The GWIRE

David Kellermann, chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, found dead in his home earlier today.

David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.

Mary Ann Jennings, director of public information for the Fairfax County, Va., Police Department, said Kellermann was found dead in his Reston, Va., home. The 41-year-old Kellermann has been Freddie Mac’s chief financial officer since September.

Jennings said that a crime scene crew and homicide detectives were investigating the death, but that there didn’t appear to be any sign of foul play.

My thoughts are with his friends and family.

(h/t to Shakesville.)

Almost two weeks ago now the media was covered in news of the arrest of 12 men in Greater Manchester and Liverpool on terrorism charges. The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and the Prime Minister Gordon Brown were quick to dispel the questions, asked by nobody in the media, about whether these charges were designed to distract attention from the various scandals that have dogged Labour over the last few weeks by immediately proclaiming that the arrests were the result of serious intelligence about a serious terror threat. These twelve men were such a danger that Gordon Brown publicly berated Pakistan about its supposed laxness in prosecuting terrorism in its own country, following the announcement that most of the arrested men were Pakistani nationals here on student visas. As many as two of the men had gained their student visas in fraudulent colleges set up to enable foreign nationals to gain easy access to the UK for work and/or terrorism purposes.

Over the course of the investigation, GMP raided many properties and released to the public carefully vetted evidence of terrorist activity, such as photographs of buildings in Manchester and packets of Tate and Lyle sugar – helpfully headlined by The Sun as a “bomb part” in a style they later didn’t defend as “not credulous propaganda at all” but probably would if anybody had asked them about it. Allegations that sugar is common in all UK households and commonly added to that most British of drinks, tea, have been absolutely ignored.

The mention of “photographs” as evidence of a terrorist plot without any context led Photography Rights activists such as McDuff of The GWIRE blog to say that “if merely having photographs of Manchester landmarks in your possession is compelling evidence of being involved in a terrorist plot, I suspect that the GMP could find evidence that half the population of Manchester are similarly suspect of terrorism. I hope their cells are big enough after I tip them off to arrest myself and everybody I know.” McDuff is also alleged to keep sugar in his house, although it is as yet unconfirmed as to whether he uses it to manufacture bombs.

Today, however, despite previous assertions that the raids were designed to thwart a “very, very big” plot due to take place “very soon”, it now turns out that none of the men investigated were guilty of anything whatsoever and all have now been released without charge.

Adding to the complications around the case is the resignation of the UK’s top Anti-Terrorism Police Officer, Bob Quick, after he walked into Number 10 with the names of those due to be arrested clearly on display. The question may well be raised as to whether more evidence would have been found had Mr Quick not forced the GMP’s hand by revealing the information in such a cack-handed way, but this has been dismissed by the Home Secretary herself who said that the raids were only brought forward by “a matter of hours”. Rather less frequently asked was the question of why Mr Quick was photographed in the first place. According to liberal activist Craig Murray:

[I]t was no accident that he was photographed entering Downing Street…

In the first Iraq War I used to hand carry intelligence reports to No 10, and sometimes had to explain them personally to Mrs Thatcher. I never once took one in the front door. In fact I have only ever walked in the front door of No 10 when accompanying a foreign dignitary or attending a party. The front door is for people the government wants to be seen – hence the permanent stand of photographers which captured Bob Quick. People arriving to brief on secret matters go in through the back door, or more likely through the Cabinet Office.

This certainly lends credibility to the theory that the raids were in fact politically motivated, based on the need of a beleaguered Prime Minister and Home Secretary to hand some red meat to an eager press all too willing to ignore ministerial indiscretions if there was a chance to tell everyone how scary foreign people are. Thankfully, our ever avid press has so far asked the question around zero times and rising, expected to finally reach the obvious conclusions at some after it’s stopped being distracted by today’s budget, announced the day after the alleged terrorists were released in an allegedly entirely unplanned coincidence.

Initial reports from the BBC suggested that at least the men were suspiciously dodgy immigrants and would be deported on allegedly non-specious grounds of “national security”, but this was also later explained to be entirely meaningless.

All in all, nobody whatsoever concluded that this was a fine day for British Democracy, except Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown. Our useless media are unavailable for comment.

OK, so I lied. Lugo is facing a third paternity claim. At least this post is about some form of proliferation so it’s not a total lie. Anyway, this time the mother has sympathetic and even flattering words to say about the man. We will hear all kinds of opinions if the sample size keeps growing.

