Green Shoots?

Finally, there are signs of economic life in The Dark Place. At least, according to Paul Uppal, the invisible MP:

From anecdotal evidence in recent canvassing sessions, I have noticed a pick up in drug dealing, particularly in the
south of the city.

An honest Tory would be delighted. Increasing custom implies that there's more money around for luxury purchases. Drug dealers are of course natural Conservatives: they don't like paying taxes, they respond readily to the laws of supply and demand, and they're entrepreneurial small businessmen opposed to regulation and state intervention. They're opposed to Health and Safety, few of them are unionised and they're fully integrated into the globalised economy. What's not to like? Uppal had no criticism to make of HSBC becoming an integral subsidiary of the Mexican drug trade so why's he so down on hard-working local drug dealers? They might well help him keep his seat given his tiny majority of 619.

And of course the more constituents get smacked-up and delusional, the more likely they are to vote for him.

Nic, meet Steve. You won't be sharing a cell.

Nicolas Robinson is an idiot.


He was walking home from his girlfriend's house during last summer's riots, and opportunistically stole £3.50's worth of bottled water from a store which had been trashed. He was arrested and imprisoned for six months.


Baron Reverend Stephen Green of Hurstpierpoint is - as his titles imply - an important man. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an ordained minister in the Church of England. He is a government minister for trade and business and he is a leading member of the Conservative Party. Here he is, plugging his book Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.  

Turning to the current economic crisis, Green said that "the breakdown in public trust and confidence in business in general and banks in particular" had created the need for a new look at the fundamental values and objectives that motivate business. In his view, corporate social responsibility should be regarded as a core component, the "raison d'être" of a company, rather than as merely an adjunct to its "real business." 

 
In the subsequent audience Q&A, Green, an ordained minister in the Church of England, fielded a question about how he balanced his professional life with his personal beliefs. Green replied that while he did agree that "one cannot serve both God and mammon (money)," he didn't equate "working with money as worshipping or serving the money." When the topic veered towards Wall Street and the "demonization of bankers," Green mounted a spirited defense of the many decent and hardworking people he believes to be working in the financial sector.  

As plain Mr Green, he was the chairman and CEO of HSBC ('the world's local bank'), the banking and financial services conglomerate. Before that, he was the CEO of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) S. A., one of the world's leading tax-evasion providers (very sadly, someone stole a CD listing all their clients, and the tax authorities arrested rather a large number of them), and a Director of HSBC (Mexico), very much his baby. Steve also bought the Bank of Bermuda for HSBC, a curious choice for a religious man: it only seems to trade in tax havens.


According to Senator Carl Levin, HSBC (Mexico) and the rest of the HSBC group was knowingly providing banking services to Mexican drug cartels, tyrannous dictatorships, fraudsters, smugglers and tax avoiders to the tune of several hundred billion dollars. HSBC staff knew all about it and decided to carry on. Some of them were even using armoured cars to smuggle drug money across international borders. This is a long way from the current HSBC ads depicting cute children from across the world saving their pocket money… unless the implication is that their lawn-mowing is actually the drug harvest.In one case, HSBC continued to accept cash from Sigue, which federal agents caught taking on transactions even after agents explicitly told them were the proceeds of the drug trade.

The bank moved billions of dollars in cash from its affiliate in Mexico to the US, more than any other Mexican bank, despite concerns raised by law enforcement agencies with HSBC that such sums could only involve the proceeds from dealings in illegal narcotics, the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations report said.

Some of the money that moved through HSBC was tied to Iran, the report said, which would violate U.S. prohibitions on transactions linked to it and other sanctioned countries. 

To conceal the transactions, HSBC affiliates used a method called "stripping", where references to Iran are deleted from records. HSBC affiliates also characterized the transactions as transfers between banks without disclosing the tie to Iran in what the Senate report called a "cover payment". 

Ordinarily, anyone caught processing money for drug dealers goes to prison for money laundering. HSBC was not the victim here: it made billions of dollars by knowingly moving drug and terror money from the black economy to the legitimate one. Stephen Green is in fact not a lord, government minister or bank manager. He and his colleagues are linchpins in the drug trade. Without them, it wouldn't have functioned. No wonder the HSBC ads feature the line 'understanding people and their values'. 


So where are we? Oh yes: Nicolas Robinson goes to prison for stealing a bottle of water. Stephen Green writes books about ethical markets, gets a seat in the House of Lords and a government job to add to his bloated bank account. I think we can legitimately call him a Drug Lord. As for Robinson… them's the breaks. Steal a bottle of water and that's your problem - he should have worn a tie and thought bigger. Enable a multibillion dollar drugs-and-murder empire… that's our problem.

Who will rid me of these pesky scientists?

Here's something to write to your MP about.

A year ago, Professor David Nutt was thrown off the government's Drugs Advisory Council for saying some science-based things that didn't accord with political dogma: he was its chair. Several more scientists resigned in support.

The new government has announced a new direction in evidence-based policy-making. It's agin' it. That's right. They're throwing all the scientists off the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. In future, we won't need any of your 'facts', or 'science'. We got all the facts we need, right here in our guts. And in our PR advisers.

It might sound like me going on and on once more, but this is really important. Drugs are often dangerous. Sometimes they aren't. I'd like a scientist to tell me what's what, not a bunch of political placemen. What area of society will they remove expertise from next?

Experts are so last year.

