Tourist tirade

After an absence of five years, we found Barbados to be, for the most part, as agreeable as ever:  the sun warm, the beer cold, and of course de rum "fine any time of year".  However, we also noticed that a trend we have been observing for quite some time is becoming yet more pronounced.  Barbados is turning itself into a rich man's playground, and it's a model that may bring problems for the island in the longer term.

The latest manifestation of this trend is the development, on the always upscale West Coast, of a "lifestyle mall", Limegrove, to cater for the needs of the wealthy.  It's unlikely that the locals have much interest in the Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Bulgari extravagances that have appeared in their midst, and there must be some doubt about whether the new development will attract much business from the target audience -- how likely is it that the super-rich don't see any need to own a Louis Vuitton handbag until they happen to spy one in Barbados?

However, as the new place to be seen, Limegrove, and the surrounding district of Holetown, is pulling business of other kinds away from the rest of the island.  That area is now the place to go for an evening out, and the effect is being felt in the island's long-time party hotspot, the "Gap" on the South Coast, where a number of well-established watering holes are now boarded up, and the evening footfall seems noticeably lower than in the past.

This is having the effect of pushing down property values on the South Coast, which is prompting developers to move in and erect the kind of much fancier tourist accommodations previously confined to the west.  We stayed in one of these new hotels, and very nice it was too, but as all these developments are being financed and sold on a condominium basis, there is an obvious risk that the range of properties available for the less affluent short-stay tourist will shrink.

Indeed, this is already happening.  One property we have used in the past has now been boarded up for three years.  Just last year, one mini-chain of three all-inclusive, mid-range properties threatened to close, with the loss of 500 jobs.  One of the three was kept open with government help, but the others are closed and up for sale, with the obvious likelihood that they will be picked up by condo developers and turned into something more upscale.

The official data show that Barbados tourist numbers fell during 2012, having only just begun to recover from the impact of the financial crisis.  It's very unlikely that a loss in tourist numbers can be successfully offset by improving facilities for the world's rich -- there just aren't enough of them out there, and they tend to be awfully fickle.  To keep its people gainfully employed in this key sector, Barbados needs to continue to find ways to attract visitors across a wide range of incomes and countries.

.....though perhaps not these guys.  A couple of days before we left,  our hotel was invaded by a group of fifteen men, who proceeded to drink from morning until night, commandeer the swimming pool, festoon their balconies with sports banners and generally make themselves a nuisance.  A taxi driver told me that he took some of them for an island tour, which turned out to be a jaunt to a bar on the other side of the island, with a stop at a rum shop on the way back to the hotel.  I probably don't even need to tell you at this point that they were from the UK, doing their part to reinforce the sad truth that homo erectus britannicus, when travelling in packs, is the most feared and loathed creature in world tourism.

Still, it was a great week, so I should end on a bright note.  We took the opportunity to visit a local church for which an old friend, many years ago, had designed the Stations of the Cross.  The parish is now in the hands of a group of very jolly Polish priests, and it was uplifting to take part in their Sunday Mass.  There's a line in one of Leonard Cohen's less well-known songs, "Jazz Police", that runs like this:

"Jesus taken serious by many
Jesus taken joyous by a few".

This congregation were very definitely part of the joyous few.  Long may that continue, both for them and for their island.

Tortured logic

I haven't had a chance to see Zero Dark Thirty yet, but I certainly intend to, as I was very impressed by Kathryn Bigelow's previous movie, The Hurt Locker.  (A movie, by the way, that bears repeated viewings -- we watched it again recently on Blu-ray and found it just as absorbing and exciting as the first time we saw it).  Ms Bigelow has found herself defending her movie against a series of attacks from all sides, most of which don't make a whole lot of sense.

Long before the movie was given even limited, Oscar-qualifying release, there were suggestions that Ms Bigelow and her writers had been given access to a lot of classified information about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and especially about the raid in which he was eventually killed.  It was intimated, mainly by Republicans, that the Obama administration had given the film-makers sensitive information in the hope of seeing themselves portrayed in a more favourable light.

Now that the film is on general release, there's a whole new set of criticisms, to the effect that the movie depicts and attempts to justify the use of torture in obtaining information about bin Laden's whereabouts.  The US has denied any use of torture, though its definitions in this regard have always seemed fairly loose: waterboarding, for example, is considered to be an "aggressive interrogation technique", rather than torture.   (The late Christopher Hitchens, who underwent the procedure for research purposes, emphatically disagreed).  There have even been calls from some senior Hollywood figures, including Martin Sheen, for Zero Dark Thirty to be boycotted because of the torture scenes and the implication that they were instrumental in tracking down bin Laden.