I’d like to hear your suggestions for a new tag to classify all these posts.

I will be posting about the Bolivian raids in the future. The main reason I haven’t posted about it in the future yet is that at the moment Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo keeps having new babies more and more years ago! His scandalous sex life is even wrecking grammatical tenses, man.

Here’s my translation of Paraguay’s Última Hora:

Benigna Leguizamón annouced on Monday that she has given the president 24 hours to recognise her six-year-old son. The woman resides in Ciudad del Este y assures she held relations with the head of State during his stay in San Pedro, where the now president was a bishop.

DNA testing is pending, but Lugo inspires little confidence at the moment.Three of his female ministers are calling on him to set his record straight. I mean, how can you govern or pay attention to anything else when every week you get a new story? Is Lugo trying to enact national social reform as a way to give alimony to his vast and anonymous progeny? What the hell, man? Seriously, though, this is, like, the opposite of a good thing.

There’s video here in Spanish where Leguizamón complains that Lugo never took responsibility for the child. This story is even more damning than the previous one. This child was born in 2002, back when Lugo had no political aspirations. Having no illusions of becoming a civilian at the time, Lugo behaves like the scum of the earth for six years.

BBC coverage.

On the one hand he is better than most by admitting things quite quickly. On the other had, he seemed to be neglecting his duties, which prompted the mother to sue him. That’s pretty scummy.

I’m still holding judgement on the personal aspects of the story because no facts are in. I have nothing against consensual sex between adults, despite the age difference. The fact that he was a priest doesn’t really concern me; it’s not like priests breaking their vows is a new thing. If the relation did not start when Viviana Carrillo was underage I guess it’s OK. There’s still the chance that Carrillo was an adult victim of abuse or coercion, but there is at the moment no indication to feed those rumours.

Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo got slapped with a paternity suit by a 26 year old woman. They met ten years ago at the home of the then-young girl’s godmother. The child in question will turn 2 years old this year. The relevant dates are clustered around Lugo’s resignation as bishop and his announcement of political aspirations. Which is to say, if the paternity claim is true then Lugo’s decision to leave the Church was either caused by or celebrated with carnal knowledge. Make of that what you will; I’ll reserve my opinions until the matter is aired and more details are available.

Running in politics was bad enough for Lugo’s standing in the Roman Catholic  Church, but sex with non-altar-boys may be too much for the Vatican. This seduction will not stand, man.

Now, for all their crapness, there are some papers that do have redeeming features in this country. The Grauniad may be almost pathetic with its desperation to buff Labour’s banana at the moment, but to their credit they have been more-or-less at the forefront of the accurate reporting on the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, as opposed to the other clowns in the Fleet Street circus.

This video, the one people suspected probably existed somewhere, should go through the proper channels and the police officers in question should be sanctioned in accordance with the law. I’ve got no real beef with the police in general on this matter (although I do with the coppers in the footage), partly because many police officers do at least agree with me in principle on the matter, partly because they’re just the enforcement arm of a state that’s gone nuts with authoritarian legislation over recent years so it’s hard to fault them for doing their job, and partly because “the police is all bastards” is a pretty unhelpful generalisation.

Where my main ire stays is the shoddy work of just about every other news organ in believing the police press release rather than doing any reporting. We know the political arm of the police, particularly the Met, massage the truth about these things – the De Menzes case showed that in full media spotlight but it was hardly an isolated case – so to engage in chinese whispers based on official press releases and hearsay from other people and then publish the results across two pages of the Evening Standard is absolutely shockingly bad journalism – churnalism, to be precise. While it’s arguable the precise details of Mr Tomlinson’s unfortunate demise weren’t known, the heavy-handed nature of police action during them was hardly a secret, nor restricted to the socialist press or leftist blogosphere. To ignore a story about masses of police inciting violence during a protest on the streets of London in favour of the simpler narrative that the protesters were all violent thugs is simply not what the press should be for.

Of course, we can apply Hanlon’s Razor and say that this is simply the result of people trying to do a job they’re simply no good at and ballsing it up, but it seems at least plausible that there might be some element of an agenda here. What have you got to say, people of The Sun?

Widow rips down G20 yobs’ tributes!

Right on!

