STONE COLD HAVEN

Loss leading is as old as the concept of marketing itself. Whether it’s the freebies provided to promote a new lager at the local bar, or the free samples of cosmetics and fragrances dished out at beauty stores, or the good old fashioned buy one get one free – inducement to invite custom are part and parcel of our business world.

It’s unsurprising then, to find a storm brewing between groups of commercial sex workers in Copenhagen and the Mayor’s office who are determined that none of the working girls are going to have an early Christmas. What with the whole world descending on Copenhagen, it’s naive at best to assume that horizontal refreshments aren’t part and parcel of the ’entertainment package’ available to delegates at the climate and environment conference just beginning in the Danish capital. Just because it’s not on the official programme doesn’t mean that it’s not available.

So when the Copenhagen Mayor’s office issues a formal communiqué that blatantly says ”Be Sustainable, Don’t Buy Sex” and distributes it to hotels, the response from representative groups of the working girls is emphatic.

Conference delegates who show the official “Anti-prostitution postcards” being distributed at the conference and in hotels, in conjunction with their official conference delegates ID cards – are being offered free sexual services as a retaliatory measure against the move by the Mayor’s office.

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Today marks the first anniversary of the shot gun wedding that the Kenyan political establishment was dragged into, kicking and screaming. The choices following the chaos of the discredited 2007 general election ranked somewhere between impossible and improbable, and if only to stop the killing, violence and lawlessness, the two main protagonists had little choice but to commit to political matrimony.

If it wasn’t tragic enough, you could almost picture it:

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In an early episode of the fictional hit TV drama The West Wing, the show’s President Jed Bartlett vents his fury at his Director of Intelligence. In the plot of this particular episode, the intelligence folks fail to pick up hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and their war machinery marching aggressively towards the Kashmiri Pakistani border in a clearly provocative move that will not bode well for the two nuclear armed neighbours.

In disbelief, Jed Bartlett angrily berates his intelligence chief by pointing out that his motorcade can’t move from K Street in the middle of DC to Connecticut without being picked up on a weather satellite. Aaron Sorkin and his production team obviously did their research well in coming up with a realistic depiction of the plot that is the challenging project of moving the most powerful man in the world from location A to location B.

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Trick question: What do Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Nicolae Ceausescu, Gordon Brown, George Bush, Robert Mugabe and who else….Hmmm let me see…the military junta in Burma, the military junta who ruled Argentina in the 70s and Pol Pot have in common.

Answer: For differing reasons, they have all been responsible for some of the world’s biggest and most severe violations of civil liberties of the poor old folks that they proclaim to lead or have led.

George Orwell (if he could), must have a smug and uncanny smile on his face that has that characteristic “I told you bastards so” look. Look at any plot in his 1984 master piece and you get this queasy feeling that George was definitely onto something that will scare the living daylights out of any self respecting individual who values their privacy.

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I’ve always found it interesting to consider how people rationalize arguments to spin their own agenda – whether in politics, in civil society circles, in business or in relationships. The one common thread that runs through the spin cycle is the cryptic question about “who benefits?” – when negative, inaccurate and in most cases, misleading arguments carry the day.

Take Kibera for example. Rightfully or wrongly, this stretch of Nairobi real estate that spans over 2.5 sq km (give or take a football pitch either side) – has garnered a world-wide reputation for being the largest slum in Africa with at least 1 million residents.
A first assumption you’d make is that the government in Kenya or some form of reliable public body or statistics agency actually did a head count and figured out that the number of folks who live in Kibera topped 1 million.

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On the 3rd of Feb, I wrote Chickens come home to roost as the credit crunched bite back. As they say in football – when the home supporters get antsy about their team’s usually lousy performance, “the natives are getting restless”. Not surprising though, as human nature has a habit of defaulting us to protectionism when we’re faced with adversity that we don’t understand.

The British are now making concerted noises about the fact that the number of foreign workers in the land of the queen has doubled in the last 10 years to 3.8 million. I’m not sure yet whether this is the primary fact that irks those shouting about it – or its the fact that over 66% of these foreign workers were born outside the European union.

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It was only a matter of time before Jo Public decided they were going to do and say something about the now almost cliché “credit crunch” cop out that we all seem to hear so often. Credit crunch has become a by-word for excusing any manner of transactional inactivity as if in a shruggy shoulder kind of “we’re all screwed by the financial system” sort of way.

