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Darby Report 309 24 September 2005 page 1

Darby Report 309, 24 September 05 Published by Michael Darby for Community Expressions PO Box 401 Manly NSW 1655 Australia. Phone +61 (04) 413 348 843. Email: darby[at]tpg.com.au Visit: www.michaeldarby.net

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Darby Report 309 contains Click on page num

Freemasons & Catholic Order Work Together for Tsunami Victims

Freemasonry South Australia 2

A thoughtful view on VSU Dr Carolyn V Currie PhD 4

Katrina and Disgusting Exploitation

James K Glassman 6

Links worth visiting 9

Greenpeace hatespeak mars charity event

Michael Darby 10

Ralston Saul: Nonsense from an anti-market ideologue

Gerard Jackson 17

Study Finds a Less Dire Chernobyl Los Angeles Times 29

VJ Day – Letter to the Prime Minister Michael Darby 34

Pioneer of the 'flat tax' taught the East to thrive

Toby Harnden 35

Barr & Carr Realty Community Expressions 39

KGB eyed Tokyo nuke 'accident': late archivist

Japan Times 40

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From www.freemasonrysaust.org.au 13 Aug 2005

Freemasons & Catholic Order Work Together for Tsunami Victims The Freemasons of Australia and New Zealand have pooled resources to help build a $750,000 orphanage and vocational training centre in Sri Lanka operated by the Roman Catholic order of the Salesians of Don Bosco.

Some 600 orphans left homeless by the Tsunami will be housed in the project, which will also leave a long term legacy of education and care for the residents of Elpitiya, on Sri Lanka's SW coast.

Over half of the project cost will be met by the Freemasons. donation of $450,000. Of this figure, Freemasons in South Australia and Northern Territory raised over $72,000.

140 lives were lost and 5,000 people were left homeless when the tsunami tidal wave struck Elpitiya on December 26 and destroyed much of the area’s main industry, fishing.

.Within days of the tsunami, the Freemasons of Australia and New Zealand launched an appeal among our 61,000 members; but adopted a .wait and see. approach before deciding where the funds raised should go,. Grand Master of South Australia & Northern Territory, Rob Casson said.

Grand Master of SA & NT Rob Casson presents Tsunami cheque for $440,000 to Sri Lankan Acting Consul-General Wasantha Senanayke, with Salesian Brothers Michael Lynch and Frank Batagnolli.





The orphanage at Elpitiya, operated by the Roman Catholic order of the Salesians of Don Bosco, was chosen because 100 per cent of the funds raised can be guaranteed to be applied to the project. he said.

The Salesians had already raised enough money to fund a land purchase and partial construction of the orphanage, the head of Australia’s Salesians order of Don Bosco, Father Ian Murdoch said.

The Freemasons. most unexpected donation of $450,000 means the entire project can be completed many years ahead of schedule and leave a lasting legacy of care, training and education in this underprivileged part of the world,. he said.

The wing housing the Vocational Training Centre is to be dedicated to the Freemasons of Australia and New Zealand.

The Australasian Freemasons donate millions each year to charities, community initiatives, educational institutions, hospitals and organisations dealing with the underprivileged, irrespective of whether they are connected to Freemasonry, and irrespective of colour, nationality or religious persuasions.

This project is the latest in a series of joint ventures between Freemasons and the Salesians, which included the donation of around $1.5 million dollars worth of tools to East Timor in 2003.

The Salesians are a Catholic Religious Congregation with an extensive international network in developing countries. Today there are more than 1000 Salesians (priests, brothers, sisters) working in tsunami-affected regions of Sri Lanka, Southern India and Thailand. Some 95% of Salesians are indigenous to the countries mentioned.

The Tsunami Aid Co-ordinating Committee overseeing projects throughout Tsunami affected countries is based at the Salesian Head Office in Rome. To help the work of the Salesians, please contact:

Bro Michael Lynch The Salesians of Don Bosco

715 Sydney Rd, Brunswick Vic 3056 03 9386 6302 salmiss[at]ozemail.com.au






A Thoughtful View on VSU Dr Carolyn V. Currie, Ph.D, M.Com(Hons), B.Ec(Hons), B.Com(Merit), FAIBF, ASA, ACSA, Senior Lecturer, Financial Services, School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology Sydney An open letter to Liberal advocates of Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU)

Historically through their privilege of freedom of speech and freedom from persecution, universities, being derived from a monastic tradition ,are meant to be the spiritual, intellectual, sporting and cultural hubs of a nation. In return for the privileges bestowed upon them in their pursuit of higher learning, universities are meant to repay the community through free advice, promotion of cultural and sporting pursuits, and the inculcation of achieving excellence in all things,

In view of the overall lack of support in the community at large for VSU because of the fear of handing control to administrators who are incompetent at the worst, and feathering their own nests at the best, I recommend the following strategy.

• That the debate and bill be rescheduled and deferred to a select committee in order to call for submissions from the public. This takes into account that VSU has been inherited and imposed by certain elements of the LPA movement but never debated, certainly not by the Minister's own committee. Such a committee would empower the community and stop defections in the LPA ranks.

• The merits of the strategy are not just from the Minister's own electorate where the KGI campus of UTS is only viable because of subsidised union facilities both for food, leisure and sporting where there would be a severe community backlash, but also form important sports and business people who would like to have their say.





• The strategy also avoids open confrontation with the Nationals in the Senate and the press and Opposition having a field day exploiting division in the ranks.

The Hon Brendan Nelson MP should move cautiously on the VSU issue, and should also become aware of the continuing erosion of funding to true academic activities by the administration.

When the Minister first accepted the Education Portfolio I provided him with my papers on comparison of university performance. That research should be extended by his own department to highlight the gross overspending by the administration of universities and the ongoing problems of lack of accountability. Until the top governing bodies are made liable for their lack of good governance, abuses will continue.

Tying $140 million in extra funding to the opening up of books of account will not induce die hard administrators who have too many perquisites to lose. The behaviour of these individuals reminds me of those in the corporate sector who committed white collar crimes too complex for courts to understand.

I remain at this point a loyal and faithful member of the Liberal Party and an admirer of Dr Nelson's patience and intelligence.

I hope and pray he can defer this VSU debate - let the student unions have a year's grace, defer from political donations, and produce accounts - then decide.