There are a lot of experts out there who argue that torture is completely useless as an interrogation aid.  The victims are so terrified that they will invent things that they think the interrogator wants to hear, just to get the process to stop.  As a result, any information obtained this way is of no value unless there is outside corroboration. Maybe so, but Kathryn Bigelow is in no doubt that it was used by the US in the hunt for bin Laden, and has issued a robust defence of its inclusion in the movie.  Given what we know about waterboarding, illegal renditions and the continuing travesty of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, it seems all too sadly likely that she is telling the truth.

So, on the one hand Zero Dark Thirty has been attacked because the moviemakers knew altogether too much about what went down, and on the other they're being attacked for making up something that, hands on hearts, never happened, no sir! On the well-established principle that there's no such thing as bad publicity, Kathryn Bigelow is likely to be laughing all the way to the bank.

The morning guys at our local talk radio station, the redoubtable CKTB, were discussing all of this yesterday and made an interesting point.  All kinds of people are piling in on Zero Dark Thirty because of its supposed liberty-taking with the truth, yet the entirely risible Argo, a fictionalised telling of the Iran hostage rescue in 1980, is scooping up awards all over the place, despite bearing only a flimsy resemblance to the actual events.  Artistic license, it would appear, is fine as long as it flatters the right people.

***

We shall be away for a few days, catching a few rays.  Back around the end of the month.

Fear of climate

I'm not a climate change denier.  It's clear to even a casual observer that we are seeing extreme weather conditions more frequently than we used to, more destructive storms, and erosion of the polar icecaps.  All of that said, however, I am still very far from being convinced that these changes are anthropogenic -- caused by man.

Here is a link to an article in today's Toronto Star by Tim Harper, the paper's national affairs columnist.  His main purpose is to castigate the Harper government for its disdain for environmental issues, which is fair enough:  Canada's track record on such issues, especially those related to energy, is notably poor.  What's interesting, though, is to look at some of the recent events that Harper cites as evidence of climate change.  Here's an example:

Texas is in the middle of a drought which began in 2010, the third-worst in the history of the state...

Third worst, is it? So there have been two previous, more severe droughts that could not be attributed to man-made warming.  What exactly caused those, and on what basis is Tim Harper sure that the same factor or factors have not caused the present situation? Climate is in a constant state of flux, with changes taking place over periods of several decades, then suddenly going into reverse.  One can only imagine what today's climate alarmists might have said during the "little Ice Age" that gripped the planet from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century.

Tim Harper is mostly out to score political points, but over at Slate we have one righteously angry scientist, Phil Plait.  (Sounds like he should be doing a cooking column, but let's stick with the serious matters at hand).  I'll let you judge his evidence for yourself, and just skip to the final paragraph, where we learn that:
There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 percent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap.

Well, actually, no to that, and for a reason that Plait alludes to a few paragraphs earlier: I’ll note that climate change deniers are still going on about climate scientists manipulating data.

Yes, well, the reason the deniers are able to do that is because it happened.  Researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK, one of the major centres of climate research, published a major study some years ago, based on extremely long time series data,  that reached the conclusion, then still controversial, that man and his activities were the most probable cause of climate change.  And then....they destroyed all of the raw (and completely irreplaceable) data.  That's not exactly common scientific practice, so it's hardly surprising that more than a few people might suspect that the researchers didn't want anyone examining their methods and conclusions too closely.

I posted something on this blog once about a letter sent to a UK newspaper by an exasperated reader who was fed up with climate alarmists attributing all kinds of weather to climate change.  Would it be possible, he wondered,  for the alarmists to save everyone some time and trouble by listing any weather conditions that they would not regard as proof of climate change?  There was no answer, but the question still bears asking, when the Toronto Star's Tim Harper can write a paragraph like this and expect to be taken seriously:

A New York Times roundup published Friday pointed out China is enduring its coldest winter in three decades, Brazil is in the grips of record heat and parts of eastern Russia saw temperatures drop to -50C.

Hammerin' Hank

Big up to the board of directors of AIG, who want nothing to do with a lawsuit against the US government  over the bailout the company received at the height of the financial crisis in 2008.  The company's former Chairman, Hank Greenberg, who still controls something like 10 percent of its shares, wanted the board to support his action, which seeks $25 billion in compensation for the losses which the bailout supposedly inflicted on the equity holders.  Most of the US media coverage of the story has veered between bemusement and rage, so here's a link to a reasonable BBC take on the story.

A lot of small shareholders in Northern Rock in the UK were similarly aggrieved, and similarly threatened to go to court, when the British Government rode to the rescue of their company.  However, Greenberg's is the first proposed suit that I'm aware of that's being brought by a financial market professional, someone who really should know better.*

Equity is not the same as debt and does not carry the same legal rights.  The returns to equity are not fixed in advance: they consist of whatever value is left over after all of a company's other obligations are met.  So if a company is unable to meet its other obligations, which was glaringly the case with AIG (and Northern Rock), then the shareholders' stake dwindles in value, possibly to nothing.  It wasn't the intervention of the US Treasury that made Hank Greenberg poorer -- it was the company's own actions, during the time that he supposedly was its chief steward.