Everyone is complaining that they’ve got too much month left at the end of the money, folks have seen their life savings disappear faster than you can say Lehman Brothers, and the skeletons of a greedy and unscrupulous financial sector are surfacing at the top of the sea so fast, it’s almost like someone down there is chucking them loose with a machete. businesses of all manner are struggling to meet cash flow requirements and sales targets, forcing redundancies and business failures.

Last week may have seen the manifestation of the ordinary person’s anger, frustration, anxiety and fear that is brewing and simmering below the surface, as the so called economic experts and gurus, as well as world leaders continue to dither, fumble and engage in significant intellectual masturbation under the guise of saving the world’s economic order and financial infrastructure. It’s not uncommon to hear news of another world leaders, or financial ministers G8 or G20 meeting, or some EU organized meeting where dignitaries and experts just seem to do little but threaten us with a solution to this economic mess. A mess which I might add that for lack of a better explanation, they have been perpetrators of, either knowingly or by the incompetence of their inaction and omission.

A few examples of the manifestation of this frustration by the public:

1. Last week in the UK, wild cat strikes erupted all over the country, prompted by a decision to bring in hundreds of Italian and Portuguese workers as contractors in favour of British workers, for a £200 million plant at the giant Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire. Unions claimed British workers never even saw the job applications, let alone get a chance to compete for the jobs.

   
   Protestors at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire – UK

2. In France last week, over a million people united in protest in a strike that highlighted their dissatisfaction with the way the French government were handling their economic woes. Most people in France are angry that the banking and financial sectors got a get out of jail free card worth billions of Euros, while the ordinary man on the street and his business continue to languish. Not that France is a stranger to mass strikes and protests, but this one last week was sanctioned by over 75% of the union movement.

   
   French protestors in Paris at last week’s strike

3. In Russia, protesters are calling for the head of Vladimir Putin and the resignation of his government. The economic slowdown in Russia is triggering a wave of public discontent that most political commentators fear will destabilize Russia. Following the success of last week’s protests, the communist opposition party is threatening to mobilize masses around the country to express their anger and dissatisfaction about the economic slowdown.

Managing strikes and street protests, Russia style

If there’s anything you learn from strike action and protests, its that it provides an environment for a snowball of activity to easily take hold and assume a life of its own. This is a constant factor that doesn’t change – evident right from the first known strike in history by workers of the Royal court of Pharaoh Ramses III of the 20th Dynasty in 12th century BC in ancient Egypt, to the brazen tactics of the sailors in London in 1768 who ”struck” and sabotaged the sails of ships at dock in protest (incidentally, the derivation of the term strike) – through to the teamsters in the 1930s wielding pipes and clashing with armed police in the streets of Minneapolis, to the more recent strikes of yesteryear that have brought public services to its knees.

In most if not all of the examples of strike action of recent generations, governments, authorities and employers have had some control and leeway in developing solutions that would talk down the strikers and protesters into considering acceptable arrangements for their grievances. What is glaringly obvious, and actually very dangerous in this case, is that governments, industry and whoever might care to call themselves a stakeholder haven’t got tangible solutions that will get us all out of this self inflicted quagmire.

Most of the so called experts, politicians and economic advisers are spending enough time navel gazing and plotting solutions in their smoke filled conference rooms in the bubble of 5 star hotels in the west, that its hard to see how they continue to muster the nerve and the audacity to stand in front of cameras and proclaim to the world that they’re fixing the world’s economy. Forget the fact that most of these punks had a hand in getting us credit crunched in the first place. As for fat cat bankers of the city and wall street who think this is just a blip and continue to live like it’s a cycle that is natural and will correct itself, the words arrogance and impunity come to mind – but I digress. This is not the post to dedicate to our anally retentive banking fat cats.

What is worrying is that it will only be a matter of time before the anger, anguish, frustration, anxiety and desperation of the people who have to face high food and fuel costs, stare at unemployment’s ugly face, and battle with the constant dilemma of finding new and legal ways to feed their children –will explode up onto the street with the citizenry of the world demanding that their governments do something about it. Some will say that this explosion of public anger is not a badthing after all – its our taxes being shafted in the name of fixing the economy.

Matter of fact, it’s already happening in scenarios that people may not necessarily connect, but the scenarios are part of the bigger picture of public discontent.. Case in point, the situation with teachers in Kenya, who don’t even know whether they’ll be paid next month – let alone get arrears in salary owed to them, while bandits and crooks masquerading as Kenyan members of parliament defy all expectations of convention and refuse to pay tax – and even legislate their refusal to do so. Did I mention that these punks are the highest paid legislators in the world taking home over US$17,970 a calendar month each, tax free and while teachers can’t even buy lunch at school, pay for their transport and feed their families?