Now, of course Mrs Tomlinson has every right to object to mischaracterisations of her husband as being one of the protesters rather than someone trying to make his way home. But I rather think that calling people putting up messages of condolence ‘yobs’ is perhaps laying the Currant’s not-so-secret agenda out there for everyone to see. Went to the protest? Got some long hair? Maybe sympathise with the plight of the downtrodden in a slightly idealistic way? YOB! Not very good at nuanced points of view, the editors of that rag. Which is, of course, the best selling newspaper in the UK.

So far, the Groan’s video hasn’t made a splash on any of the other newspaper’s websites. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Sun has to say about it. “If he hadn’t looked so much like a yob the police wouldn’t have pushed him from behind,” perhaps? Admissions of crap journalism less than a week ago will, I presume, be stunningly unforthcoming.

I am personally of the opinion that we work too hard in this country. Not as much as people in the USA, but still, there is a cultural aversion to recognising the value of anything that doesn’t go into making cold hard filthy money. As much as anything else, the current situation in the world economy should serve as a warning not necessarily to abandon capitalism and all go live in the forests, but that there is indeed much inherent value in being able to limit how many days we spend making geegaws and widgets in favour of being able to see the sun and have picnics in fields.

So theoretically, when the Archibishop of York calls for a new holiday to coincide with St George’s day, you’d think lazy socialist hippy bums like me would be in favour, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, as we can see from the news coverage I don’t believe the notions of calming down and chilling out were really what he was thinking about.

Let’s see here…

Dr John Sentamu urged that England must rediscover its identity to prevent a rise in Islamic and right-wing extremism.

opens the Telegraph, reminding us that the only alternative to sufficient levels of patriotism is death at the hands of the Heathen.

Many in the Church of England have backed away from celebrating St George for fear of provoking a backlash from other religious and cultural groups in Britain.

chimes in the Daily Mail insightfully, reinforcing the notion, once again, that people who don’t want to wave St George’s flag out of their window and celebrate the notion of 11 men running around a field are probably pansies in the PC Brigade and also foreigners who are not to be trusted. They did not add “It’s PC GORN MAAAD” only because it’s dogwhistling so hard that it’s well trained readership doesn’t need to actually read the words any more.

Dr Sentamu said

Dissatisfaction with one’s heritage creates an opening for extremist ideologies. Whether it be the terror of salafi jihadism or the insidious institutional racism of the British National Party, there are those who stand ready to fill the vacuum with a sanitised identity and twisted vision if the silent majority hold back from forging a new identity.

Unfortunately, he explained neither how “heritage” was responsible for such things, what he actually meant by heritage, nor quite how an endorsement of the nationalist symbols of one part of the British Isles could tamp down extremism or division, but I’m sure he thought about putting in the speech and just ran out of time.

He went on to say

To be patriotic is to appreciate and be grateful for all that is valuable in the country you live in.

but condemned the actions of protesters, reminding us all once again that if you’re rude to the people who run the country, no matter how much you may disagree with public policy or feel that a given war is immoral, you don’t really have any business calling yourself British. This is especially true if you’re a Muslim, since everyone knows Muslim values contradict British ones.

On the other hand, think tank Ekklesia put out a press release saying

St George’s Day should be re-branded as a national day to celebrate an English contribution to the history of dissent – the witness of people such as abolitionists, suffragettes and those who have sought to combat racism, nationalism, debt, poverty, colonialism and war with the vision of a nation and world open to all.

and further

warned that he had still to set out how the darker side of English nationalism would be avoided.

“It is welcome that the Archbishop has joined the discussion about whether St George’s Day should be a national holiday” he said, “but he has yet to explain how he would separate St George from ideas of conquest and empire which are unhelpful and ill suited to encouraging a healthy sense of identity.”

Helpfully, no newspapers mentioned this kind of thing, because it would have just confused the message.

Such moves, and they occur with tedious regularity, are nothing to do with getting us to turn away from our overheating economies and learning that not all contentment comes from achievements in the rat race, and everything to do with shaming people into submission before the almighty virtue of patriotism. Nothing new there then. We truly do have some of the laziest hacks in the world working for our newspapers.

(this post adapted from a comment over at the House of Lords blog)

A much shorter post than yesterday’s, this one.

Some people may have been following the story of Ian Tomlinson, the man who died while caught up in the violence at the G20 protests last week. Back Towards the Locus has probably the best summary of what we know about what happened, derived as it is from that old fashioned technique of relying on reports from the scene, eyewitnesses and corroborating evidence.

