Davos Newbies Home

Cabinet minister weblog  

Gerrit Zalm, finance minister of The Netherlands, has a weblog. To my knowledge, that makes him the first cabinet minister to have a weblog.

Could any Dutch readers tell me whether it’s any good?

Sympathetic souls 

Tim Lambert has done the extremely useful exercise of plotting webloggers results on the Political Compass Test. I’m very happy with the company I seem to keep.

Uncle is drinking again 

Esther Dyson provides her reaction to the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Esther has long, personal experience of doing business in Russia, in addition to her well-known tech world credentials.

“Now that I’m back in the US and thinking slightly longer-term, I can’t ignore the topic of Khodorkovski. (note to tech readers; this is about Russian politics, not the Internet….but remember when we thought politics in the US didn’t matter to us either??) It gives me the feeling of familiar despair: “Uncle is drinking again!” We thought maybe he was cured, but he’s not.

“The Russian government is showing its worst side, going after one man (Khodorkovski) and his company for the (alleged) kind of crimes that virtually every non-software Russian business has been involved in. (Software companies created things out of their heads, and did not generally ‘buy’ assets from the state for amazing prices.) That means, long run, that most Russian businesses are vulnerable. WHen you create a situation where almost everyone is guilty (viz. our drug laws), you create disrespect for the law and a climate where everyone is vulnerable to misuse of government power masquerading as the force of law.

“One American I encountered during the past week said to the Russians (paraphrase): ‘You have Yukos; we have Enron.’ but that is precisely wrong. Enron broke specific laws (that most but certainly not all other companies did not break), and was not singled out for political reasons.

“The Russian business community is upset but vulnerable; the US business community and government should be taking a stand in favor of the things we believe in: transparency, rule of law, etc., instead of turning a blind eye.”

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times (subscription only) takes a cooler, economist’s view of what he describes as a “clash between arbitrary power and illegitimate wealth”:

“The question is whether Mr Putin’s authoritarian state will improve the economy further. This is possible, but doubtful. The Khodorkovsky affair can only underline the insecurity of property and the discretion available to the state. Those who support Mr Putin understandably resent the wealth of the new tycoons. That is a recipe for ongoing capital flight and corruption. Finally, the basis of wealth in Russia remains natural resource rents. As long as this is the case, the pursuit of wealth will be seen as a zero-sum game, with victory to the powerful.

“We know that Russia is not going to be a bigger version of Poland. What we do not know is whether it will deliver greater prosperity. For that, Russia needs secure property rights. This was never going to be easy to achieve. The grotesque maldistribution of wealth of the 1990s has only made it harder. We must hope that Mr Putin understands the necessity. Even if authoritarian, a prosperous Russia would be a better neighbour than one mired in poverty.”

The blogging of the president 2004 

Chris Lydon reckons we need a new Theodore White: “In my own humble observation, what’s happening out there is the start of a fundamental reordering of democratic energy and political influences, a drastic subversion of a discredited game, an inversion of the old pyramids of control, or perhaps a shape shift, as Stirling Newberry argues, from pyramid to sphere. The Internet represents a rewiring of the body politic, but it’s not the technology that’s interesting, it’s the individual engagement and social model implied in it.”

He promises to start a new weblog devoted to chronicling this shift. I’ll certainly point to it when it’s up.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *