Reviews
- Jeremy Agar
Incredible Luck
by Don Brash, Troika Books, Auckland, 2014
Reform
A Memoir
by Geoffrey Palmer, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2014
The Mighty Totara
The Life And Times Of Norman Kirk
by David Grant, Random House, Auckland, 2014
Brash Is All About Economics
So inept, so clumsy, were Don Brash’s spells in the public spotlight that it’s tempting to dismiss him as a cranky old codger with a few unfashionable ideas. He chats about some of them here, unaware or unconcerned about how out of step he is with the evolving ethos. There’s the courtly Brash, here giving thanks for the women in his life, all of whom are said to be “supportive”. Then there’s the philosophic Brash, who is given to speculate out loud about drugs or religion or whether there’s a racial and genetic component to intelligence. Normal politicians wouldn’t go there, but Brash doesn’t mind offending the conventional wisdom. This does have an up side. At least he hasn’t bothered with media training and “spin”. And not all his sallies deserve our scorn.
Whatever. Forget all the stuff about incest and marijuana and stolen identities and cups of tea. All of the ACT Party posturing might tell us something about the moral and social compasses of neo-liberalism, but is it important to the rest of us? Brash is all about economics, and it’s his economic notions which influence the main parties in Parliament.
That is a big problem. Let’s start where Brash starts, with China, the topic which obsesses both him and his successor as National’s Leader. He takes it for granted that NZ’s relationship with China is the “perfect illustration of the theory of comparative advantage”. As he says, this theory holds that you specialise in what you’re good at. NZ, small and rural, trades raw materials and imports cheap manufacturing from China. This simple balance echoes the example of David Ricardo, a founding father of classical economics. Comparative advantage is the ideology that Brash – and, in his tactically more subtle way, Key – see making another comeback.
But why tell us that now? Ricardo lived in the 18th Century and NZ’s colonial history since the 19th Century has been all about “comparative advantage”. We grew sheep and cows; the UK sent us knives and forks. Brash is trapped in a fatal misunderstanding. He says he’s a lone voice looking to the future; in reality, he’s centuries out of date. We don’t need to keep shipping out raw materials. A modern economy might try adding value to primary produce and diversifying into a more sophisticated and sustainable modernity. Dependence on a few products and a few markets has always been the main threat to our prosperity.
When Brash gets to his central point, the need for foreign capital to flood into NZ, he bases his case on a series of statements which he must know are quite wrong. Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, he thinks, were bad enough, but the Key government, we’re unreliably informed, has made “foreign investment even more difficult – leading to NZ’s having one of the least attractive regimes for foreign investment in the world”. After this absurd hyperbole, nothing surprises. Brash pretends to think that “unsatisfactory data is why a fear of foreign control… includes as ‘foreigners’ companies where just 25% of the shares are held abroad”. Yes, true, but that’s because any foreign ownership of more than 24.9%, however distributed, makes a company foreign owned. That, Don, is the legal definition, something you might have been expected to know (in fact a much smaller percentage usually is enough to establish a controlling interest).
Then, discussing Key’s asset sales, we get: “Individual investors have ended up as tiny minority shareholders in what are still Government-owned and certainly Government-controlled companies. This gives investors only a glimpse of what is really involved in investing in the sharemarket…”.
Under the State Owned Enterprise (SOE) model, as – again - he of course knows, Government ownership isn’t relevant, as SOEs are required to act with commercial motives. It’s a red herring. But for Brash, the propagandist, it’s enough to put “Government” and “companies” in the same sentence to establish waste and inefficiency. His real beef is with all the soothing talk about mum and dad investors. He despises the assurances that the power companies will remain owned by New Zealanders. He echoes the present Government’s line – its habit of putting ideological propaganda at the core of policy - that it’s important to talk up the stock market, but he’d prefer a few large corporations to take over immediately. Being ruthless, they’re seen as more “efficient”.
Brash echoes Key’s incorrect claim that “just 1.44% of the total of all rural land” is owned offshore. In fact, 8% is. Then, inevitably, the tired slur, thrown in as if in passing: “And … 55% of all direct investment in NZ was from Australia and a further 25% from other OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries”. Yes, we get it, not much is owned by Chinese. So? Brash is playing his favoured race card, but the argument against foreign economic control is informed not at all by the nationality of the foreign interest.
