Seeds of Eternity

A little rebellion, now and then....

2012-01-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

Martin Wolf’s “Seven Ways to fix the system’s flaws” reads more like a paean to our existing economic arrangements than a serious attempt at visualizing how we might reorganize our economy so as to avoid some of the more critical ills to which they have led us: a savage increase in inequality, a financial crisis wrought by the rich and paid for by the poor, high levels of national and individual indebtedness, environmental destruction on a massive scale, and so on. Wolf recognizes many of the ills, but his solutions involve little more than tinkering.

Where he is undoubtedly correct is in pointing out the mismatch between regulation, which remains largely at national level, and the multinational reach of global business. We should remember, however, that international regulation is far from impossible, and that it has occurred before, notably at Bretton Woods following WWII, which gave rise to the IMF and the World Bank. The main reason why consensus may be much more difficult to achieve now is that there are many more significant players round the table as well as substantial differences between countries in how capitalism is interpreted.

Neo-liberal capitalism - the West’s version - gives primacy to the market, to which we are all expected to be subservient because it supposedly functions best without the malign influence of human intelligence. Its weaknesses are now widely recognized. Left to themselves, markets turn out not to work efficiently: they tend towards monopoly or oligopoly (look at the UK’s banking and newspaper industries for example), while consumers are expected to make choices based on perfect information (there is no such thing), and to be rational in their economic behaviour (when we all know that economic benefit is not the only priority in people’s lives and that decisions that may seem bizarre to an economist may be entirely rational from other perspectives). Free-trade, the neo-liberal mantra for international exchange, opens national borders to a free-for-all in which employees are reduced to the status of commodity inputs, and are as exposed to price fluctuations and as substitutable as common widgets.

State-directed capitalism on the Chinese model, or highly-controlled capitalism (the other BRIC countries) are proving successful alternatives in terms of growth and competitiveness. China’s system, in particular, rests on a strong sense of collective nationalism as distinct from the individualism of the West.

Is the difference between these models so great? Yes and no.

Yes because state involvement in the BRICs is much more overt and dirigiste than in the West.

No because much of our corporate world relies on state largesse despite a general pretence that this isn’t so and that government does not and should not interfere with the private sector. Taxpayers in the UK, for example, foot the bill for health and education, police and fire services, transportation infrastructure, bank rescue and resuscitation, incentives for new investment etc; and they also directly subsidize a vast array of industries including rail, air travel (through aviation fuel), bio-tech (through R&D grants), and so on.

One wonders if there is any significant business in the UK that does not depend for its success to some great extent on the state. In other words - and here comes the heresy - there is no such thing as a purely private sector activity. In a modern state, all so-called private capital investments are joint ventures with the taxpayer. It follows, therefore, that the state should have a voice in how they are run. In this respect, the Chinese have got it right.

So much for the theory. What of the practice? Wolf confines himself to exhortation: “Serious mistakes must not be repeated,”…”control of executive pay and corporate decision-making (must occur) without government intervention…” His arguments are not just indelibly stained by the status quo, they are also fueled by a belief (currently finding expression in the row over RBS boss Stephen Hester’s near £1 million bonus) that if we fail to bribe the great figures of UK PLC with absurd amounts of cash and kind they will flee the nest and thereby leave us in an even worse mess than the one into which they have already led us. It’s called blackmail; and it bludgeons most of our politicians and economic soothsayers into cowardly submissiveness. What would really happen if the feared scenario occurred, if we refused to pay Stephen Hester his £1 million and the entire RBS Board subsequently resigned? The answer is “nothing very much”. The remaining salaried executives would hold the fort while a new CEO and Board were recruited; and meanwhile RBS would continue to function just as well and maybe even better. CEOs and Boards don’t run large organizations on a daily basis. The staff do that. Apple Computer hasn’t collapsed with the sad demise of Steve Jobs; and Microsoft seems to manage okay without Bill Gates at the helm. These two are undeniably great entrepreneurs. Après Hester & Co. le déluge? Don’t buy it.