In the meantime, the Dead Tree Media covered the full range from wanton exaggeration to making shit up to reading stuff other people had made up and expressing faux outrage.

It’s possible to laugh this kind of nonsense off sometimes, like when The Sun gets caught with its pants round its ankles for believing any old alarmist cobblers about Islamic terrorists in the UK rather than investigating whether their sole source for a front page story was, in fact, making it all up. In this case though it seems that there are some rather more serious and pernicious issues at hand than good old fashioned tabloid racism. Rather than suddenly collapsing and then being helped by police who suffered bravely under an onslaught of bottles and imaginary bricks, it turns out that various witnesses are claiming the man – who seems to have been on his way home and had nothing to do with the protests – was first attacked by police and then helped by protesters when he collapsed for the second time.

Couple this with reports from the “climate camp” sub-protest, which range from police being free and easy with the laws applying to themselves to deliberately covering their ID numbers during clashes and you have a rather problematic indictment of the vast majority of the right wing press in this country (which is more-or-less all of it). It’s not that the police are always and forever the bad guys, but rather it is the case that the role of the press should be to offer us mere mortals some protection against the excesses of the state by shining a light onto its behaviour. If, through complicity or simple incompetence, the media presents the standard authoritarian narratives that the crusties deserved to get beaten like animals, it is an abdication of the trust the fourth estate holds. It has got to the stage where we might as well not bother with private ownership of some newspapers, because no reporting gets done between the official press release and publication of the paper itself, unless there’s a chance someone got their tits out during the story.

With jobs vanishing and wages frozen, it’s hardly the fault of individual journalists that they can’t be everywhere or see everything. Rather what we’re seeing is a continuation of a trend where newspaper owners try and squeeze 20% profit margins out of companies not designed for that level of return, and in doing so continually gut the industry they own of anything that would continue to justify its existence. The expansion of independent reporting in independent, online venues isn’t at a stage yet where it can replace the traditional media’s reach. We are thus left with a very troubling gap in government accountability which nobody seems able to fill. Interesting times.

A couple of weeks ago a Tory MEP by the name of Daniel Hannan got his five minutes of internet fame with a diatribe against Gordon Brown in the European Parliament.  Although dubiously fast and loose with the facts and full of the kind of yah booism that the Tories are famous for it seemed to resonate with a viewing population fed up with the political state of the nation and quite in favour of watching someone have a proper go at Mr Brown.

At least, that was at first.  Where it really seemed to catch on, and where the majority of its two-million-plus hits came from, was the good old US of A.  No less a dignitary than Matt Drudge himself helped to spray links to Hannan’s videos all over the right wing of the American blogosphere, prompting many people to say things like “where’s the American version of Daniel Hannan who’s willing to stand up to the Obama administration?!?”  Now, again, the crazy facts of the matter aside (Brown was chancellor from 1997, making him the political contemporary of George Bush Jr, and is a pretty committed centrist capitalist despite the Labour label), it seems that the thing that caught people’s attention wasn’t what he said but that he used big words and flowery rhetoric.  After all, the USA is hardly starved for people slagging off Barack Obama for ruining the country already.  It seems that what they want is someone who can do it without sounding like a complete half wit.  Queue a bunch of right wingers in the US media jumping on this latest phenomenon and bringing Hannan over to dance for them

Good news for Mr Hannan, certainly, and theoretically good news for the Conservative Party, which has always been strongly Atlanticist. There are always questions about whether this particular incarnation of the Republican Circular Firing Squad is the one they want to hitch their wagon to given how popular the image of Obama is around the world, but they could play the long game on this and wait for the inevitable backlash.

The problem is, though, there’s a reason Hannan was able to make that speech at all.   Hannan only got the opportunity to address the PM at all because he’s left the federalist EPP grouping of centre-right parties ahead of the planned departure by the UK Conservative Party, placing him quite firmly on the more radical and obstructionist wing of Cameron’s new Cuddly Conservatives. And with his new found fame and a receptive audience in the States, Mr Hannan didn’t take long to remind his bosses why, no matter his new international YouTube credibility, he would be a bad choice to become the fact of the Tories as they’re expecting a win: he’s started slagging off the NHS.