Dear Paul Uppal,

may I ask you to urgently raise in Parliament the amendment to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility bill which removes the requirement to have scientists on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs?

I gather that you are an expert member of the Parliamentary Group on Urban Development. I therefore assume that you recognise the need for expert guidance in crucial areas of policy development, for the purpose of sound policy-making and to retain credibility in the eyes of the public. Removing scientists from this committee suggests that awkward opinions will be silenced. 

No doubt the minister will claim that removing the requirement to include scientists does not mean that he will actually do so: I urge you to resist this logic and to lobby for the automatic retention of expert advisers.

Yours,

More drugs, anyone?

This is what happens when Americans want drugs, and the authorities decide that it's all the fault of the suppliers, not those demanding the product - a line of countries wrecked by violent capitalists.



What's the answer? Legalisation would benefit consumers and the countries inbetween, but I'm wary of legalising addictive substances - perhaps decriminalisation would help to treat addiction through the health system, but I doubt it would put an end to criminal distribution and all the violence which comes with it. I do know that the current system has fuelled a 40 year civil war in Colombia, a long one in Peru, and is bringing Mexico to the condition of a failed state - all so Americans can party harder.

Kitsch Klassic

I've previously mentioned that wonderful book by Sylvia Gibson, Latawnya the Naughty Horse Learns to Say "No" to Drugs, the publication that is guaranteed to put your child off… horses for ever.

I can only find one copy for sale, at £95, but Laura has located a scanned copy of the whole thing. So if you like surreal, patronising and badly written propaganda featuring dubious 'ethnic' names and pictures of horses smoking and swigging from bottles, off you go. It was written in 1990! What the hell did Gibson think 90s kids were like?

Still, it beats My Friend Flicka.

On the Ketamine…

Awful Library Books (run by rebel librarians) is fast becoming an addiction. Head over there to see today's work of genius, Latawyna, the Naughty Horse Learns to Say "No" to Drugs, in which said equine weans itself off smoking, drinking and drugs. It's illustrated too!

Can't help thinking that the author and publisher were on drugs themselves…

Science 1 - Government by tabloid 0

Professor Nutt, recently sacked as head of the government's advisory council on drugs for… er… giving advice on drugs has written a guest editorial in New Scientist. It's, well, calm and sensible.

A little taster:

The message for the British government is a simple one: don't exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don't try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.

I ain't no suit-wearin' businessman like you... you know I'm just a gangsta I suppose...

Quote of the day, from the passionate, leftwing author of The Wire, to which I'm quite attached:

"It is possible," he has observed, "that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: 'You are hopelessly full of shit'."

I do worry a little about watching the show - it's pretty voyeuristic to watch the travails of a mostly-black city. From top to bottom, it depicts a capitalist dystopia in which life is cheap, getting paid is all that matters, and from which all oversight is absent. The newspaper jettisons standards and journalists at an appalling rate. The politicians are obsessed with their careers and kickbacks, whether they started idealistically or not. The legal system is politically compromised, and the police - some of whom are broken, others corrupt - care little for their citizens, with a few exceptions. The unions are mob-controlled, the schools act as mini-prisons for kids who really want to be earning on the corners, and the black men are determined to kill or be killed for money and prestige. Add the racial tensions and you have a recipe for disaster.

Yes, it's fiction, but it's based on long experience. The Tories are currently claiming that the UK is like The Wire, which is astonishingly irresponsible, and proof that they haven't actually watched it: the show's implied solutions are leftwing, calling for altruism, a strong and caring state and a sense of community. The Wire's problems, meanwhile, are those of Thatcherite capitalism, in which unbridled capitalism, the free market, privatisation, contempt for public services and 'there is no such thing as society' (Thatcher) feature prominently. Think about it: drugs are a selfish bit of indulgence. There's demand, and businessmen have spotted a gap in the market and behaved like good little capitalists by filling it. Legality, guns and the like don't matter - we've all been taught that profit is more important than morality or community. The dealers shouldn't be alienated: they're just further along the continuum that is us.

War, on drugs

Paul Flynn castigates the idiocy of the Afghan policy - the result of eight years of war is that 95% of heroin in Britain comes from a country flooded with Western troops, the same proportion as when the Taliban ran the country. The only difference is that heroin is now massively cheaper than it was then. A victory for capitalism, at least.

How much are the police snorting?

I meant to rant about this yesterday, but had so much to do that I forgot.

The police and their shady friends were all over the press yesterday proclaiming their amazing success in restricting the flow of cocaine into the country, increasing the wholesale price. Paul Flynn rips this PR bollocks apart over on his site. Also, the Ministry of Defence claimed that they'd seized £50m of heroin from the Taliban a while back: Bad Science's analysis reveals that actually, this was PR-speak (i.e. lies) for $126,000 of opium, or $250,000 of heroin, and so on.

What interested me was that the boys in blue said that the street price hadn't changed because dealers were mixing the coke with any old shit they found lying around.

Well, that's OK then. What a result. Lots of stupid people are being poisoned because they're snorting rat poison, Persil or whatever, as well as a little bit of coke. It seems to me that the cops have got totally the wrong end of the wedge on this one. We're always going on about the NHS becoming a health service rather than a sickness service. In the 'war on drugs', we should be reducing demand for drugs (mostly through education and treating addiction as an illness) rather than by firebombing Peruvian peasants and encouraging dealers to poison their customers.