Executive compensation is not so to difficult to control via marginal tax rates. Currently the UK top marginal rate of 50% kicks in at a “mere’ £150,000. That’s loose change to top executives who count their earnings in £millions. Why not introduce higher rates for higher earnings - with a discouragingly high marginal rate for income over a certain sum (say £1.5 million)? The main arguments against such a procedure are that it would frighten away the incomparable geniuses who run our major corporations, and that it would raise hardly any revenue anyway.

Revenue raising, however, is not the point. Think of it this way. Executives who are paid at stratospheric levels earn enough in a few years not to have to work again no matter what may happen to the company they lead. Provided they do not break the law, they are thus relieved of any serious financial penalty for the outcome of their actions. Some - they do not need to be named - end up playing monopoly with the livelihoods of employees and shareholders alike. Absurdly high remuneration is a gateway to irresponsibility - even if not all recipients head through it.

One of the most serious charges against our brand of capitalism is that it fosters the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. Corporate efficiency is all-to-readily conflated with national or regional welfare as if the two were synonymous. In fact, they are different and can sometimes be mutually antagonistic. In a capitalist economy it is always efficient for the firm to produce at the lowest possible cost, and its techniques for doing so include maximizing sales, reducing labour costs (sometimes by shifting production elsewhere), and externalizing social costs. But it is not necessarily efficient at the national level for people to buy superfluities (and create the associated waste), nor for a nation to cope with employment instability, the displacement of small farmers and business-owners by multinationals, the ravages of industrial pollution, and the societal disruptions that accompany extremes of inequality. Inequality itself is arguably a spur to capitalist enterprise, but it may also become a charge on the social fabric. We need a way to assess the cost-benefits of corporate activity and to embed them in our tax system in a way that encourages community and environmental responsibility and discourages the reverse. As others have pointed out, the survival of our species may depend on our meeting this challenge. Human welfare and care of the environment will, in the end, have to displace individual enrichment as the principal objective of economic activity.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, wrote that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” What we need is not a little tinkering with the existing system à la Wolf, but a root-and-branch reappraisal of its fundamental purpose. A little rebellion maybe...
Note: this article was first published in Open Democracy.

