If your name is Smuts, the airline industry has great respect for you. That’s probably because the biggest airport in the country was called Jan Smuts once. So even in Durban, if you’re Smuts and you’re late for a flight, they’ll kick someone off the plane for you.

That’s what SA Express Airways, which operates flights between smaller regional airports for its parent company, South African Airways, reportedly did. It told the already checked-in and seated Sharmalee Maistry to leave the plane and collect her stuff from the hold, while her “double-booked” replacement was waiting on the apron in a car.

Either that, or Smuts Ngonyama got special treatment from the state-owned carrier because he happens to be a senior ANC official.

Surely nobody is going to believe that it was just coincidence. That Ngonyama’s case, of booking online, receiving a double-booked seating assignment, and arriving after the other passenger with the same seat assignment, is somehow a normal exception to the airline’s rule that the first person to check in gets to keep a double-booked seat? Considering how many bookings are made online by busy business people, kicking people off planes rather than stopping them at the check-in desk seems an awfully inefficient way to handle the inevitable double-bookings. Last time I heard, airlines got livid with passengers who check in but fail to board on time, because removing just one suitcase from the hold is a major operation that causes delays and annoys the airline’s other paying passengers.

If you’re going to swagger around with your civil service badge like you own the place, at least have the decency to be honest about it. And if you’re a business that kowtows to influential government officials, at least have the courtesy to grin sheepishly at the people you treat like dirt and say, “You know how it is…”

President Thabo Mbeki has reportedly said that the government will not participate in a class action suit against several American companies over failing to disinvest during the apartheid era. This is a welcome development. Mbeki put it thus:

The freedom and democracy that we attained in 1994, therefore, represents the most fitting and profound reparation for those of us fortunate to have survived the nightmare. … In this regard, it is our view that actions that may in the short term benefit some individuals in our society, but have the long-term effect of generating investor uncertainty, would not be in the nation’s interest.

I couldn’t agree more. Business is neither moral nor immoral, as a general rule, but amoral. It operates wherever it finds space to operate, given the constraints of a legal or political environment, rather than judging that legal or political environment. I’m somewhat less enamoured of Mbeki’s notion that government-led programmes of reconstruction and development are the answer, but the broad principles, that liberty is our just reward, and suing would be counter-productive, are noble and right.

I would hope that Mbeki’s views are honestly felt, rather than a simple political recognition that for a government — especially the ANC government — to become involved in such a court case would not only be unseemly, but would fundamentally bias the outcome.

Perhaps he said it because he won’t dignify Edward Fagan, the lead attorney in the case, because Fagan is little more than an ambulance-chaser turned “king of torts” (to borrow John Grisham’s book title). Fagan dropped his personal injury clients (and lost a malpractice suit as a result) to turn his hand to the far bigger business of filing class actions against companies he claims aided and abetted human rights abuses of the past. Thus, he’s carved himself a lucrative niche, away from the usual hotly-contested class action territories of medical malpractice and consumer liability.

Even if Fagan’s claims in the case are true, there’s something rather troubling about litigating arbitrary but large settlements out of the current shareholders and directors of companies over decisions taken a generation or more ago. Where do we stop? Can I sue Spain, England, France and Germany, and their companies, because each of them at one time or another, collectively and severally, cruelly harmed, robbed or oppressed my ancestors? Can the Afrikaners sue British companies for the crimes the Empire committed against them long before they themselves assumed the mantle of the white master race in South Africa?

There are a lot of reasons to hope Fagan’s class action suit against companies that did business in South Africa prior to 1994 fails. Whether or not you believe Mbeki’s stated reasons for distancing himself and his government from the lawsuit, for the fact that he did so he deserves our praise.

Listening to CNN hail some recent economic pessimism as an “It’s the economy stupid” moment like the one which swept Bill Clinton to power in 1992, it not only sounded like a Democrat stump speech, but prompted me to give the US economy some thought. The proximate cause of the current low economic confidence is, no doubt, the mortgages problem. “Credit crunch”, “subprime crisis”, it’s all over the papers.

What I’m wondering is what this has to do with the current president, and how a different president with different policies would have done (or rather, would do) things differently.

To simplify somewhat (but not much): after the dot-com bubble burst two things happened. Both were designed to ease the pain and soften the landing. Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates, and kept them at record lows for a long time. George Bush proposed a raft of tax cuts. So Greenspan made debt look attractive, by making the real interest rate (nominal rate minus inflation) negative, prompting a rush of zero-rate deals offered by banks. Bush, by contrast, took less money from people’s incomes, leaving more in their pockets for spending or investment.

Lots of people took the debt deals, with or without the elementary understanding that zero interest rates couldn’t possibly last, whether or not they could now afford it. Since then, interest rates have risen, but taxes have not.

So who’s the villain in this piece? The Fed chairman, who independently determines interest rates, or the president, who doesn’t? Granted, it’s always nice to blame your bank when you’re in trouble, or your spouse, or your kids, or your government, but it’s not always accurate. St Alan, not the devil in the White House, was most responsible for today’s credit crisis. Unlike the president’s remedy, the Fed’s medicine was at best a temporary salve. Greenspan is already gone, but his successor, Ben Bernanke, has as much power in controlling the price of money. Price controls don’t work anywhere else, so why would it work in the credit market?

And if you think the problem is larger than bad credit, and point, say, to the ever-weakening dollar, one can again point to the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy. If you’re printing money to keep consumer spending up, your currency is going to devalue. Ask Bob Mugabe.

Since Bernanke isn’t up for re-election, and the Federal Reserve isn’t up for a renewal of its charter, why would these issues even feature in a presidential election campaign? They have little, or nothing, to do with the current president. (Just like Congress’s profligate spending has nothing to do with the president if he doesn’t even have a line-item veto.) If I were an American voter, I’d be thanking the president for doing what he could do — cut taxes — and considering any candidate who looks skeptical enough of the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to try to do something about it.

Why would CNN be telling us they’re critical election issues for Campaign 2008? This is misdirection, and partisan misdirection at that.