The Charge Was

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The charge...was that men who had been leaders of the German legal system had 'consciously and deliberately suppressed the law' and contributed to crimes, including torture, that 'were committed in the guise of legal process'. 'Men of law', the prosecutor told the Nuremburg judges, 'can no more escape...responsibility by virtue of their judicial robes than the general by his uniform.' In his closing arguments LaFollette summarised the various bases for individual responsibility. One of them was that the defendants 'administerial legislation which they must be held to have known was in violation of international law'. Those words rang a bell.
Philippe Sands.





As if all was over, the bath run, a life already lived, he was astonished by moments of what seemed almost like happiness at the end of the race. It didn't matter any more what happened. Is this how normal people felt? Unladen by gloom, no longer desperate for oblivion. The days opened up into party avenues. Friends dropped by. Companionship was easy to come by. Thailand is the easiest country in the world to get laid, the stranger said. It was a well known fact. He got drunk at the bar in the brothel, and resisted the staff's offers. Later he was not sure why. A natural prudishness over came him at the most inappropriate moments. A thin man lived inside the fat man. He wasn't the person he used to be.

The financial crisis sweeps the globe. People talk of hundreds of thousands being unemployed in this country alone. Any one who works are trapped by ridiculously high taxes, so that the week of grind is hardly worth the effort at the end. You have to be making $70,000 plus just to be on an equivalent income to a single mother with all the assistance medical, rental, transport that they mop up. Their dirty secrets. They've made it barely worth going to work. Raise the dole and you start to surpass the minimum wage. Everyone seems to agree that the aged pensioners deserve an immediate $30 pay increase, the proposal of the opposition which Rudd has resisted, waiting for a review.

They've hit the ground reviewing, Malcolm Turnbull repeats, treating us all like fools, ignoring the question of the interviewer. What would you do differently? How would you deal with these problems? They're shadows, they're arrogant fools. They live in our lounge rooms thanks to television. They make marks and they savage high learning. Think not for yourself, you will be crucified. The march to a communist state in this country was barely halted by a conservative government which adopted
or out bid all of Labor's policies, spread welfare into the middle classes. And once you give someone something, it's very hard to take it back.

They were Christmas, they were stealing, they were the real thing, hiding beneath the lip of the world, snarling beasts. He was filled with dread and the urge to hide. This world no longer belonged to him, if it ever had. Savage play, savage laughter, a dance on the edge of time, casual criminality, they tried their best and there was nothing left. The socialists had taken over. The lowest common denominator ruled. Cloaked in social justice rhetoric, businesses were destroyed, hope was stifled. We'll shut down pubs, the minister for police declared in yesterday's screaming headlines. There is no fun, no laughter, no chance to stray.

Straight laced, the gloom of the middle class filtered into every street, every nook, every cranny. Soon we will be free. We will escape the bonds of work and live easily in the country. The grinding turmoil of the city will disappear into a foggy memory. Laughter will be mine. All the spring mornings, all the optimism, it will dance in his blood as he travels the globe. Many things could have been, but he didn't believe in the social engineers any more. The left was equally as venal and self interested as the right. Shadows were cast; and his soul mission was to escape.

Noble savages; that's what they called them. He exits his car. He shakes his head as a drug dealer starts to walk towards him. No, he doesn't want anything. Haven't they learnt by now he lives here. Redfern has deteriorated all over again. The dealing is more blatant than ever, casting aspersions on the entire aboriginal community. Tourists get off the station and the first thing they see is the little collection of boys working the streets in front of the station, the needle bus parked directly behind them. Buy, sell, deal, all under the watchful eye of the police cameras. The affects of last months clean up have clearly faded. Another raised eyebrow. You want something... you want something..?



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3187662/Financial-crisis-Australia-and-New-Zealand-guarantee-all-bank-deposits.html

The move comes after currencies and markets in both countries suffered heavy losses last week.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said his government would guarantee Australia's entire deposit base of AU$600-A$700bn (£238-£278bn), including savings in credit unions and building societies, for three years.

"We are in the economic equivalent of a national security crisis, and the challenges are great," Mr Rudd said.

He referred to recent moves by other economies, such as Britain, Germany and Ireland, to extend guarantees or state aid to their banking systems and warned Australian banks could be disadvantaged if his government failed to act.

"I don't want a first-class Australian bank discriminated against because some other foreign bank, which has a bad balance sheet, is being propped up by a guarantee by a foreign government," he said.

Last week, $190 billion was erased from the Australian stock market when the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 Index slid by nearly 16 per cent. At the same time, New Zealand's NZX 50 fell by 11 per cent. The Australian dollar slid by more than 5 per cent against the US dollar on Friday alone.

But on Monday Australian shares rallied to their biggest one-day gain since October on the heels of Mr Rudd's announcement, with bank stocks making some of the largest gains despite warnings from analysts that the new-found optimism could be short-lived.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced her deposit guarantee scheme moments after Mr Rudd.

Speaking at the launch of her party's campaign for the Nov 8 election, she said: "Our government has agreed to implement a deposit guarantee scheme which will provide New Zealand depositors with additional confidence."

New Zealand, which is in recession, has offered to guarantee retail deposits for the next two years, with deposit-taking finance companies also included in the scheme.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24485552-16741,00.html

THE world's political leaders and bankers have reached their Waterloo, and they know it. The eye of history is on them more closely and mercilessly than they might ever have imagined it would be in their climb up the ladder of success. That realisation itself is a measure of progress towards an achievable solution to the global financial crisis, even if no concrete and immediate remedies emerged publicly from the weekend's emergency meetings in Washington of the Group of Seven and the Group of 20. International acceptance has at last arrived of the scale and character of the credit freeze, and of the need for co-ordinated action by governments in rich and developing countries to unfreeze credit by force of money from injections and interest rate cuts.

A new kind of grand coalition is demanded by events to meet a crisis equivalent to the greatest of security threats. Only joint stimulus by solvent governments can reopen the clogged cardiovascular system of the world economy that has become the financial sector. Actions by individual governments, even those at the trillion-dollar level, have been insufficient to calm the financial and stock markets. The weekend's meetings may not be enough for some national markets today. But Australia, among the least culpable of nations in the causes of this crisis, is doing its part. Kevin Rudd announced yesterday a series of dramatic measures to lock in confidence in Australian institutions and help them compete for scarce funds on world credit markets.

Let there be no misapprehension of what confronts us. The toxin, as it's being called, in the financial system is likely to take years to remove fully. This toxin lies in foolish and sometimes politically driven loans in a once-booming housing market and their entry into the world's holdings of derivative investments, estimated to be worth up to $US536 trillion before the credit slide began last year. The lending that underlies some derivative securities includes good and bad loans, particularly mortgages, at the price of transparency. If the problem were as relatively simple as bailing out institutions that had lent foolishly, the crisis would be more manageable. But exposure to debt losses and risk is proving far harder to assess than in that case, and so banks are reluctant to lend to other banks and institutions, or even to strong businesses in the face of the predictions of global recession caused by the lack of credit.

The choice is stark for world leaders. They can let the global economy flap in the wind until the financial toxins are eliminated, they can leave us to take time off and suffer a deep recession - a depression in some countries. Or they can lead us towards adaption to and working around the crisis and returning to business as near as possible to usual in the wider economy of goods and services. As the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said at the weekend in Washington, the measures taken so far "have not yet achieved the goal of stabilising markets and bolstering confidence". He continued: "Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest US-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown."

http://voanews.com/english/2008-10-13-voa29.cfm

The World Bank president says the global economic crisis could hurt poor people in developing countries most severely.

Robert Zoellick said in Washington Sunday that as governments try to fix economic problems at home, they must not forget commitments to help poor countries reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty.

Zoellick added that a prolonged credit crunch or a sustained global slowdown raises the risk that poor nations will be seriously hampered in efforts to improve the lives of their citizens.

He said officials from the world's advanced economies agree that the international community should continue to help.

The World Bank estimates that high food and energy prices have pushed another 100 million people into poverty this year alone.

The director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said the current economic crisis puts additional strain on countries that are already suffering.

Zoellick, Strauss-Khan and officials from the world's seven most industrialized nations discussed the crisis over the past few days in Washington.

Zoellick said the World Bank has a one-point-two billion dollar fund to help countries cope with the impact of high food prices.

He said the the bank's private-sector lending branch, the International Finance Corporation, also is considering creating a fund to help banks in the developing world.

Reflections in an art gallery window, Redfern, Sydney, Australia.