Scotland and Quebec - A Reply to a Scottish Nationalist

2011-05-11T01:12:00.000-07:00

There are reefs to negotiate before you reach the promised land. In many ways, your opinions remind me of the intelligent and impassioned material published on and from Quebec during the 1980s and 1990s - when I lived in Canada. Both the arguments and the fervour are remarkably similar, though thankfully yours lack the edge of anglophobic bitterness evident in some Quebecois writings of the time.
Familiar, too, are Alex Salmond’s demands for more money from central government (see here and here).
Maurice Duplessis was the first Quebec premier to demand “notre butin” (our booty) from the Canadian federal government; a cry that was taken up by several of his successors - not least Jacques Parizeau - the Quebec Premier who very nearly won the 1995 independence referendum. In demanding extra cash, Salmond employs the same arguments as those used by Parizeau, including the apparently powerful one of “it’s our money in the first place”. Those demands can, however, be a two-edged sword, because in the population at large they can create an awareness not necessarily of simple dependence of the smaller entity on the larger but of a strong symbiosis between the two. Whatever the arguments in favour of Scottish independence, it would be idle to pretend that Scotland derives no advantages at all from the present dispensation. Far better to look at the weaknesses of the independence case and to deal with them than to pretend they aren’t there.
One disagreeable interjection in the 1995 Parti Quebecois referendum campaign was Parizeau’s comment that if electors voted - however narrowly - for secession they would be “like lobsters thrown into boiling water” - in other words, there would be no going back: Quebec’s destiny would be in his and the Party’s hands. Some said he was intoxicated - not by alcohol but by the prospect of victory and national power. The comment undoubtedly cost him precious votes.
In those years, Quebec was far nearer to Independence than Scotland has ever been (since the Union, of course). Yet, in the end, voters didn’t buy it. Parizeau blamed the loss of the 1995 vote firmly on the “ethnic” population - a racist comment that he later regretted. Racism, however, was never entirely absent from the drinking water in those years. The phrase “Quebecois de vieille souche” (Quebecker of French ancestry - which, amongst other things, also meant “white”) was no longer widely used - but for many the term “Quebecois” had precisely the same meaning. Ironically, Quebec’s immigrant population had grown as part of a policy designed to enhance the Province’s economic strength. I don’t know what percentage of Scotland’s current population consists of immigrants or people whose roots lie in other parts of the UK - but you will doubtless have a good feel for their presence in the Scottish mosaic. Are they significant? Are their concerns being addressed or are they marginalized in this debate? If the referendum fails will they be blamed?
The 1995 Quebec referendum could have gone either way. Almost immediately afterwards, however, Quebeckers’s appetite for independence began to wilt at the edges. In the recent Canadian federal election, the Bloc Quebecois (the federal arm of the Party) was massacred - winning only 4 seats - down from 48 before the election. The jubilation at that result - right across Canada, including Quebec - is enormous. Canadians may have decided after all that they are stronger together than apart. Unity can be an ideal too, and championed with no less fervour than you display in advocating independence.
As a Canadian, I feel relief that Quebec independence is, at least for the time being, in the long grass (it could, of course, find its way back in the future). As a Brit - that’s how I always describe myself - I would be sorry to see Scotland’s departure from the Union because I believe it would weaken all four of its members. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect the independence movement. If Scotland becomes convinced that it should secede, then undoubtedly it has a right to so (though I hate to think how the terms of separation would be negotiated).
Over the life of this new Scottish parliament, we can expect a huge effort to persuade the people that independence is in their best interests. How much persuasion is legitimate? When does persuasion start leaning too heavily on hyperbole?
Apart from Canada, I have also worked and lived for extended periods in the so-called developing world - notably in Latin America and Africa. I wonder if those who desire to break up countries like Canada and the UK know how privileged we are to belong in such a society, how benign are our conditions of life, how extraordinary our opportunities for personal fulfilment, how exceptional our tolerance of “others”, how remarkable our freedoms?
UK politics infuriates me. Much of it is trivial, tribal, centred on picayune squabbling and point scoring. I find the sight of adults baying at each other across the parliamentary benches nauseating. The fact that huge amounts of time and effort - and acres of newsprint - have been devoted to the expenses scandal but almost none to the free-market ideology that lies behind the international financial crisis strikes me as perverse. Still, what we have here is far better than in too many other places in the world.
Like you, Gerry, I would like to see the golden city on a hill that you describe for Scotland. There is nothing in your vision that doesn’t equally apply to all four countries of the Union. I believe that we have a much greater chance of achieving that vision together than any of us do apart.

Thursday, May 5, 2011 - UK

2011-05-07T14:38:00.001-07:00

The only minority administration I have lived under was of 1985-87 in Ontario, Canada. David Peterson’s Liberals headed the government with some help from the left-of-centre New Democratic Party (there was no formal coalition). It remains the best government of which I have personal experience. In the 1987 election, Ontario’s Liberals won a substantial majority, dined out on the proceeds and eventually lost public support.

One hopes that Scotland’s SNP with Alex Salmond does not follow a similar pattern. Minority government has worked well for Scotland. It remains to be seen whether the SNP will be able to maintain its discipline and the allegiance of the electorate now that it fully controls the legislative agenda.

In its leader, of course, the SNP has the most charismatic politician not just in Scotland but in the whole of the United Kingdom. An important part of Salmond’s armory is that he - and the party he leads - offer a strong vision of where they are heading and what they stand for. Unlike the hapless LibDems, they have shown themselves unwilling to compromise on their fundamental platform. When, for example, Salmond stated that there would be no student fees in Scotland, he stuck to it. Margaret Thatcher had a similar reputation for “not turning”. The electorate responds favourably to politicians who mean what they say.