An Alternative Universe Of Pure Theory
Brash repeats this construction, his way of pretending to have practical common sense, with another unsupported assertion: “And all companies, irrespective of their ownership, should be required to meet our environmental laws”. Yes, his reader is supposed to murmur, secure in the knowledge that the great men wouldn’t overlook such obvious and pressing national interests. Except that, yet again, it’s not true. All available leaks as to its text suggest that under the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) this is precisely what won’t be happening. A prime motive of transnational corporations is to regulate so that sovereign governments would lose the right to legislate against environmental damage caused by foreign corporations. That’s what it’s about. It’s already happened with “free trade” deals on which the TPPA is based.
The ostensible purpose of all the bashing of the public and our institutions is to be efficient. Cut waste. Run a tight ship. Be accountable. We’ve heard it ten thousand times. Yet even here, at the core of Brashdom, is falsehood. Neo-liberals take on easy targets like solo mums and naughty children because they play well on talkback radio. Meanwhile, often in secret, the State that they claim to be shrinking is to massively expand, with millions more being thrown at the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), at roads of supposedly “national importance”, at anything which buttresses corporate power or favours financial marketeers. Look no further than the $1.6 billion that the government wasted on bailing out South Canterbury Finance investors. Brash gives this as an obvious example of wise Government spending.
Brash lives in an alternative universe, in a bubble of pure theory, untroubled by the crude claims of reality. From there he is happy to pronounce that the global financial crisis [GFC] “is certainly not an event which proves the need for more regulation”. On the contrary, the crash was the result of “a failure of policy” by those American mortgage brokers which were set up by the Federal government. Thus, the crash was the fault of the “altruism” of the US government in helping Americans get a mortgage - much as used to happen in NZ when home ownership was widespread and affordable with the former State Advances Corporation. He makes no mention of the real problem, the housing bubble in the private market, or any of the other housing bubbles around the world, because he cannot admit to any hint of failure in unregulated markets.
In the six years since the crash, other candidates have presented themselves to analysts. According to taste, the governments and banking systems of, for example, the US, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland and Iceland have been criticised, as have the big brokerage corporations. Brash might be only observer in the world who has nothing to say about any of them. Words like “hedge funds” or “derivatives” aren’t mentioned. His other villain is the only major world economy that was not involved in the GFC - the government of China (it’s true that China financed the debts stacked up by neo-liberal excess – but that can’t be said).
Bugger Democracy, Give All Power To Bankers
“Does democracy have a future?” asks Brash’s climactic chapter, to which the answer seems to be: “Unfortunately, it might”. It’s obvious to the man who nearly became NZ’s Prime Minister that democracy is a bad idea. He need only quote from a favourite source, The Economist, to remind us that “Plato warned” and “James Madison feared” and “John Adams worried” that the result of democracy would be that “the idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush to the utmost extravagance of debauchery… and then demand a new division” of the spoils looted from the rich.
But these guys aren’t running in Epsom or Ohariu, so are they vital contributors to an election year debate? Plato was around over 2,000 years ago, fretting over the rise of an Athenian citizenry; Madison and Adams were American Presidents 250 years ago, contemporaries of Ricardo, powerful men threatened by the stirrings of a popular will at a time when European NZ didn’t yet exist. Message to Don: We’ve moved on. The old order lost. Democracy won.
Brash has a different idea. He knows that had we listened to Plato we wouldn’t have had a financial crash in 2008. About this he is admirably explicit. “The GFC”, he writes, “was a direct result of our democratic form of government”. Why? Because it’s axiomatic that the yobs out there, the four and a half million of them, elect governments who know that “the simplest way to stay in power is to take money off the most affluent minority – subject only to the constraint that taking too much off them may prompt them to leave the country”. We’re in a dunghill and we can’t climb out as long as we are weighed down by universal suffrage and the income tax.
Give all power, all of it, to bankers, and remove all taxes on wealth and income. Then “addictive” spending, the habit of the four and a half million losers spaced out on greed and laziness and envy can be eliminated, and we can give all of the public’s money to the likes of Rio Tinto and Sky City. Obviously – and here the message has been made explicit by Don’s usually whimpy Keyite successors – that means welfare and social services. The brasher, and more honest admission, is that in a perfect Platonic world health and education, too long indulged through the “promiscuous altruism” of Christianity, would also be eliminated as a public responsibility. Let them learn the three R’s and stay healthy if they want to. It’s their choice. If they don’t have hospital insurance or a private tutor, and if they can’t afford to serve the family fresh fruit and veges, let them eat cake.
After all this eccentricity, Brash refers approvingly to Edmund Burke. Burke, a British politician, and yet another 18th Century mentor, is always tossed in by Rightwing extremists trying to place themselves within a conventionally acceptable conservatism. Brash talks of a Burkean contract between the generations, as if to imply that he too wants to be a wise steward of the future. He’s anything but. The one Government department that bears the name of this ethic, the Department of Conservation, rates not a mention in his book. There’s nothing here on the environment or climate change. Brash takes it for granted that the landscape exists to be mined in whatever manner miners think profitable. He rages that the mountains haven’t yet been scraped away. At least that wasn’t China’s fault. For this he blames … Lucy Lawless.
Energy policy? Transport? All we have is the wild assertion that there is “not the slightest economic justification” for an Auckland rail link. Brash is all about the here and now of money. Unguided missiles like these – the book is a series of rants - are fired whenever the Don detects any deviation from neo-liberal dogma, and that’s always happening as the “problem all governments face in a democracy is the relatively low level of public understanding of even basic economics”. NZ is hampered by “poor literacy and numeracy, and in particular the poor financial literacy” (DB’s emphasis). Without Brash as PM the country risks a series of “inevitable disasters”, such as would follow, for example, any imposition of Import controls or rent controls in Christchurch. We could go on, but you get the idea.
Palmer: “I Wrote This Book Because It Is Interesting To Me”
At 800 dense pages Geoffrey Palmer’s autobiography is exhaustive. Some might say exhausting, When Palmer gets hold of a topic he doesn’t easily let it go, and if constitutional law is not at the centre of your life, you might not find it an easy read. This is something that Palmer himself points out, his opening paragraph breezily pointing out that “[t]he purpose of this chapter is to try to explain why I decided to write a memoir. There is a presumption involved in writing such a book that the author has something to say in which other people will be interested. I am far from confident that this is the case. I wrote this book because it is interesting to me…”
At the start we’re given 35 pages on Palmer’s great-grandfather, raising the possibility that 800 pages will not be enough. It turns out that no other relative receives more than a conventional amount of scrutiny. The great-grandfather has 35 pages because in the Nelson of the mid 19th Century he was frequently suing or being sued. John Palmer was all about litigation. We appreciate his great-grandson’s introduction. If it’s the law, it’s fun.
Such cogitations should interest more than the author, Palmer being ever alert to wider implications. From his ancestor we’re led into thoughts about colonial New Zealand society. The title, “Reform”, is pure Palmer. Great-grand-dad started the Palmerian process. The point of life, Palmer urges us to appreciate, is to keep improving the way society is organised, and this starts with study. Political memoirs are customarily stacked with profound names. Unusually in the genre, Palmer means what he says. He doesn’t just mention heavyweights like Brash’s Plato and Burke; he’s read them and thought about them. This makes him a very unusual politician, possibly a unique species.
So it’s significant that his favourite is John Stuart Mill, a 19th Century British politician and intellectual. Mill is the archetypal liberal, his championing of individual freedom and free speech being “highly relevant to today’s society”. Palmer’s career has been all about enacting rules to clarify social rights and obligations. In this, it has to be said, he’s been remarkably influential. Anyone interested in the background to policies like accident compensation, the Treaty, or alcohol laws will find Palmer’s discussion essential reading.
As a conviction politician, unwilling to bend to compromise over principles (as that would be illogical), he is reminiscent of that other dedicated liberal, Don Brash. Both are rationalists, atheists. The difference is that Brash’s social liberalism was scatter-gun and was notoriously abandoned in Orewa in the tactical pursuit of power for what really mattered, the pursuit of economic neo-liberalism. Palmer was also neo-liberal, but for him it was largely just another aspect of dismantling procedural impurities.
Better Things To Do Than Be PM
Brash always found it difficult to persuade us that he was interested in anything other then his obsession over money, but when Palmer declares an interest, he radiates sincerity. His honesty is guileless. When he says that he could not be bothered to rally support to remain as Prime Minister in 1990, he’s credible. He had better things to do.
The Resource Management Act (RMA), enacted by the Bolger government in 1991 but initiated by the outgoing Labourites, was typically Palmerian, and it’s not surprising that he singles it out as a proud achievement. The RMA unified a hotchpotch of statutes and rules which had accumulated in varying circumstances, and sought a consistent, national process. Palmer’s strongest criticism of the Key regime is over its current dismantling of the RMA. He’s not just cross because they’re killing his baby. Palmer’s respect for the natural environment shouldn’t be doubted.
Palmer’s enthusiasms are relentless and some of the personal anecdotes recorded here might indeed be of more interest to the writer than the reader. There’s a schoolboyish tone to proceedings, as though Palmer was freshly into a new term and set an assignment on what he had done in the summer holidays. His memory must be prodigious.
When the Attorney General (Palmer) was not lobbying the Cabinet, the Deputy Prime Minister (Palmer) was trying to keep the peace between his Prime Minister (Lange) and his Minister of Finance (Douglas), neither of whom wanted to talk to each other. All this kept him busy, and there’s little evidence on display that Palmer thought as deeply about other related issues. Beyond running around, patching up the Government’s confusions over its anti-nuclear stand, he doesn’t seem to have questioned other conventional – and dishonest - justifications for NZ’s defence and foreign policies which were inconsistent with it
On matters economic he has more to say. His claim that latter-day ACT’s purist neo-liberalism is “ideological” and “extreme” is accurate, but unhelpful. All Brash and his mates want is to continue the course set by Roger Douglas, whom Palmer did not oppose. He says that Douglas’ shock tactics were “clearly wrong”, as they were hostile to his sense of due process. This is obviously the case, but he must by now have realised that the profoundly anti-democratic way in which Rogernomics was thrust onto the country was the only way it could have been imposed, and the reason it was imposed was ideological. The lack of a mandate for neo-liberalism meant there was no other choice. Rogernomics was not a process failure within the Cabinet; it was a Cabinet political coup against the citizenry, supported by the man whose political career was dominated by his insistence that NZ had an “elected dictatorship”, the power of which needed to be curbed. His Government abused its monopoly of power like none other.
The error is compounded by Palmer’s repeated assumption that privatisation might have been unfortunate, but was necessary because of NZ’s debt. Douglas himself has written that using debt as a pretext for his coup was “a poor argument”, deployed because it was the “easiest to use politically”. Douglas was entirely cynical, contemptuous of the NZ public, and his Deputy Prime Minister still says he had no idea. There’s a further contradiction. Palmer might say he did not like privatisation, but that’s only because it was unpopular. After all these years is the ivory-towered Palmer still able to think that other aspects of Douglas’ assault were not unpopular? Is the deeply principled Palmer outing himself as just another populist?
Near the end of his book Palmer offers some (uncharacteristically) brief critiques of current governance. Among his dislikes are the “cult of management” and the way Government activities are organised within “silos”, thus compromising a holistic vision. Again, he’s right, but, again, he’s the wrong person to complain. Surely both managerialism and the silo culture are the expression of a style introduced by … Palmer and Douglas. They were designed to shut down all that messy democracy, whether in their silo-style Cabinet, their Party caucus or the country at large. This point is made in Thomas Piketty’s important book, “Capital In The Twenty First Century” (see Bryan Gould’s article about Piketty’s book, elsewhere in this issue. Ed.), where he points out that managerialism is closely associated with the Rogernomic “Anglo Saxon” economies.
Kirk: The Good Kiwi Bloke
David Grant’s biography of Kirk, Prime Minister between 1972 and 1974, is unashamedly partisan in that the author’s respect for his subject is manifest from the title on. Kirk was a mighty totara, his death while in office giving rise to a sense of loss rare in NZ politics. Grant conveys the feel of the times in a way that will ring true with those old enough to remember Big Norm’s all too brief life, and while his virtues are given full play, so are his shortcomings.
There are many stories about Norman Kirk. When he became known as a public figure at an unusually young age, he seemed something new, a politician whose life resembled the lives of those he represented. Kirk grew up poor, left school early, worked hard at manual jobs. His energies were immense, as were his ambitions. He is perhaps most characteristically remembered as having built his own house while Mayor of Kaiapoi, first elected when he was 30, the youngest mayor in the country. Four years later, in 1957, he became an MP.
Openly keen to reach the top of the greasy political pole, Kirk somehow escaped the (public) resentments that normally result. He wanted power, but the feeling was that he wanted it so that he could exercise it in the interests of the electorate. Grant’s thoroughly researched biography shows that this quality of directness – and charisma – remained throughout. He wasn’t a lawyer or a farmer, a shortcoming that astounded some Nationalists, but neither was he a career trade union boss or Labour Party functionary. Perhaps more than any other Prime Minister, before or since, he seemed the good Kiwi bloke. He should have been the first NZ born PM (that milestone was reached by “Kiwi” Keith Holyoake, National PM from 1960 to 1972. The two men, from Grant’s telling, respected each other).
In retrospect the short Kirk tenure marks NZ’s transition to modernity. Socially conservative, Kirk resisted the emerging liberalism that was pressing for abortion rights and the removal of discrimination against homosexuality. In this he was very much a child of his time. Yet, when it came to apartheid, and NZ’s sporting links with South Africa, he was on the side of history. A Springbok tour scheduled for 1973 exemplifies Kirk’s career and marks the change in the wind. Initially the pragmatic beer-and-chips Kiwi bloke sided with the pro-tour sentiment; later he decided that morality demanded that he needed to mix politics and sport after all. The tour was cancelled. Grant shows that expediency was a factor. NZ stood to gain more from siding with the angels.