Or look at it another way.  Shareholders are the owners of a company.  If that company builds up debts, then those debts are in a very real sense the debts of its shareholders, even though the principle of limited liability sets a ceiling on how much they can lose if things go badly wrong.  If a company can't meet its debt obligations, and someone else steps in to do so instead, thus allowing the company to survive, you'd think the shareholders might have cause to be thankful.  And indeed, that's just what's happened at AIG, which has been running a series of TV commercials thanking the US government (and taxpayers) for the bailout, just as Hank Greenberg has been concocting his lawsuit.

One of Greenberg's charges in the proposed suit is that AIG had no choice but to accept the bailout.  The Treasury has responded that it did so have a choice: it could have rejected the money on offer and gone into bankruptcy.  Actually, there was a third possibility: the existing shareholders could have put up the money needed to rebuild the company's capital base.  I wonder how long Hank and his fellow shareholders spent considering that option in AIG's hour of need.

* No doubt he does know better, but he figures it's worth finding out whether the legal system might have a less rigorous view of the rights of shareholders. 

We're gonna party like it's 1913

Here's a link to a lengthy and sobering article by Charles Emmerson, of the UK foreign policy institute Chatham House, in which he examines similarities and contrasts between the world today and the world as it was in 1913.  Some of these themes will be explored at greater length by Emmerson in a forthcoming book (see below).

Boiled down to its essence, the thesis is that in each of the subject years the world was dominated by a single power (then: Britain; now, the USA) that was starting to lose its grip, challenged by a rising new military and economic force (then: Germany; now, China).  Each era was a time of globalisation and technological change, factors which many, indeed most observers thought would make armed conflict between the major players unthinkable.

Emmerson is at pains to stress the differences between the two years as well as the similarities.  Even so, and even though he argues that history never exactly repeats itself, he concludes that we should prepare for what the Chinese euphemistically refer to as interesting times.  Here are the final sentences of the article:

The world of 1913 -- brilliant, dynamic, interdependent -- offers a warning. The operating system of the world in that year was taken by many for granted. In 2013, at a time of similar global flux, the biggest mistake we could possibly make is to assume that the operating system of our own world will continue indefinitely, that all we need to do is stroll into the future, and that the future will inevitably be what we want it to be. Those comforting times are over. We need to prepare ourselves for a much rougher ride ahead.

As I said at the outset: sobering, especially for those of us who think the last decade or two have been quite rough enough to be going along with.  Very obviously, Emmerson does not share the optimism of many commentators that the level of armed conflict in the world is set to decline steadily.  His forthcoming book ("1913: in search of the world before the Great War") looks like being one of the year's must reads.

By the way, if you want to stretch historical comparisons even further -- specifically, to the 14th century -- the late Barbara W. Tuchman's wonderful "A distant mirror" is the book for you. 

Native rights

Most of the time, the majority of Canadians take an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to the country's aboriginal (or First Nation, or native, or Indian*) population.  They know that the conditions faced by these peoples are often harsh, but they tend either to despair of ever being able to do anything about it, or to blame it on the native people themselves.  Right now, however, native issues are on the front pages of the media, both nationally and locally.

At the national level, the chief of the native community of Attawapiskat, Teresa Spence, is currently on hunger strike in a tepee near Parliament Hill in Ottawa.  Attawapiskat is a God- and man-forsaken place in Northern Ontario, and Chief Spence wants a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper so that she can demand that something be done for her people.  Public response has been less than sympathetic, with a lot of commentators making snide references to Chief Spence's weight, while others have pointed out that large amounts of public money has been spent in Attawapiskat, to little obvious effect.

One gent on the radio phone-in show this morning said the PM should agree to meet with the Chief, on condition that there should be a full forensic accounting of all the taxpayer money that has gone into Attawapiskat over the decades.  Seems fair enough, until you stop to think that the Chief would be perfectly entitled to respond that the PM is in no position to lecture on the subject.  After all, this is a government that has wasted millions on a jet fighter tender that has now had to be sent back to the drawing board; whose predecessors spent millions on a national handgun register, a good though unpopular idea that was implemented with unimaginable inefficiency and is now being abandoned at great cost; and so on, back through generations of government at all levels.

Wasting taxpayer money is simply what politicians do.  If Chief Spence and her colleagues at the Assembly of First Nations are getting adept at it, well, they've had plenty of time to learn from their white counterparts. In any case, I'd much sooner have my taxes spent on well-meaning efforts to help natives (and the non-native poor for that matter) than on a lot of the other things that the government sees as higher priorities.