Now, to explain, slagging off the NHS is a national pastime over here.  The newspapers are full of reasons why it’s failing and why people don’t get the right treatment.  The Labour government has poured money into it since their first election in 1997 but it’s widely considered to have been mis-spent on “bureaucracy” and an obsession with targets and league tables, or to have merely kept the service afloat rather than improving it.  But there’s a big difference between saying “the government has ruined the NHS!” and claiming, as Hannan did on Sean Hannity’s show, that the NHS is “a 60 year mistake”.  Most people in England want the NHS made better, not eradicated.  They have a good idea that while it is certainly not without its problems that private-sector replacements are rarely if ever a viable alternative.  Not only do we have decades of experience of our government making a pigs ear out of strategies to privatise other sections of our infrastructure to inform our own collective Theory of Second Best Solutions in this matter, we also have a pretty good idea about the problems faced in the US health care system.  More people in the UK are inclined to sympathise with the millions of uninsured or the middle classes who find their health insurance eating up larger proportions of their paychecks every year than with the wealthier sections of society who can get access to the top-drawer cancer treatment and not have to worry about bankruptcy while they are doing so.

The European Parliament is elected on a list based system, and Hannan represents the South East – where the rich people live – so he can be a self regarding objectivist and still keep his seat quite handily.  But this is not true of the Tories in general.  The Labour government in the UK is well on the way to self-immolation and Cameron’s ideas about rejuvenating the Tories with a kinder and more compassionate worldview stand a very good chance of securing them a majority at the next election.  But they are in no way on course for a landslide, and people like Hannan poking these third rails of British politics is just the kind of thing that would remind people that behind David Cameron there remains a party full of Thatcherites and old-school Tories who hate the government provision of services they rely on, simply because the government’s providing them and government is de facto bad.

Hannan defends his critique as being something “everybody knows”, and that may well be true of his colleagues writing for The Telegraph and his fellow Tories.  But the reality is that while the NHS is hardly breaking any records, it hardly follows that socialised medicine as a concept is a failure or even that the general structure of the NHS in general is flawed.  For a start, the NHS is dirt cheap.  Per-capita healthcare spending in the UK is amongst the lowest of any developed nation, spending around 20% less than the European average and a staggering 60% less than the USA.  Hannan and Hannity might well be aware of the phrase “you get what you pay for” but, obviously, such figures would probably throw a spanner into the works of a simplistic analysis that said private markets were always better and providing services.  Further, while it’s true that heart disease and cancer survival rates are amongst the lowest in Europe, this has as much to do with treatment priorities as it does with structural problems.  For example, our childhood cancer survival rates are pretty similar, and our Infant, Under-5, Neo-Natal and Maternal Mortality rates (PDF) are all comparable or lower to that of the USA.  Like it or not, heart disease and cancer are diseases of the old.  Because of the way funding is structured, the USA tends to put more of its resources into keeping old people alive.  It’s arguable that the UK should put more money into doing the same thing, but the statistics Hannan quotes aren’t indicative of a general broad failure of the NHS.  Rather, they’re more or less what you’d expect from an ageing population with limited resources to spend on health care that prioritised in favour of preventative care and treatment of the young.

So the question is, given these figures, how would Hannan make sure the resources went to the “right” people?  If the problem is that we’re not spending enough, surely government can be relied upon to increase spending just as much as private enterprise.  If it’s that the resources are being misapplied, that would seem to indicate that Hannan is in favour of taking money out of preventative and early-life care and putting it into treatments for the elder and, generally, wealthier in society – again, good news for Telegraph readers but not really a vote winner.  Theoretically, of course, Randians and other Free Marketeers hold that private business can more efficiently allocate resources than government, but the numbers don’t seem to bear that out.  We spend less than half the USA’s money but we don’t get half the healthcare.  Other countries in Europe (not to mention Canada) spend less than the USA on their various incarnations of socialised medicine and achieve broadly similar results for cancers and heart disease and better results on the broad-population and early-life indicators.

It’s hard to work out where the facts and figures support Hannan’s belief, expressed on Hannity’s show, that the NHS has been our undoing and that the USA should resist the siren call of socialised medicine because their way is so much better.  It seems remniscent of those women who are wheeled out on similar shows to defend wife beaters because the bitch was asking for it – it must be true, look, even a European says so!  I’m not sure it’s either a noble calling for him personally or for the Tories in general to be Sean Hannity’s go-to European, on call to jump through hoops in exchange for biscuits.  I guess we’ll see when the election comes around whether or not he’s faded into the background or whether the Cameron wing will have an Objectivist live wire on their own side to muck everything up for them.

(Updated because of HTML craziness)