Kirk became socially progressive. It was during his tenure that NZ opened up towards China. He raised the profile of Waitangi. He opposed the raising of Lake Manapouri. But opposition to the war in Vietnam, another touchstone issue, was a step too far for the boy from Waimate.
Some things, though, never change. HART (Halt All Racist Tours) was a leading organiser of the anti-apartheid movement. At a 1973 Labour Party Conference, Helen Clark, a youth delegate, moved that the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) be disbanded:
“That received no traction among the wider Conference, although Kirk had expressed disquiet about the operations of SIS agents in the field and said there had to be a closer definition of an individual’s right to privacy (he later learned that the SIS had bugged the Christchurch home of HART Chair Trevor Richards*. Some months earlier HART had complained of SIS bugging in a letter to Kirk; when the SIS initially denied it, Kirk conveyed this to Richards. Later, when the truth was revealed, Kirk was incensed. ‘What were they doing making a liar out of the Prime Minister?’ he wanted to know)”.
(Let’s add our brackets. It’s a sign of how much evil from the State we take for granted that the matter ended there, and that within 511 thick pages even a fair and progressive historian like Grant can mention this only parenthetically). *Trevor Richards was the founding leader of HART through the 1970s. You can read Murray Horton’s tribute to HART in the Obituaries in Foreign Control Watchdog 72, March 1993, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-march-1993.html. Ed.
Perhaps the quality that most endeared Kirk to his supporters was his anti-intellectualism, a quality much admired in the heartlands. Norm worked on instincts, and these were sharp. It is coincidence that he and the very different Palmer represented neighbouring electorates, Palmer being elected just five years after Kirk’s death. In the Christchurch suburb of Linwood, where Kirk spent his childhood, hating the place, Palmer chose to set up his house and office.
Palmer and Brash were obsessives, one of them distressed that people are content to go for days on end, even lifetimes, without worrying about constitutional law; the other, burdened by the certainty that the lazy and envious herd weren’t into economics. Both were rationalists, shocked by the inability of New Zealanders to base life on a single inviolate premise. Brash took an aversion to simple practicalities to an extreme. He tells us that when he was appointed to run the Kiwifruit Authority he was invited to sample one of its products, something that in the course of his life he had not yet imagined he would attempt. The experience made him nervous.
Kirk Alone Was the Conservative
Between them, this trio of party leaders served less than three years as Prime Minister: Kirk enthusiastically for 21 months; Palmer reluctantly for 13 months; and Brash not at all. Of the three outcomes, that’s the best.
The common assumption as to why Kirk’s reputation remains high is that “he was the last working class Prime Minister’. Certainly neither the minister’s son, Brash, nor the editor’s son, Palmer, would see themselves as proletarian. The qualities they see as uncouth, the instincts usually dubbed down-to-earth - pragmatism, an ability to intuit the aspirations of fellow citizens, a readiness to be guided by experience – might have humble origins but they are also conservative values. Asked to choose between the trio, Edmund Burke would have identified with Norman Kirk. Working class? The phrase can be condescending. Let’s say Kirk’s popularity is based on a simpler proposition. He sought to govern in the interests of his country, guided by circumstance. He alone was the conservative. The Secret Life Of Kim Dotcom by David Fisher, Paul Little Books, Auckland, 2013
David Fisher, a respected journalist with the New Zealand Herald, has not really written about Dotcom’s “secret life”. There’s lots of information here about Dotcom’s ventures, which will be of interest to Internet junkies, but the title is more an attention grabber than an indication of scandals about to be told. Fisher writes in the fast, informal style perfected in the popular American manner. The type is not justified at the margins, a gimmick presumably to underline this style. As its subject would expect, the ride is going to be fast and fun.
Typically in such ventures the author is about to hype his topic, and that’s probably the intent here. Fisher follows the story of Dotcom’s attempts to be granted residency in New Zealand, outlining developments and usually concluding each episode with a quotation from Dotcom. Neither side comes out smelling sweet. Government Ministers were trapped between needing to suck up to American interests who asked for extradition, and wanting to find reasons a dicey but very rich man could live here. Illustrating the confusion, the two pertinent Ministers made opposing rulings on whether he was eligible to buy the mansion*. For his part, Dotcom protested that he’d never given them cause to be denied, but he too is unconvincing. *See Watchdog 130, August 2012, “Kim Dotcom And The Good Character Test: Money Versus Power”, by James Ayers, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/30/06.html Ed.
