economic success story, profound inequities in its society have gone comparatively unchanged.

“Superclass” makes a case that today’s elites are an improvement on those of the past: Instead of inherited aristocracy or sheer military might, power is more likely to go to the smart, ambitious and hardworking. Membership is fluid to an unprecedented extent, with new people muscling their way into the inner circle and slackers dropping out of the bottom all the time. Still, as Rothkopf points out, the ranks of this elite are overwhelmingly older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges. Critics have been complaining for years that Davos is too Eurocentric, one reason why the Boao Forum for Asia was started for Eastern financial honchos in 1998.

Above all, like anybody else — in fact, more than anybody else, given the obsessive, often narcissistic energy required of moguls, politicians and would-be messiahs — these people are self-interested. However gifted, they should not be allowed to operate in a vacuum. The difficulty is that most of them exercise their power transnationally, while laws and regulations are confined within the borders of nation-states (which Rothkopf, in classic Davos-man style, regards as doomed). “We must resist the temptation to reflexively attack elites,” he writes, since human societies need leaders and this is an able bunch, but elites ought to be more accountable to the millions of people whose lives they affect. Otherwise, as history (and the current upsurge in religious extremism) shows, they may provoke a violent and chaotic backlash.

Nevertheless, the likelihood of a world government forming to handle the situation is remote — not while nation-states have any life left in them to defend their sovereignty. International institutions — the U.N., especially, but also the IMF and the World Bank — are weak, or weakening, and are hemorrhaging credibility. The answer, according to Rothkopf, is not global government, but “governance,” fewer formal agreements and mechanisms among international entities. The registration and management of Internet domain names (via a collection of organizations) is one example of this sort of governance, orderly and helpful in a way you wouldn’t automatically associate with Rothkopf’s ominous-sounding definition of the term: “Fulfilling government roles with mechanisms” that “lack the full traditional power, authority or mandates of governments.”

Yikes! Rational as it may sound to set up such systems, they just aren’t directly answerable to the populace at large — they’re undemocratic. Of course, as several of the superclass muckety-mucks Rothkopf talks to complain, most of the officials who are democratically selected by the masses don’t really understand — and perhaps aren’t even capable of understanding — the complex global issues that need to be negotiated. American congressmen, senators and even presidents know how to get elected by capitalizing on delusional fears of gay marriage and illegal aliens, but their constituents don’t demand that they master high-level economic or scientific concepts. Chances are, the voters haven’t even heard of those concepts, let alone formulated opinions on them. How can even the superclass be accountable to a public that can’t (or won’t) comprehend what they do?

Still, Rothkopf insists that elites ought to look out for the disadvantaged. “If the global decisions that take place out there only serve the powerful,” he writes, “and many of the people making the decision are not elected or chosen by the people, the average person is going to recognize they have less influence. So it won’t just be unfair, it will produce a backlash.” One such “backlash” is the administration of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, a leader characterized by Rothkopf as part of “the global network of antiglobalists.” Chavez has made political theater out of taunting and thwarting the global elite. No wonder one of the book’s chapter sections is titled “Is a Crisis Inevitable?”

Rothkopf’s idea is that the superclass ought to be smart enough to foresee any such crisis and head it off by doing more to make the currently disenfranchised feel like “stakeholders” in the new global order. The superclass should recognize that “order and legitimacy are the allies of both business and those who seek social stability.” Furthermore, I suppose, they should put pressure on fellow members who step out of line with this program. The upside to the “closely knit” connections between the globe’s top players is that, like any community, they can use exclusion and ostracism to punish those who misbehave.

This is a tall order indeed. Of course, the power elite are not entirely indifferent to the world’s problems. The Davos conference often spotlights issues like poverty in Africa and global warming, and high-profile charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative suggest that at least some of the superclass feel obliged to step in where national governments have failed to do anything substantive. Deciding on how best to gentle the masses, how to settle on standards of global economic conduct and how to enforce those standards won’t be easy, though. Fortunately for the superclass and anyone seeking to work with them, there are consulting companies like Garten Rothkopf (”an international advisory firm specializing in emerging markets investing and risk management related services”) to turn to!

In the concluding pages of “Superclass” it becomes increasingly difficult to dispel the impression that you have just read what amounts to a 380-page business card. Many recent nonfiction books on “current affairs” are little more than that. Organized around a catchy concept and extensively researched by underlings, they win their authors jobs in think tanks and speaking engagements at corporate workshops and conferences — all of which pay much, much more than anyone can expect to make on a book. There are a handful of important ideas in “Superclass,” it’s true, but many of them have been gleaned from other, more original thinkers. There are also a lot of facts and statistics, presumably gathered by Rothkopf’s assistants.

The other thing that you’ll find in “Superclass” is names, lots and lots of names. At times, Rothkopf’s breathless citing of notables, accompanied by the banal details of their C.V.s and hobbies, made me waspish enough to mutter an old saying of indeterminate origins: Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about things and small minds talk about people. Yet, to be fair, people are among the things that Rothkopf has to offer his clients, specifically his knowledge of and acquaintances among the very superclass he celebrates and scolds. One thing “Superclass” assiduously demonstrates is that whatever the mistakes of the global elite, Rothkopf has been around to witness a few of them firsthand.

This explains why “Superclass” lacks the one thing that would probably guarantee it a spot on the bestseller list: the actual names of the 6,000 members of the superclass, as defined by Rothkopf’s criteria. The list exists, Rothkopf assures his readers, but publishing it would be “an exercise in futility.” CEOs lose jobs and retire, tycoons suffer financial setbacks and even get thrown in jail. Therefore, “the day after it was published,” the list “would be obsolete.”

Besides, Rothkopf sniffs, “publishing such a list immediately generates debate about who’s in and who’s out, and obscures the bigger issues involved.” This shows a surprising degree of high-mindedness in a book that is significantly occupied with mini-profiles of the rich and powerful, whom they know, how they operate and where they eat lunch. If printing the list coarsens the conversation, then why compile it to begin with? If, as Rothkopf intimates, the list was a necessary part of the book’s research yet publishing it would nevertheless be a detriment to the project, then why mention it at all? Why let drop the tantalizingly specific number of 6,000 names?

Despite his demurrals, I’m sure there are at least a few conversations that Rothkopf would not regard as fatally cheapened by the sharing of his list of the rich and powerful. To the contrary, those conversations would no doubt be very expensive indeed, taking place between Garten Rothkopf and the clients who pay for its consulting services (which surely cost more than the $26 cover price of “Superclass”). In the end, this might be the most important message contained between the covers of “Superclass”: David Rothkopf’s got the list, and you know where to find him.

Salon

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