When you follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, and even draw inspiration from his 1863 speech about not compromising liberty for the sake of security, then there comes a time when your words and prophetic messages have to translate into reality. The alternative is nothing but a recipe for stirring cynicism and ridicule for not only blowing smoke up people’s asses, but for illustrating to a world looking up to you for a new type of leadership, that at best, you’re full of bullshit, and at worst, you’re just like any other politician who lied his ass off to get elected. What’s new, I hear your sarcastic self mumble….

Barrack Obama had probably plotted his first 100 days in office with clinical precision and an anticipation of some teething problems, giving him enough time and wind in his sails to focus on the US economy and the debris in Iraq and Afghanistan that Eagle 43 left in the Oval office in-tray on his way to a leafy suburb of North Dallas. As regular as clockwork, the executive orders rolled out in the first few days to show the world that Eagle 44 was a man of substance who was serious about meeting policy change promises made during his campaign, not least the closure of the torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay.

But just like conventional wisdom would suggest, well laid plans get blindsided like a nonsense, and there’s really nothing you can do about that. Granted, Obama’s team rightly anticipated that closing Guantanamo bay is going to be more than a project, but I doubt if they expected their first live grenade with it to be a one 30 year old Binyam Mohammed from Ethiopia.

Binyam Mohammed who claims he was tortured in Guantanamo bay

See, in 2004 someone decided to lock up Binyam in Guantanamo bay and throw away the key. This was after flying him around on renditions to places like Morocco and Pakistan, and torturing him for 18 months. In an effort to limit the reputational damage that the US has suffered, they supposedly extended him the courtesy of a full and fair trial, though they didn’t anticipate the enthusiasm of Binyam’s pro bono lawyers from the UK.

As he is a UK resident, his lawyers have successfully made a claim at the high court in the UK that his confessions were extracted under extreme torture, and he did what any person who had no option would do – confess so that the pain and anguish would stop. He describes some of what they put him through including being regularly hang from ceilings, his genitals and chest being sliced by surgical instruments, and hot liquid being poured into the wounds.

The charge put to him is that he allegedly trained with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in preparation to carry out terrorist attacks in the UK. One problem now posed by the success of his legal team to have the accounts of torture heard by 2 justices of the high court, is that the accounts provided by American interrogators having been recognized as torture by the court, are now admissible. Which means that they fall into the public domain and the ‘Freedom of Information’ hawks from the press and the civil liberties groups are hovering around like a vulture would over a carcass of a wildebeest slain in the Maasai Mara.

Binyam’s defence is straight forward – “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time”. But that’s not the crux of this piñata for Obama. The problem for Obama is that he has gone out of his way to wax lyrical about his disdain and intolerance of torture, and the fact that America must not choose between liberty and dignity, and their national security. This is clearly a blunt policy change from the neo-con hawk policies of Rumsfeld and Bush that condoned torture and sanctioned the US military’s unilateral desecration of article 3 of the Geneva convention.

The British government’s case is that the high court, whilst accepting the account of events in this case as a matter for the defence, must keep it out of the public domain for national security reasons. The Americans have issued an explicit threat that if this ‘torture’ information got out in the public domain, then the US will withhold intelligence from the UK, which is in itself an implicit threat to the security of UK citizens and residents. The court whilst agreeing to keep the info secret, did not hesitate to unleash a tirade of condemnations of how the British government had stooped so low, not only to be shafted yet again by the US, but to have the audacity to preach to the world about the virtues of democracy and liberty – yet British security services are clearly complicit in their view, to acts of torture. The government of course are denying this – but what choice do they have.

The questions for Obama then become very uncomfortable:

1. Does his administration stand by the explicit threat (made by the Bush administration) of withholding intelligence if documents about the torture of Binyam – which have been accepted as facts to consider by the court – are released to the British public and the world?
2. If not, why the hell did he lie to the world during his campaign and at his inauguration that he will change all policies and redress America’s position on torture?
3. If he doesn’t change the position on that threat on the basis of “national security” – how does he expect people to take him seriously and even think that he was credible?

On the other hand, Obama has a massive opportunity to score a powerful and extremely loud early goal in foreign policy and signal to the world that things have changed and let the court release the details of the torture. Clearly, it will not only be politically embarrassing to the US and the UK, but it will further damage the reputation of both countries. He can get away with it by blaming Bush – but has he got the cojones to do it? The British are scared of asking him of his position.