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TCS: Tech Central Station - http://www.TechCentralStation.com

Katrina and Disgusting Exploitation James K. Glassman Published 08/31/2005 A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there. My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life. Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect. That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

James Glassman’s article is three weeks old, but has not lost its significance. When it was written, the America-haters – especially those in Europe - were trumpeting estimates of ten thousand dead from Katrina . Ten thousand is actually the number of elderly French citizens who died in the August 2003 heatwave as a direct result of the selfishness and incompetence of socialist French society. Tragically, as many as one thousand Americans may have died in the South East of the USA. One thousand deaths represent one thousand tragedies, but one thousand is not ten thousand. Whatever the shor-tcomings of the official response, Americans did a damned fine job of looking after each other. That is what happens in a free society.

– Michael Darby





Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces. Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/index.html The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s. But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children." Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy." The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."





He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.) Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests. And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming." The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday: "Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'" An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately "may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, there is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation can be made."





Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: "Reliable data since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased." Yes, decreased. Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.). But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts.

Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

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interesting links.

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Greenpeace hatespeak mars charity debate.

The true colours of Greenpeace as a hard-left hatemongering organisation were revealed at a recent Sydney Rotary event. This letter tells the story. 25 August 2005 The Board of Directors Greenpeace Australia Pacific Level 4, 35-39 Liverpool Street Sydney NSW 2000 [email protected] Dear Directors, On the evening of Wednesday 24 August 2005, a charity-fundraising debate organised by the Rotary Club of Sydney took place in the Chamber of the Legislative Council of New South Wales. A member of the Government side was the Campaigns Manager of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Danny Kennedy. The three members of the Opposition were UTS lecturer, Dr. Carolyn Currie PhD, Sydney poet Michael Darby, and renowned Irish-Australian comedian Brian Doyle. After the debate those present walked to the nearby historic “Mint” restaurant for dinner and for questions to the speakers.





A question regarding nuclear energy was asked of Mr Kennedy. In the course of his answer, Mr Kennedy said, “There are people in the world who need better access to electricity, but Dr Carolyn Currie and Michael Darby would not like them, because those people are brown.” This gratuitous and defamatory insult, imputing racist attitudes to two innocent contributors to a charity event, bore no relevance to anything said by any speaker during the evening. Neither Dr Currie nor I had in our respective speeches made any reference to Greenpeace or to Danny Kennedy. The false assertion made by Danny Kennedy had no purpose other than to wound. Dr. Currie and I are each wholly undeserving of the racial slur generated recklessly and hurtfully by Danny Kennedy. Irrespective of the personalities involved, or the backgrounds of the victims of the Danny Kennedy attack, it was wrong and utterly inappropriate for any participant in a charity fundraiser to descend to the politics of viciousness in an unprovoked attack. Your employee gave the impression of the existence of a Greenpeace policy that persons with views differing from the views of Greenpeace have no rights, and should be maligned in all circumstances. When the opportunity afforded, I advised the gathering to this effect: “Dr. Carolyn Currie spends a good deal of her time attempting to raise the living standards of the ordinary people of Indonesia by giving wise advise to that nation’s government and financial institutions. Of Dr Currie’s four closest friends, two are Aboriginal, and one of those individuals is present here tonight. I recall in April

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1975 while the North Vietnamese were capturing the city, participating in the evacuation from Saigon of 330 orphans, many of whom would have died if left behind. I recall organising a medical team to look after the needs of the East Timorese during the 1975 civil war. I presently spend a good deal of time collecting bicycles and computers which are sent to East Timor and Ghana.” I could have added that in her academic work Dr Currie has earned a high reputation for her efforts beyond the call of duty to assist students whose first language is not English, the great majority of whom are Asian in origin. I could have added that Dr Currie has a long and commendable record of financial generosity towards charities whose principal beneficiaries happen not to be white. I could have added that Dr Currie’s fashion supplier of choice is a dark-complexioned Afro-American gentleman born in New York, and that a visitor to any social gathering at Dr Currie’s home will meet among her guests individuals invited without reference to their diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I could have added that citizens of Indonesia frequently stay in Dr Currie’s home. I could have added that in my army officer days I was the defending officer of choice for Aboriginal soldiers in 6 Task Force. I could have added that in 1994 I was praised by a Mount Isa magistrate for my successful efforts to minimize the sentence of my Aboriginal employee who was before the Court charged with breaching bail conditions. I could have added that in 1994 I designed a healthy house for aboriginal communities or that in 1973 I proposed to then Member for Riverina Al Grassby the accelerated recruitment into the nation’s Armed Forces and Police Forces of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. I could have added that when I stood for local government office in the Shire of Cloncurry I earned and received a strong majority of votes in the Dajarra aboriginal community. I could have added that my email newsletter in every

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issue promotes donations to the Salesians for projects among the poor of Asia and Africa. I could have added that my friend the late Neville Bonner – then a Senator – accompanied me to East Timor in 1975 and joined me in attempting to persuade the Australian Government to dissuade the Indonesian Government from invading East Timor. I could have added that my adopted sister enjoys Chinese ethnicity. I could have added that in 1988 I was first to propose a national audit of the status of Australians of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestry, so that progress in health, education and welfare could be more accurately monitored. I could have added that each year on the occasion of the City to Surf, in an honorary capacity I entertain a busload of mainly Aboriginal youngsters who come from Wilcannia and Broken Hill to participate in the event. I could have added that as honorary adviser to the Government of the Republic of Ghana I contributed to the planning of National Sanitation Day in 2002. I could have added that in an honorary capacity I have made representations to the Department of Immigration on behalf of several citizens of Asian and African nations. Having made reference, as above, to the backgrounds of Dr. Currie and myself, I stated that the happy atmosphere of a charity event had been polluted by the slur against two participants. I invited Danny Kennedy to stand and make a public apology. He refused, saying “I won’t apologise on your terms.” While I was presenting a poem as requested to the gathering, Danny Kennedy continued talking loudly until I asked him to “shut up for a while”. Later Danny Kennedy privately offered to me a qualified apology, which I did not accept because he refused to give a promise that he would not re-offend. Danny Kennedy then approached Dr Currie, perhaps with the intention of

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offering privately an apology to her. Danny Kennedy is a disgrace to himself and his employer, and he has demonstrated that he has no scruples whatever in his desire to denigrate individuals who do not share his political views.

I call on Greenpeace immediately to terminate the employment of Danny Kennedy. Failure to take action against this rogue employee will be seen as endorsement of his wholly unacceptable behaviour. Moreover, potential contributors to future charitable events will be rightly apprehensive that they may be victims of a similar attack. Defamatory false imputation of racism is a serious matter. Where malice is involved, as is demonstrably the case with Mr Kennedy, a court may have the option to return a verdict of Criminal Defamation.