John Key claimed later not to have heard of Dotcom when his residency was an issue. Fisher is dubious: “Key’s government was one which thrived on a ‘no surprises’ rule. Civil servants were instructed to pass any matters of interest to the Prime Minister’s office in the Beehive – as (Simon) Power’s office did on the mansion purchase”. Dotcom arrived under a scheme that Key promoted, and lived in Key’s electorate in the country’s most expensive house. At one stage Key admitted to having heard that a German man was living in the mansion, raising the question of how he came to hear. Neighbourhood gossip, if it knew enough to know the nationality of the mystery man, would surely know more, or at least speculate. The other possibility, official knowledge, is not likely to have noted nationality, in itself of little significance, and stopped there. Fisher mentions other surprising gaps in Key’s knowledge.
The infamous raid on the mansion, which rents for $1,000,000 a year, has been the bleakest action to date, the cops using a gross and quite unjustified degree of force, while Dotcom waited in his panic room. Appropriately perhaps, both parties were aping Hollywood clichés (Dotcom, inevitably, is a James Bond fan).
“I Don’t Give A Shit What Other People Think”
If the format of Fisher’s snappy biography suggests he’s touting his subject, the content might not always do so. The ambiguity that marks the public proceedings is echoed in the personal tale. It’s not easy to think of anyone more given to self-promotion than Dotcom, yet we’re told several times that he is “media shy”. We’re simultaneously told that he wanted to live in the isolation of his grotesque luxury and that he regretted feeling isolated from neighbours.
Before he adopted his present name, a younger Kim Schmitz wanted to be known as His Royal Highness King Kimble the First. A defining moment in his life, we’re told, was a crash on the autobahn when he was rolling along at 250 kph, yet in 2011, he escaped an Auckland winter to go back to Germany so he could drive fast cars again. “For the holiday, [he] took 12 cars, golf buggies and jet skis, the furniture and 18 staff to manage the logistics”.
Dotcom’s wealth and his attraction for the sort of people who grovel before the power it allows, combined with his hankering for attention and his apparently obsessive need for self-justification, were ideal qualities for the two indisputable services he has rendered his adopted country. He’s exposed at least one low-life politician who needed to be exposed, and – much more importantly – he revealed what we all knew but was officially not known: that the secret police, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), were spying illegally on him, an NZ resident (for more on the spies, check my review below of Glenn Greenwald’s “No Place To Hide”).
Kim of course says that Key knows more than he admits to, but he doesn’t have much longer before his bluff will be called. Once the election’s held, Dotcom’s currency will devalue. Of the Internet Party, Hone Harawira or Mana there’s no mention, and that’s not just because Fisher published before the politicking was public knowledge. There is no indication that Dotcom has any interest in politics. All we get to hear about his life outside the world of computer geekdom is stuff like how he loves driving fast cars and spending money, how he regrets that Auckland has a dull party scene, and that, in general “I don’t give a shit about what other people think” It’s all very unsurprising.
You can’t easily drive at 250 kph around the North Shore, and in Hong Kong, his previous address, His Royal Highness King Kimble the First would have found it even harder. Slow NZ is not likely to interest him much longer.
No Place To Hide Edward Snowden, The NSA And The Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald, Hamish Hamilton, London and New York, 2014
This important book made the news shortly after Edward Snowden revealed to the world what the spies were up to. Glenn Greenwald is a journalist with a track record of researching what he calls the “surveillance State”. That’s the National Security Agency (NSA) in the USA, the outfit that watches the world, along with its “Five Eyes” partners, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Snowden contacted him anonymously, feeling out whether Greenwald, and his newspaper, the UK’s Guardian, would serve as a conduit for the top secret files that he wanted the world to know about. He couldn’t reveal who he was or what he knew till he was sure that he’d found the right man. And until that confidence was established, Greenwald couldn’t know who was sending him messages or what they might be about. The first section of this engrossing book follows these exchanges. Eventually they met, in Snowden’s Hong Kong hotel, and the partnership was established.
Snowden had access to the most secret stuff in the world of the spies. To quit, emigrate, and spill all took immense courage. He knew that the US government would make every effort to get him back and lock him up. From Greenwald’s account Snowden impresses as a man of unusual intelligence and integrity.