Meanwhile, at the local level, some folks are in a snit because a provincial park, Short Hills, is to be closed for the weekend so that local natives can stage a deer hunt.  The natives' right to do so, either for food or for ceremonial purposes, is enshrined in the Indian Act.  Only twenty hunters will be allowed each day, and they'll be using bows and arrows.  I'm no fan of hunting, but considering how many white folks in these parts go out every fall to shoot animals (and often enough, each other) with much more lethal weaponry, it seems churlish to object.

* I was involved in native financial issues during my previous spell in Canada, and was told by a number of native people that they don't object to the term "Indian", even though it makes some white people queasy.  In the first place, the native people are used to it; and in the second place, until the white men started using the term "Indian", the native peoples had no collective term for themselves. 

Left, right, wrong

One interesting sidelight to the fiscal cliff debate has been the way pundits on the left and right have been competing to badmouth the US economy.  Right wing commentators, few if any of them economists, argue that four years of Obamanomics have left the US economy debilitated.  Over on the left, the commentators include a lot more economists, with Paul Krugman among the most vocal.  Their argument is that the US economy is still much too weak for policymakers to contemplate any removal of fiscal stimulus.  Not too long ago in the NYT, Krugman actually used the term "deep depression".

The Krugmanites, if I may call them that, are closer to calling this correctly (though that "depression" comment is ludicrous),  yet paradoxically. theirs is the trickier case to make.  The first Obama term saw record-shattering fiscal deficits and unprecedented monetary stimulus.  If you argue, as the left does, that the economy is still in a funk, then in effect you're saying that all that stimulus hasn't worked -- in which case, it's legitimate for your opponents to ask why you suppose that more of the same will suddenly make everything better.

In any case, both sides are wrong about the state of the US economy.  Sure, the recovery has been tepid for the most part, and unemployment is painfully high.  By comparison with the rest of the world, however, the US economy is moving ahead quite well, with slow but steady job creation, new activity in the energy sector,  a turnaround in the auto sector, and even some positive signs in the housing market.  Right wingers choose to ignore all of these positives because they're fixated on the fiscal situation, with one of the loudest voices, Mark Steyn, characterizing the US as "the brokest nation in history".

Steyn et al may be exaggerating, but there's no denying that the US fiscal situation risks becoming unmanageable -- indeed, it would already be so if foreign investors and the Fed were not still buying US debt.  That's why the pathetic deal that supposedly averted the fiscal cliff is such a serious failure of nerve.  Someone, whether it's on the Republican or the Democratic side of the Congress, is eventually going to have to tell US voters a very uncomfortable truth:  the United States can't continue to move toward European-style social programs while pining for 19th century taxation rates -- and it certainly can't do either of those things if it wants to maintain the world's largest military machine.

The fiscal cliff deal addresses none of this -- in fact, it will add $4 trillion to US debt over the next decade, according to the CBO. It's all but impossible to believe that the next round of negotiations, over the "sequestered" spending cuts and the debt ceiling, will get any farther.  Fact is, the Republicans are broadly right that something serious has to be done about the fiscal situation, and the Democrats are right to warn about putting the economy at risk by doing anything hasty -- after all, the key to solving any fiscal crisis is growth.  However, the two sides now evidently hate each other so much that it's hard to see how they will be able to find common ground.

A new year, a bad deal

At the time of writing it remains unclear whether the US House of Representatives will approve the deal passed overnight by the Senate to avert the so-called fiscal cliff.  For a non-American observer, however, there can only be one response:  after all the name calling and brinkmanship, the best they could come up with was THIS??  (I urge you to click on the link, as I bet you were not aware that Bride of Frankenstein was a member of Congress).

It was always likely that the tough decisions would get put off for another day, but this deal does that to an almost unthinkable degree.  There are income tax hikes only for those earning over $400,000, which amounts to only about 1% of taxpayers.  However, payroll tax reductions will expire, hitting even lower middle class Americans where it hurts, and thus very likely damaging consumer confidence and spending.

The worst failure, however, is on the spending side.  The spending cuts that were "sequestered" during the 2011 debt ceiling debate, and which would have been the most damaging part of the entire cliff, have been delayed for another two months, to allow Congress to find alternatives.  Given the abject failure of the two major parties to agree on any spending measure over the past eighteen months and more, what are the chances that two months are going to make any difference?

The net effect of all this, according to early estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, will be to add $4 trillion to Uncle Sam's debt over the next few years -- and this deal was done in the very week in which the existing debt ceiling was reached!  How either party can claim victory in this debacle is quite beyond me.

Oh well, HAPPY NEW YEAR anyway!