I do not speak for Dr Currie, who was entitled to be distressed by the Danny Kennedy attack upon her, and gave every appearance of being distressed. By any standard of judgement, Dr Currie’s professional standing and personal reputation have been damaged by your employee. Note that Dr Currie is unaware that I am writing this letter and may become aware of this letter only after it has been despatched. Your employee has defamed me, and done so with malice, while acting as a representative of Greenpeace. The effect of this is that I have been defamed by Greenpeace. My capacity to earn a living in my chosen profession is impaired by the Greenpeace defamation. Moreover, the Greenpeace defamation has impaired my effectiveness in promoting charitable causes, an activity which routinely receives more of my attention than commercial pursuits. While reserving my rights in all respects I demand an immediate written apology and

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retraction from Greenpeace. I recommend that Greenpeace similarly retract and apologise for the defamation committed against Dr Currie. Moreover, I require that Greenpeace immediately obtain from Danny Kennedy, and hold in secure care, the following material which is likely to be the subject of a subpoena:

• All speech notes, speech texts, research notes and all other material used by Danny Kennedy in the preparation of his speech.

• Each and every hard disc drive or data storage attachment of each and every computer or information processing device used by Danny Kennedy in the course of the preparation of his speech.

• A log of each and every website visited by Danny Kennedy since his receipt of the invitation to participate in the debate.

• Each book and article consulted or ready by Danny Kennedy in the course of preparation of his speech.

Factual information about the views of Dr Carolyn Currie and of my views is easy to obtain from the internet and from libraries. The abovementioned material may be important as evidence of the extent to which the act of defamation by your employee was motivated by malice and recklessness. Failure to obtain and secure the material as requested may have serious consequences. Finally, I caution Greenpeace and its employees, including Danny Kennedy, against any repetition of the attack on Dr Currie or on myself, and warn Greenpeace and its employees against any retaliation in respect of this complaint. I expect a prompt reply. Yours sincerely Michael Darby

Greenpeace did reply, on recycled paper, asserting that Danny Kennedy was acting in a private capacity, and denying all responsibility for his conduct. There was of course no apology from Greenpeace. Rotarians and all service organisations should note the important lesson that political fanatics cannot be trusted to conduct themselves properly in any context, not even a charitable event. All people and organisations of goodwill should boycott Greenpeace. – Michael Darby





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Ralston Saul: Nonsense from an anti-market ideologue Gerard Jackson BrookesNews.Com Monday 29 August 2005

To the delight of our ill-informed journalists John Ralston Saul has flittered back into town. It says much about the media’s intellectual standards that they take this poseur seriously and expect the rest of us to do likewise. Unfortunately this is not the first time this enemy of capitalism has tainted Australia’s shores. He visited us in early 1997 and spewed out, with the support of a adoring media, the usual leftist anti-market nonsense.

Proving that leftists never learn, this brilliant commentator his pushing his book The Collapse of Globalism. Revealing a staggering ignorance of economic theory and the history of economic thought, this dilettante tells us that the world needs new theories to replace the 19th century theories of economics that sustained globalism.

These theories, of which he is completely ignorant, did nothing of the kind. What they did was to explain the benefits of free trade in particular and free markets in general. There is nothing stopping the ever so clever Ralston from trying, for example. to refute the theory of free trade. So why doesn’t he? Because he cannot. That is why resorts to

Professional ignoramus John Ralston Saul vies with the animist David Suzuki as the inter-national interviewee of choice for the anti-market ideologues who infest the ABC and spill into commercial media. Brookes Economics Editor Gerard Jackson, a genuinely intellectual leader of informed Australian opinion, flattens the Saul house of cards in this article. For a dose of wisdom anytime, please visit: www.brookes.com.au.





baseless attacks

Unfortunately the more ill-informed the attack on free market theory the more support it will receive from lefty journalists. That is how it was with Richard Yallop of The Australian. During Ralston’s last visit the sycophantic Yallop reported that Saul had said that the people of the West are no longer living in democracies but are the “slaves of the economic market place”. This is the kind of smart-aleck comment that our journalists mistake for wisdom

Saul is also the author of The Unconscious Civilisation which was apparently inspired by anxiety provoked by Canada’s alleged adoption of “the corporate state and economic rationalist ideology”. (Yallop’s words). Saul asserted that embracing corporatism had placed self-interest above the public good; that corporatism had failed to solve the problems of high unemployment, war and poverty. He also insinuated that in 1997 the incomes of 77 million Americans

had fallen below their 1966 level, and that corporatist policies had driven 18 per cent of Americans below the poverty line.

Although these claims were unadulterated hogwash our doting media lapped them up. Market economics (sneeringly and mischievously called rationalist ideology by new class intellectuals) is a branch of the social sciences devoted to the study of human action. Calling it an ideology is just a vicious attempt by anti-market intellectuals and their media allies to

destroy its reputation. Totally unable to refute the power of economic reasoning, they turn instead to the weapons of slander, libel, propaganda and confusion to destroy its credibility.

Saul’s use of the term corporatism as a synonym for free-market economics is a typical example of a lefty intellectual deliberately causing confusion in the public’s mind by exploiting its ignorance. How many know that corporatism is the antithesis of market economics? How many even know that the popular

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name for corporatism in the 1920s and 1930s was fascism? Mussolini’s economic policy was to create a network of planning agencies called “corporations” that would organise production in each branch of industry.

The policy was grandly labelled stato corporativo, or corporatism. University chairs of economics were renamed chairs of economia politica e corporativa; books and thousands of pamphlets were produced explaining the “new way” (what social democrats call the third way) and its superiority over capitalism, a

superiority that The Economist acidly exposed as intellectual posturing (27 July 1935).

Fundamental to corporatist ideology, a form of guild socialism, is a deep rooted hostility to free-market economics. Yet we had the so-called erudite Saul claiming they were one and the same! Not only that, but corporatism claimed to put the public interest first, unlike capitalism.

It was the Nazis who coined the slogan Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz; roughly translated, the public good above private profit, the very thing Mr Saul and his disciples promote. (Whenever I hear an intellectual preaching the common good, I never know whether to look to my wallet first or my liberty).

Not only was his description of the West as corporatist a grotesque caricature of reality but his statistics were outrageously inaccurate. His claim that 18 per cent of Americans were below the poverty line was

wildly misleading. The figure for 1982 was 15 per cent which had fallen to 13 per cent by 1988. The 1997 figure was about 14 per cent. Even if his claim were

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true it would still be deceptive because the poverty line has been rising relative to other incomes.