For Greenwald himself the risks are also considerable. An American like Snowden Greenwald lives in Brazil. More than anyone outside the world of State surveillance the pair has reason to know that the governments they were challenging (primarily the US and the UK) had not just Five Eyes but long arms. Greenwald tells us that when his partner was flying to meet him in Hong Kong, he was detained at Heathrow, the Brits claiming that Greenwald’s “release of documents [was] designed to influence a government and is made for the purposes of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism”.
Both Snowden and Greenwald knew that an NSA tactic of “discrediting a target’ included such practices as setting up sexual encounters (“honey traps”), changing photos on social networking sites, writing a blog purporting to be a sexual victim of a target, or texting damaging messages to their colleagues.
Spying On Brazil’s President
What we heard in May 2014, when the book came out, was that in 2011 NZ had been privy to NSA spying on the President of Brazil. Greenwald reproduces a document, labelled “TOP SECRET”, meaning that it was circulated only within the Five Eyes. Headed “surge effort”, its “goal” was to attain “an increased understanding of the communication methods and associated selectors of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff and her key advisers” (in another context we read that Canada had a programme to spy on Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy).
The NSA’s “(U//FOUO) S2C41 surge effort” targeted “one of Mexico’s leading Presidential candidates, Enrique Pena Nieto, and nine of his close associates. Nieto is considered by most political pundits to be the likely winner of the 2012 Mexican Presidential elections which are to be held in July 2012” (Nieto did win, and is still in office, from all accounts serving as a conventional Mexican President). Brazil and Mexico were of interest to NSA as it compiled a list headed “Identifying Challenges: Geopolitical Trends for 2014-2019”. A question followed: “Friends, Enemies, or Problems?” Others on the list are Egypt, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey and Yemen.
What do these countries have in common? It’s anyone’s guess, but the obvious connection is that they’re large countries which are neither firm friends nor dedicated enemies, and of interest to American economic and military strategists. What they’re not is a security threat as supporters of terrorism or subversion. They’re the sort of countries that the USA would always keep an eye on. Any idea that NZ needs to ask – or should spend money asking - if Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey and Yemen are “Friends, Enemies, or Problems?” is farther than far-fetched.
The understanding had been that the Five Eyes partners don’t spy on their own citizens. Thus, just as it was illegal to spy on Kim Dotcom (see my review above of his biography), Americans were specifically beyond the NSA’s mission, except if someone elsewhere was communicating with the US, or if a warrant was issued.
There had been repeated assurances from NSA that it could not provide specific numbers of interceptions, and, in fact, did not spy on individuals. They said they only had “meta data”. This was a lie. A programme called BOUNDLESS INFORMANT counts all phone calls and e-mails in the world. In Greenwald’s summary of Snowden, it is clear that “[t]he US government had built a system that has its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide”.
When the law won’t allow something that NSA wants, the law might get changed. For example, Verizon, a major US phone company, got a top secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, under FISA (the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), to turn over data about Americans’ phone calls, either domestic or international.
Everything about the NSA and Five Eyes is creepy. The tone of the language it uses is a sort of mix of dystopian science fiction, geeky computer talk, and North Korea. In 2011, for instance, Five Eyes announced a “New Collective Posture”, an ambition to “Sniff It All”, “Know It All”, “Collect It All”, “Process It All”, ‘’Exploit It All” and “Partner It All”.
The Scale Is Vast
Snowden’s leaks show that NSA has a staff of 30,000 plus contracts with 60,000 employees of private corporations, the latter because the best estimate is that 70% of the snooping is on private concerns. Smari McCarthy, a researcher in Iceland, has calculated that Five Eyes spends $US120 billion every year (“Don’t Shoot The Messenger!”, Vanessa Baird, New Internationalist, April 2014, http://newint.org/features/2014/04/01/keynote-whistleblowers/).
By 2012 NSA was processing over 20 billion “communication events” every day. In a randomly chosen month, March 2013, 97 billion e-mails and 124 billion phone calls were collected. This volume excited the lads (the NSA world comes across as young and male), and as they took their Christmas break, “on Dec 21, 2012 SHELLTRUMPET processed its One Trillionth metadata record. SHELLTRUMPET began as a near-real-time metadata analyser on Dec 8, 2007…”
Then there’s MUSCULAR, whose beat is to invade Google and Yahoo!, while BLARNEY boasts it’s about “Corporate Partner Access”, getting telecoms to spy. Targets in 2010 included people and businesses in Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Venezuela, the EU and the UN.
The excitement reaches fever pitch when it comes to “PRISM … the most cited collection source in NSA 1st Party end-product reporting. More NSA product reports were based on PRISM than on any other single SIGAD (signals intelligence activity designator)…The number of tasked selectors rose 32% in FY12 to 45,406 as of Sept 2012…. Expanded PRISM taskable e-mail domains from only 40 to 22,000”.