Meaning, for instance, that if the 1950 poverty line had been maintained there would have been no poverty in the US in 1997. Making international comparisons can also be revealing regarding poverty levels. In the early 1960s it was calculated that 44 per cent of America’s non-white population were below the poverty line of $3000. But by the same measure 75 per cent of the UK was also in poverty. What counts, therefore, is not relative poverty in this respect but relative purchasing power.

Saul’s assertion that the incomes of 77 million Americans had fallen below their 1966 level was not only questionable it was patently absurd. The figure was equal

to about 28 per cent of the population and about 64 per cent of the workforce. Despite Saul’s claims to the contrary, real incomes had risen considerably during the previous 30 years.

In a study commissioned by the New York Times, Leonard Nakamura calculated that real wages rose by 35 per cent during the period 1976-96. So who is Saul talking about? If there were 77 million pensioners in the US he still cannot mean them as indexed pensions had also risen in real terms. How could it be otherwise once we realise that social spending had increased (in 1990 dollars) from $US143.725 billion in 1960 to about $US1,000 billion in 1997?

This brings us to another one of his blatantly false claims, and that is free markets had not solved the problem of unemployment. What this deep thinker had not grasped, and still hasn’t, is that unemployment is not a market problem but a statist problem. Let us start with the US and Europe. The much maligned

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Reagan years — maligned by the likes of Saul and his media groupies, that is — created over 18 million new jobs.

In fact, the Reagan presidency was a period of sustained employment growth for blacks: it saw the black labour force participation rate hit a record 64 per cent, the percentage of low-income black families fall while the proportion of those blacks earning more than $50,000 a year jumped from 7.9 per cent to 13.8 per cent.

Despite anti-Reagan propaganda, about 82 per cent of the newly created jobs were in higher-paying, higher-skilled occupations. Only 12 per cent were in the lowest-paid, low-skilled service occupations, such as retailing and fast-food outlets.

So much for the left's McJobs myth. The Bureau of Labour Statistics calculated that in Reagan’s first term 48.7 percent of new jobs were actually in the best-paid managerial and professional category. In addition to this, the top 1 per cent of earners saw their share of income taxes grow from 17.6 per cent to 24.6 per cent during the 1980s.

And America’s incredible job-creating machine continued to perform during the 1990s. For example, from June 1992 to June 1996 non-farm payrolls rose by 11.1 million, 10.2 million of these were in the private sector. Nationally, unemployment fell to 4.9 per cent in 2000, while in some states it ranged from 2 to 3 per cent. Compare this astounding performance with Western Europe’s miserable record.

Between 1970 and 1984 Western Europe suffered a net loss of 3 to 4 million jobs while America created something like 28 million jobs in the same period; in

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1970 she had 20 million more jobs than the US, by 1984 she had nearly 10 million less.

Moreover, 97 per cent of all new civilian jobs created in the European Union from 1981 to 1997 were in the government sector while her average level of unemployment still exceeded 12 per cent. During the 1982-1997 period the US economy created over 35 million new jobs. So who did Saul think he was kidding, apart from the lefty idiots who interviewed him?

Widespread persistent unemployment is a curse created by overpricing labour. Unemployment was high in Europe, and still is, because she adopted the kind of anti-market social democratic policies that Saul and his leftist fans support. These policies forced labour costs above their market clearing levels.

Politicians did this, irrespective of what Saul would have the public believe. It is plain to see that those countries with the most fettered labour markets are the ones that suffer the highest unemployment rates. So how in heavens name could Saul claim that market economics had not “solved the problem of unemployment” when the example of America, and Hong Kong, provided irrefutable proof to the contrary? The answer is ideological bigotry, plain and simple.

Saul’s ignorance and prejudices were also highlighted by his reported comments about corporations and their taxes. This was amply driven home by his assertion that reducing corporate taxation is one of the reasons governments have been forced to chase gambling revenue. To lend support to this ridiculous view he claimed that corporate taxes provide about 50 per cent of Canada’s tax revenue in the 1950s but that it had dropped to single figures by 1997.

Well, Canada must have had an extremely low level of government spending if what Saul said is true. Now I do not know anything about the size of Canadian corporate profits relative to the national income but I would hazard a guess that it was not all that different from the US, of which I do know something. Post-tax profits per dollar of sales for US manufacturing corporations averaged about 5 cents in the dollar during the 50-year period 1947-1997; net corporate profits





for 1996 were approximately 7 per cent of GNP while net cash flow was around 11 per cent of GNP.

These figures clearly show that Saul’s nasty insinuation that higher corporate taxes could significantly fund government spending and still reduce the tax burden on his “middle classes” and “lower middle classes” to be utterly absurd. The reason governments were forced to chase more tax dollars had nothing to do with cutting corporate taxes and everything to do with reckless political promises.

Fortunately, economic history (for which he also seems to have little respect) provides us with an abundance of graphic evidence to show what happens when governments treat corporate profits with the contempt that Saul apparently believes they deserve. In 1929 US employees received 81.6 per cent and shareholders 18.4 per cent of that part of

the corporations’ gross income available to employees and shareholders. In 1933 the employees’ share had rocketed to 99.4 per cent while the shareholder share plummeted to 0.6 per cent.

Obviously corporate profits had been wiped out. The result — paradoxically to some — was that payrolls dropped from their 1929 level of $US32.3 billion to $US16.7 billion in 1933. Any wonder when we consider that net corporate profits plunged from $7,300 billion in 1929 to $US100 million in 1933.

Of course, Saul was not suggesting that corporate profits should be eliminated, only that they should be savaged a little. The 1970s provides another interesting example of what happens when corporate profits are attacked, even inadvertently. In that period the real after return to equity fell from 10 per cent

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to less than 5 per cent but, because of inflation, the effective tax rate on real income leapt by 70 per cent, even exceeding 100 per cent in some cases.

Out of pre-tax earnings of $US39 billion in 1977, $US28 billion went to taxes (72 per cent tax rate), $US10 billion in dividends (which were taxed again) and only $US1 billion for reinvestment. Put another way: for every dollar of investment (savings) these firms had to set aside $28 for taxes. This is a ratio of 28:1; the ratio in 1967 was 3:1. By the following year net profits had collapsed to 4.4 per cent of the national income. George Terborgh, an economist, was chillingly correct when he stated that real profits had been devastated.

The results were all too predictable. Collapsing corporate profits were followed by collapsing investment which in turn brought about a severe productivity slowdown. In its 1979 Economic Report, the Council of Economic Advisors calculated that between 1948 and 1955 productivity increased by 3.4 per cent a year. From 1965 to 1973 this had fallen to 2.3 per cent and from 1973 to 1977 it fell further to 1 per cent. The period 1977 to 1978 saw productivity shrink to a miserable 0.4 per cent.

On these figures living standards went from doubling every 20 years to doubling every 175 years. Even though statistical revisions now indicate that inflation was overstated, thus exaggerating the decline in the rate of increase in real incomes, there is no escaping the fact that a significant fall in productivity occurred during those years. There was not the slightest indication from Saul that he has even a nodding acquaintance with these facts or even cares about them.

What eluded Saul and his doting press was that corporations cannot pay taxes, only people can do that. And when you tax away the means and the incentive to invest you also tax away future living standards. This is what happened in the 1970s. Yet Saul carries on, like some new class oracle, blissfully ignorant of past events and totally indifferent if not actually hostile to contrary evidence, totally at peace with his own dogma, impervious to the logic of economics and the lessons of economic history. A true ideologue.





Saul’s deep hostility to corporations was brought into sharper focus by his accusations that they have nothing to do with capitalism, that they are inefficient, slow and irrelevant to the market place and risk. To argue, as he does, that they have nothing to do with capitalism is bizarre. The essence of capitalism is free exchange and that can only exist in the market place. ‘Giant’ corporations are voluntary organisations that pool and put to work the savings of millions of people.

If this is not capitalistic, I'll be damned if I know what is. The refusal of many, if not most, intellectuals to recognise the legitimacy of the corporation spring from their failure to recognise the market place as a process, a spontaneous order. That something can emerge that seems to exist without direct ownership or, in their view, even accountability. No: whether Saul likes it or not, the corporation is part and parcel of capitalism.

That corporations are inefficient per se, as he claimed, is just plain silly. First and foremost, corporations are firms and, as Professor Coase explained (The Firm, The Market Place and The Law): “. . . firms arise voluntarily because they represent a more efficient method of organisation. In a competitive system, there is an ‘optimum’ amount of planning”!

The free market determines the optimum size of the firm (and that means corporations): that is, the size where the firm’s distribution of activities is such that any deviation from them results in factors being employed in less valued activities. (Obviously, the optimum is always shifting). But this means that factors are being allocated to the margin — and only the market can do that. Therefore, in an unhampered market firms will tend to expand up to a point where the costs of further expansion would exceed the benefits.

To suggest, as Saul does, that corporations can enjoy financial success in the market place while being inefficient and unresponsive to consumers’ preferences is contradicted by experience and theory. The view, which he evidently holds, that corporations can defy the market and violate consumer sovereignty with impunity is Galbraithian nonsense. For example, by 1988 of Fortune’s original top 500 companies only 285 remained 20 years later; 50 had either gone bankrupt or shrunk and 6 could not even be classified.





The market deals severely with inefficient companies, i.e., companies that fail to satisfy consumers. The mobility of corporations, which he condemns, has enhanced comparative advantage and forced governments to compete and review their own policies. All of this has greatly benefited consumers.

In his attack on privatisation, Saul turned to the alleged spirit, not the wisdom, of Adam Smith and argued that Smith would, if alive, oppose the denationalisation of electricity generation. Rather than pretend to divine what the long-dead Adam Smith would have to say on state ownership if he were here today, let us look at what he actually wrote:

. . . the last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those publick institutions and those publick works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small numbers of individuals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain. (The Wealth of Nations, Liberty Classics, 1978, Vol II, p. 723).

Electricity generation clearly did not fall into Smith’s category of “publick works” that could not be undertaken by the market place. Electricity generation was a market place activity that was nationalised by ignorant politicians. What Smith would attack, I venture to suggest, is the argument for state ownership of these facilities. I think it is abundantly clear that our Mr Saul has never read, let alone understood, Adam Smith.

Saul tried to reinforce his pro-state-ownership arguments by claiming that privatising, for instance, power stations drained investment from the private sector. His tacit assumption being that ownership is irrelevant to cost, revenue and decision-making. This is sheer nonsense. Even when operating in competitive environments, state ‘companies’ do not face the same range of constantly changing opportunities that private companies face as well as create.

This is because the decision-making scope of state managers is not only more limited than that of managers in private companies it also operates on different





levels. It is ownership that makes this difference because it is ownership that affects choice.

That ownership is the heart of the matter is amply supported by numerous worldwide examples of how privatisation demonstrated that the real market value of so-called state enterprises can exceed their value under state ownership. Which is another way of saying that they were inefficiently managed. Moreover, government guaranteed borrowings by state ‘enterprises’ distorts lenders’ decision-making by altering their opportunity costs in a way that investment no longer reflects them, which means sub-optimum investment decisions are made.

This exposes the fallacy that government borrowing does not distort investment decisions and even, on reflection, demolishes the equally fallacious view that governments can really borrow below the market rate.

It says little for the intellectual climate of our times when the kind of patent anti-market drivel that the likes of Saul peddle can be taken seriously and virtually without question by the media, sections of academia and a great many politicians. Saul is an anti-market ideologue who has declared war on the discipline of economics and whose economic illiteracy is made self-evident with every utterance.

Another of his assertions is that economics had failed from 1972 onwards. What failed was Keynesian economics, just as the Austrian school predicted it would. However, the application of market economics (even in a hampered form) has been a roaring success. Compare America’s state employment rate with that of Europe’s and Australia’s. And that is just one example.

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Saul is just another of a long line of anti-market corporate-baiters with a slick intellectual patter masquerading as serious thought but having no substance. It is the kind of patter that easily impresses feebleminded journalists and smug, ignorant left-wing politicians who know even less economic history and economic theory than Saul.

The man is an anti-market ideologue who speaks with an authority that he has not earned. His intellectual shallowness was exposed by his silly assertion that a truly intelligent person never uses words like inevitable, fact or truth (sic). Apart from the fact that this view raises some questions about his own existence as well as the contents of his books as well as his public statements, it also reveals a third-rate undergraduate approach to philosophy that can, I think, be best described as total scepticism (no wonder journalists love him) as well as totally useless.

That Saul can peddle his anti-market propaganda in Australia with apparent intellectual impunity is a disgrace that tells us much about the state of our own so-called free-market intellectuals.

***

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Los Angeles Times

Study Depicts a Less Dire Chernobyl

U.N. researchers find lower radiation levels than earlier reports had and project far fewer deaths will result from the '86 nuclear accident. By Charles Piller and Alissa J. Rubin, LA Times Staff Writers

VIENNA — Nearly two decades after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster spread radioactive fallout across much of Europe, a United Nations study has concluded that the health effects have been far smaller than feared. The researchers confirmed 56 deaths — nine children from thyroid cancer and 47 emergency workers from acute radiation poisoning or radiation-induced cancer. They projected that 3,940 more people would eventually die of cancer, according to the report released Monday.

Virtually all the deaths are expected to

Comment by Michael Darby: The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident was seized upon by opponents of nuclear energy as a gift from the gods. Various propagandists crowed about “thousands of deaths”, or “tens of thousands of deaths”. As time has progressed with these wild claims proving wholly unsustainable, Greenpeace wound down its deaths claim to 2,500 (presently claimed on its website).. After visiting Ukraine in 1991, I addressed a conference of Private Doctors of Australia, where I made these points: • The accident was a failure of socialist

unconcern about safety procedures. • The local population was endangered

in the first instance by secrecy and denial, and in the second instance by preferential treatment of Sovcom apparatchiks.

• Deaths were numbered in dozens rather than thousands.

• There would likely be an increase in the number of lives shortened by thyroid cancer, in the order of a few percent within the exposure area.

• Chernobyl caused only a tiny fraction of the destruction of human life caused by the tragic Bhopal methyl isocyanate leak of 1984.

• The largest number of casualties from Chernobyl would be those suffering death or injury from the mining, transportation and burning of coal used to replace the generating capacity lost by the destruction of the reactor.

• In a nation plundered by communism with widespread malnutrition and generally inadequate medical care, significant incentives now exist to attribute any illness, especially a childhood illness, to Chernobyl.





come from among the 200,000 emergency and recovery workers or the nearly 400,000 people who lived in the immediate area. The death estimate is about half of what several recent studies found and a small fraction of the up to 150,000 deaths estimated shortly after the 1986 accident in Ukraine. The higher projections of health effects resulted in part from miscalculations about the amount of radiation to which many people were exposed, the report says. But a U.N. official said the countries affected by the accident also tried to inflate the severity of its effect to boost the financial assistance flowing to the area. Kalman Mizsei, an assistant U.N. secretary-general and deputy coordinator on Chernobyl, said there had been "a vast interest in creating a false picture" in the countries involved: initially the Soviet Union, and after its breakup, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

That contributed to misinformation and fear among local residents, who believed they were on the verge of being diagnosed with fatal diseases. Those countries then spent large amounts of money to help presumed victims, helping to create "a dependency culture," Mizsei said. There was "a tendency to attribute all health problems to exposure to radiation," something that "led local residents to assume that Chernobyl-related fatalities were much higher," concluded the more than 100 scientists, health experts and economists who worked on the study. Their 550-page report found no evidence of genetic or reproductive problems

Comment by Michael Darby: Predictably, Greenpeace launched a worldwide propaganda effort to discredit the UN report, describing it as a whitewash. This is the usual Greenpeace formula of never letting science get in the way of propa-ganda. Yet again, Greenpeace is exposed as an unprincipled organisation which achieves influence, power and prosperity for its unelected leaders by a constant fear campaign. Teach people to hate technology and give money to Greenpeace! No surprise that the ABC uncritically quoted the wildly inaccurate statement by Jan Van de Putte of Greenpeace: “It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious industrial accident in human history." I found it necessary to complain to the ABC after one of its PNN announcers wrongly described the UN report as stating that “4,000 died as the result of Chernobyl.”





among Chernobyl-area survivors. Most area residents living beyond the 19-mile-radius "exclusion zone" around the nuclear plant received minor doses of radiation, lower than the radiation ordinarily found in some regions of the world, the report says. The exclusion zone will be unsafe for decades because of high levels of radioactive caesium-137. About 350 mostly elderly villagers, however, have chosen to live inside the zone, despite its hazards and meager services. The study backs earlier estimates of the economic costs of Chernobyl, put at

several hundred billion dollars. The costs include sealing the reactor, relocating residents, providing them with social services and cleaning the environment. The report said it was impossible to provide a more exact estimate. The study is the most definitive look at the effect of the Chernobyl disaster. Its sponsors included the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Bank, the World Health Organization and the governments of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The meltdown of the plant's reactor spread radioactive particles across 77,000 square miles of Europe, reaching as far as the Arctic Circle. The vast majority of the fallout was short-lived isotopes whose radiation decayed in a matter of weeks, according to the report. Most of the

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longer-lasting radiation landed within 62 miles of the plant. The report recommends further research on long-term radiation effects and urges that most financial aid go to displaced residents, particularly to provide better mental-health care. Many Chernobyl survivors have remained deeply pessimistic about their futures, said Roy E. Shore, a New York University epidemiologist who worked on the study. "Radiation has a big dose of fear," he said. "It's something you can't see, you can't feel, but it affects you." In the wake of Chernobyl and in part because of misinformation about the radiation's effects, "a whole mythology" grew up, said Mizsei, the U.N. official. Many people believed their children would have poor memories as a result of the exposure to radiation. Mizsei described meeting a man who rationalized drinking vodka, saying it would destroy the radiation in his body. Confusing matters is that male life expectancy in Russia and other former Soviet states has declined precipitously, in large part because of economic losses in the area. Although people in the Chernobyl region may attribute their life expectancy declines to radiation exposure, it is far more likely that they are due to increases in smoking, drinking, eating poorly and stress, U.N. experts said. Fred Mettler, a University of New Mexico radiologist who coordinated the health sections of the report, said some government programs had unwittingly exacerbated that anxiety. For example, former Chernobyl-area residents now undergo elaborate annual medical exams. The exams have found few problems but feed a sense of fatalism among patients, he said. Misguided aid to Chernobyl victims has also led to what the study calls "perverse





incentives." Some families, the report notes, returned to contaminated areas to claim increased benefits. The next step is to get better information to people, Mizsei said. The U.N. will work with local nongovernmental organizations and civic groups to spread the word. It will also try to reach young people via the Internet and other information technologies so they know more about the actual risks, he said. As for the economic health of the region, the U.N. will invest in encouraging jobs to stem the depopulation that has occurred. "We have to convince the people that actually, except for the [immediate] area around Chernobyl and some forests," he said, "the rest of the surrounding territory is safe."

Piller reported from Los Angeles and Rubin from Vienna. Elisabeth Penz in The Times' Vienna Bureau contributed to this report.