No penny stock on a dicey stock market was as bullish as this. Another document shouted: “PRISM is a team sport!”, linking the FBI and the CIA. Greenwald shows us an NSA Powerpoint presentation, which would have screened at a motivational session: “’The Role of National Interests, Money, and Egos’: Oh yeah… Put Money, National Interest, and Ego together, and now you’re talking about shaping the world writ large. What country doesn’t want to make the world a better place … for itself?” Wow! Those guys! Are they on to it or what!?
There’s an analytical side of NSA: “Let’s be blunt – the Western World (especially the US) gained influence and made a lot of money via the drafting of earlier standards. The US was the major player in shaping today’s Internet. This resulted in pervasive exportation of American culture as well as technology. It also resulted in a lot of money being made by US entities”. This wisdom might be banal, but it is at least accurate.
A PRISM document shows a “sampling” of “reporting topics” for a week in February 2013. They were: Mexico, narcotics, energy, internal security, political affairs, Japan, trade, Israel, Venezuelan military procurement, oil and the ‘trade activities’ of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan and Mexico”.
NSA rejoices in “malware”, a term that Snowden and Greenwald don’t bother to explain. Wikileaks defines it as “malicious software, any software used to disrupt computer operations, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems to view every keystroke.…” . NSA has the ambition to use malware “to own” an estimated 100,000 computers.
The vast majority of NSA’s intrusions are “top secret”, and most of these are “FYEO” – For Your Eyes Only, those eyes being the Five Eyes, proudly first in the pecking order in Tier A, where they’re privy to “Comprehensive Cooperation”. While Greenwald notes that “[t]he US spies with these countries, but rarely on them, unless requested to by those countries’ own officials”, he points out a Guardian finding that NSA has paid at least ₤100,000,000 to UK’s “Eye”. This Eye, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), in 2007 successfully clamoured for the right to ‘“unmask” and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits. Meanwhile the Australian Eye has “pleaded with the NSA to ‘extend’ their partnership and extend Australian citizens to greater surveillance”.
Five Eyes Are The In Group
Tier B are 20 countries, roughly the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies. They get “Focused Cooperation”. Chile, France and Israel aren’t here, but probably for contrasting reasons. France has always been offside with the Yanks, whereas, as Greenwald outlines, Israel has a separate set of spying arrangements with the US.
“Metadata”, the compiling of information about overall electronic contacts, is excused by the spies’ apologists on the grounds that metadata storage does not look at the actual content of communications. Greenwald reverses matters, arguing that the substance of specific phone calls or e-mails can be confusing, incoherent or coded, and perhaps of little use to the spies. Metadata is more sinister as it “reveals all you contact, how often, when, and all their contacts …Metadata is mathematical: clean, precise, and thus easily analysed”. Whose life could withstand such scrutiny?
“Customers” for metadata include the US Trade Representative, the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, and the US Treasury. Sometimes Five Eyes does indeed spy on its ostensible enemies, actual terrorists, but Greenwald doubts whether any terrorism has been stopped by it. Normal intelligence and Police work should do the trick. He reminds us that all the 9/11 perpetrators were being watched. They succeeded only because the authorities did not connect up all the dots. Because of its secrecy and its duplicity Five Eyes “reduces legitimacy” and lowers trust within society, suggests an NZ critic (Professor Kevin Clements, at Otago University’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Otago Daily Times, 5/6/14).
The frequency with which Mexico appears in this account is interesting. The original “free trade” deal, the template, was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) involving the US, Canada and Mexico. That’s two of the Five Eyes, and, in a bottom tier when it comes to the NSA, the country on the US’s southern border and the birthplace of millions of its citizens. In NZ the connection with US policy - being in Five Eyes, being keen on the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), and pursuing the cult of neo-liberalism - has made us the only small country to be in Tier One. But if “free trade” deals are about equal opportunity freedom, as the snake oil salesmen tell us, then why deny Mexico? Its low ranking suggests the reality of the power relationship: Mexico was included in NAFTA as a source of cheap labour and an export market for the US. The Key government might well ponder just how the US trade negotiators see the fifth of the Five Eyes. During the Hobbit deals, one US source described New Zealanders as “Mexicans with cell phones”.
The National Party Cookbook
This short booklet has some favourite “recipes for victory” from Government ministers. Not many of them look appetising. Surprisingly, given National’s penchant for spin doctors and publicity, the cookbook is published anonymously. You can contact the writer/s at nationalpartycookbook@gmail.com
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