* * *

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VJ Day – Letter to the Prime Minister 16 August 2005 Hon JW Howard MP Prime Minister of Australia Dear Prime Minister

Congratulations on your excellent VJ Day speech at the Australian War Memorial. . Your many good qualities include the ability to say exactly the right thing at the appropriate time.

Unfortunately someone in your Department has decided to inflict an attempt to change history on your speech, by captioning its appearance on your website with the aberrant heading "VP Day". Unfortunately the ABC has also been guilty in this respect, and other radio stations have also been misled.

I'd welcome your assurance that the bureaucracy will not permitted to make this mistake in future years.

With all good wishes Michael Darby

***

From the website of the BBC “On this Day – 15 August” The Allies had delivered Japan an ultimatum to surrender on 28 July 1945.

When this was ignored, the US dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, the day Soviet forces invaded Manchuria.

The Allies celebrated victory over Japan on 15 August 1945, although the Japanese administration under General Koiso Kuniaki did not officially surrender with a signed document until 2 September.

Both dates are known as VJ Day.





From news.telegraph- www.telegraph.co.uk

Pioneer of the 'flat tax' taught the East to thrive

By Toby Harnden, in Tallinn (Filed: 04/09/2005)

Imagine a place with no tax accountants, where the annual return takes a businessman an hour to complete. Think how you could lead a country and design an economy just as you liked. Consider the joy of creating a tax system with no loopholes and exemptions, where everyone is treated the same.

When he became the prime minister of Estonia at the tender age of 32, Mart Laar saw this opportunity as a beautiful thing. The Soviet regime that once ruled his country had been overthrown, and he was starting with a clean slate - and the confidence that came from reading only one book on economics.

As a former history teacher with a fondness for Guns N' Roses, he had given little thought to what kind of tax system he should introduce when he won office. Within a year, however, Estonia had become the first European country to introduce a single rate of income tax.

Now, 14 years later, Mr Laar is hailed as the prophet of a revolution - the flat tax insurrection enveloping much of Europe. As the "father of the flat tax" he is sought out by economists and

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politicians from across the globe, anxious for his counsel.

Dressed in a grey T-shirt and black chinos, Mr Laar - chubby, bespectacled and with a scrubby blond beard - sat on a park bench outside the Estonian parliament in Toompea Castle in Tallinn, the capital. It was the arrogance of youth in the post-Soviet dawn, he said, that had turned him into an unlikely poster boy for free-market economists everywhere.

"Most experts advised against it and said it was a very stupid idea," he said. "My finance minister said don't do it, the IMF said don't do it. But it's not very easy to convince a young person that he is wrong and I was that type of young person. So I did it."

Last week, he fielded questions from academics and officials in the Czech Republic, Poland and Switzerland about the flat tax, in between celebrating the 25th anniversary of Solidarity over beers with Lech Walesa and advising Cuban opposition leaders on how to plan for Fidel Castro's demise.

The economic results of the flat tax in Estonia were stunning as the tiny Baltic state emerged from 50 years of Soviet oppression and a Bolshevik-style planned economy to become a modern, prosperous country.

Inflation dropped from more than 1,000 per cent to just 2.5 per cent, in line with western Europe. Unemployment fell from 30 per cent to six per cent and growth has soared to six per cent, a rate that Gordon Brown would envy. Investment poured in and the initial 26 per cent tax rate has been cut to 23 per cent. Next year, it will be cut again to 20 per cent.





Now aged 46 and out of office, the one-time young firebrand is a grand old man of Baltic politics after serving two stints as premier. The flat tax is now cross-party orthodoxy in Estonia, and Mr Laar is tipped as a European commissioner when his country joins the EU in 2007.

"My main problem was I was not an economist but a historian," he said. "The only economics book I had read was Milton Friedman's Free to Choose."

He assumed that Friedman's theories sprang from economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. He had no idea that he was about to become a pioneer.

"A flat tax seemed to be very logical and very fair and I didn't have the smallest clue I would be the first," he said.

The flat tax has been adopted by nine European countries, and counting. After Estonia came Latvia and Lithuania. In 2001, Russia introduced a 13 per cent flat rate.

Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia Georgia, and Romania have adopted it and Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece plan to follow suit. The finance adviser to Angela Merkel, likely to be elected German chancellor this month, has backed the flat tax. Belief in flat tax is no longer akin to thinking that the Earth is flat.

George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor, who visited Estonia in July to study the flat tax, said: "We've got to wake up to this flat tax revolution that's sweeping eastern and central Europe. These are the countries we are competing with. There is a powerful case for simpler, lower, flatter taxes in Britain."

From: www.mdarby.blogspot.com FLAT TAX In the 1970s a small number of thinking reformist Australians began campaigning for proportionate taxation, otherwise known as Flat Tax. NSW grazier and former stockbroker Richard Tanner has been the most persistent Flat Tax campaigner. Others who deserve recognition include Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Raymond Lord and the late Alan Robson. Flat tax advocates will be encouraged by the following article: RUSSIA'S FLAT TAX REFORM Russia switched to a 13 percent flat tax and tax revenues increased. By Deroy Murdock DALLAS MORNING NEWS, March 4, 2002 (text of article may be read at the abovementioned blogspot.)





Mr Laar, who is married with two children, explained how flat tax works in Estonia. "It's simple, he said. "The same rate of tax for everybody, or no rate at all. There is a minimum level at which it kicks in. There's no point wasting state money collecting tax from the very poor."

He said the tax was fair, "because rich people are paying significantly more tax even with the same percentage" - and it increased revenue because it was hard to avoid. "It is very efficient in destroying the black market. It is very easy to collect and control."

Also, he said: "In a highly progressive tax system there is no incentive to work: the harder you work, the sooner you get to the next, higher, tax level. A flat tax generates more growth and therefore more revenue for the government."

John Ross, a Scottish engineer whose Estonian company employs 220 people, said Britain should have a flat tax. "It's fantastic. You don't get all this nonsense of people trying to abuse the system. There's no such thing as a tax adviser in Estonia."

In Pikk Street, close to what used to be the KGB headquarters in Tallinn's 12th-century old town, Kylli Koiv, a ceramist, said: "The flat tax is very good for business. The difference between now and Soviet times is like night and day.

"The economy has grown rapidly. Today, we have seven cruise ships in the harbour. Finns come here to spend money on Finnish goods because they are cheaper here." It takes her only an hour to fill out her tax return and submit it on the internet.

Back at the castle, Mr Laar, still an MP, said he wanted to slip back into obscurity and resume his study of history. "Like the lizard who didn't know he couldn't walk on water and found that he could, we didn't know a flat tax couldn't be done," he said. "We just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

***





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The Japan Times Online 21 September 2005

KGB eyed Tokyo nuke 'accident': late archivist

LONDON (Kyodo) The KGB considered releasing radioactive material in Tokyo Bay in the late 1960s, which it hoped would be blamed on American submarines and thereby damage Japanese-U.S. relations, according to a book published Monday by a former KGB archivist.

"The Mitrokhin Archive II," written by Vasili Mitrokhin, reveals several sabotage plans by KGB officers to sour Tokyo-Washington relations. The book discloses that Foreign Ministry officials, journalists and politicians from both the right and the left were helping the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s.

Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist from 1948 to 1984. He smuggled sensitive foreign intelligence to his home and took it with him when he defected to Britain in 1992. The first volume of his archives was published in 1999. He died in 2004.

In the new book, co-written by historian Christopher Andrew, Mitrokhin reveals that in 1969, KGB officers in Tokyo considered a plan to scatter radioactive material in Tokyo Bay in the expectation it would be blamed by the public on nuclear submarines based at the U.S. naval base in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The plan was vetoed by senior officers, who feared it would be difficult to obtain U.S. radioactive material, and getting it from somewhere else could have provided a trail back to Moscow.

The book also discloses a plan to have a Japanese agent leave a bomb planted in a book in the American Cultural Center in Tokyo in October 1965 at the time of demonstrations against the Vietnam War.





To conceal its hand in the operation, the KGB was prepared to publish leaflets purporting to come from Japanese nationalists calling for attacks on U.S. property.

Mitrokhin reveals ultimately unsuccessful attempts by the Soviet intelligence service to kill a revised security treaty between Japan and the U.S. in 1960. He claims the KGB helped foster a Japanese student protest targeting President Dwight D. Eisenhower's press secretary, James Hagerty. Later, senior KGB officials took some of the credit when Eisenhower's trip to Japan was cancelled due to safety concerns.

The KGB stationed in Tokyo managed to get bogus secret annexes to the proposed revised treaty published. These purported to continue terms in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty regarding the use of U.S. troops to quell civil unrest in Japan, and to extend Japanese-U.S. military cooperation from the Soviet Pacific to the Chinese coast.

One of the major preoccupations for Soviet agents was to reconnoitre sabotage targets in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and NATO countries.

Mitrokhin discloses that in 1962, agents made preparations to sabotage four major oil refineries in Japan as well as U.S. bases in Okinawa. They also identified four sites on the northwest coast of Hokkaido that could be used as wartime bases for KGB officers.

The former archivist reveals that the KGB had two valuable agents, code-named Rengo and Emma, based in the Foreign Ministry. They provided large amounts of material between the late 1960s and 1979. Emma reportedly used a small camera fitted to her handbag to copy sensitive documents.

The KGB used a Russian-language teacher to seduce a Japanese diplomat in Moscow into working for them, according to the book.

Similar techniques were used to recruit a Japanese cipher clerk in Moscow, code-named Nazar, who also helped Moscow on his return to Tokyo. Information he passed on included traffic between Tokyo and Washington.





The book notes, "There must have been moments when, thanks to Nazar and Soviet code-breakers, the Japanese Foreign Ministry was, without knowing it, practicing something akin to open diplomacy in its dealings with the Soviet Union."

The KGB recruited journalists and politicians to work as agents during the 1970s. They were used mainly to lobby on behalf of the Soviet Union, rather than provide useful intelligence. By autumn 1979, the KGB had 31 agents and 24 confidential contacts, according to Mitrokhin.

The book reveals that the KGB managed to collect a large amount of technological information from Japanese companies, particularly in the field of computers.

Mitrokhin concluded that although the Soviets spent a lot of money on operations in Japan, they failed to truly achieve their goals or improve Moscow's image.

"Though the KGB offensive in Japan generated many tactical operational successes, it ended in strategic failure. The enormous quantity of S&T (science and technology intelligence) collected by Line X (KGB section) from the West and Japan could not save the Soviet system from economic collapse," the book says.

Mitrokhin's book, whose U.S. edition is titled "The World Was Going Our Way," also recounts how Soviet spies flopped in Iraq, failing to win over Saddam Hussein or sufficiently bolster his opponents, including Jalal Talabani, Iraq's current president.

The Japan Times: Sept. 21, 2005 (C) All rights reserved

*** SEAFORTH TAFE CAMPAIGN

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From: http://www.consumerfreedom.com Center for Consumer Freedom Daily Headlines September 6, 2005

How Europe Starves The World's Poor "The European Union and fellow travelling anti-biotech activists may well succeed in bottling up the next wave of genetically improved crops that aim directly at helping poor farmers in the developing world," writes Reason magazine science correspondent Ron Bailey. As he explains, this activist-driven fear has created a climate in which "some developing countries are so afraid of the EU's anti-biotech wrath that they are willing to risk the lives of millions of their hungry by rejecting food aid that contains genetically enhanced crops." Citing advances that could fight blindness in a half-million of the world's poor each year, the creation of disease-resistant fruit, and the prevention of "commercial extinction" for bananas, Bailey notes the enormous potential benefits developing countries will miss if they bow to activist fear-mongering:





Anti-biotech European regulations are spooking the governments of poor countries into preventing their farmers from growing the new genetically enhanced crops. And that's a shame, because researchers in laboratories and plant breeding stations around the world are endowing new biotech crop varieties with traits like disease resistance and improved nutritional value. Part of the problem in Europe, Bailey writes, is that the constituency for anti-biotech groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth is "not poor African and Asian farmers and their families, but affluent and easily frightened European consumers." And as Bailey points out, this bias leads to some appalling logic: Activists usually blame the inaction of rich countries for killing people in poor countries. However, instead of outrage here, we get Greenpeace geneticist Doreen Stabinsky primly quipping in the [St. Louis] Post-Dispatch, "Hunger is not solved by producing more food. We're the breadbasket of the world, and we have hungry people in the U.S." Hunger may not be solved by producing more food, but it sure couldn't hurt.

***

Kerry Collison Kerry B. Collison is more than a very popular author. With a background of military intelligence and very wide international business experience, Kerry Collison is an excellent source of accurate information and sound opinion. Visit Kerry’s blogspot http://kerrycollison.net/ For information about Kerry’s many books, including “The Happy Warrior”, a wonderful anthology of Australian and New Zealand War Poetry, please visit :

http://www.sidharta.com.au/

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