Although I would prefer Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, were I living in Scotland I would certainly have voted for the SNP not just because of the clarity and strength of its campaign, but also in the light of its record in office, and the fact that its position on issues such as student fees, the NHS, Iraq, and climate change reflect my own more than that of any of the three major UK parties. I admit to feeling a little envious of the Scots that they have a party so willing to stick to principles that the LibDems and the Labour Party, in particular, have been so ready to traduce for short-term political advantage.

The Tories will be quietly congratulating themselves on Thursday’s results; possibly even salivating over the prospect of an eternity of Tory governments once the constituency boundaries have been re-drawn. Scottish independence,moreover, could cement Tory hegemony in England for the foreseeable future, which is why I wouldn’t take Cameron’s vow to fight for the UK entirely at its face value. If he “loses” Scotland, he will gain England as compensation and, for the time being, Wales and Northern Ireland also; though if that happens Wales may also start to think the unthinkable.

The LibDems have evidently preferred power to principle. Their justification for compromise on fundamentals has been that they have joined with the Tories “in the national interest....so as to clean up the financial mess left by the Labour Party”. This mantra - repeated already so often that it has ceased to have any resonance or meaning - is neither credible nor adequate as an excuse for the transformation of the LibDems under Clegg into servants of an extreme right-wing Tory Party that is openly committed to the wholesale privatisation of the public realm.

Thursday’s election has made clear the extent to which the LibDems have forfeited public trust. They will likely not regain it while Clegg remains leader. They have been thoroughly outmanoeuvred by Cameron and Co. - not least least on electoral reform. AV - on which much of the party’s hopes came to rest - was never a LibDem proposal. It was, as Clegg himself admitted, “a miserable little compromise”, satisfying to no one and vulnerable, therefore, to attack from both left and right of the political spectrum (though it is questionable whether the old Labour hacks who supported the “No” campaign represent anything that could be remotely described as “left”). Miserable little compromises are not the stuff of which successful leaders are made. The contrast with Alex Salmond is stark. This electoral disaster for the LibDems begs the same old question that has haunted them since their launch in 1988: What on earth does the Party stand for?

What of the Labour Party? Under Blair and Brown, it turned to the extreme right as an apostle of neo-liberalism, thereby (among other things) granting the banks free reign to impoverish us, making ruinous PFI deals with the private sector, and placidly presiding over the continued evisceration of our manufacturing industry; and it turned to the far left by passing anti-terrorism legislation so draconian and all-encompassing that almost anything more dramatic than breathing could (and still can) result in arrest. Much of the good that the last Labour Government may have done in restoring our NHS and investing in education has been clouded by its anti-libertarian record, its foolish engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its subservience to the interests of capital. Leaving the issue of authoritarianism to one side, we might well ask if any significant difference exists between the Labour and Conservative Parties on any of the fundamental issues that matter to the electorate. If, as I suspect, the answer is ‘No’, we are left with the same question we have posed with respect to the LibDems: what on earth is Labour for? Ed Miliband has so far failed to offer a credible reply. For the moment the Party offers no sign of the vision and drive so evident in Alex Salmond’s SNP. Unless Labour rediscovers its raison-d’être, those who continue to believe in its founding principles, as I do, had better start looking round for an alternative party.

Mexico's Drugs War

2011-02-16T03:41:00.000-08:00

Mexico City

An end-of-year drink at the house of some friends. Our hosts - Nacho and Sandra - are a young couple with two small children - Carla and Tomás. The telephone rings. Sandra picks up the receiver, listens for a moment, grimaces and hangs up. The caller, she tells us, said he was: “Colonel Roberto Ordoñez of the Zetas”. He claimed to have four-year-old Carla in his “possession” and wanted a million dollars for her return. Happily, both children were playing in the garden under their parents’ watchful eyes.
The Zetas are the most feared and violent criminal gang in Mexico, a drug cartel with a lucrative sideline in kidnapping for ransom.
“We’re used to the threats,” Sandra explained.
The couple, well-known artists, are back home only for the holidays. They now live in the United States which has an open-door policy for people of exceptional ability - their talents having made them targets in their own land. Even on this short visit - they are in town for just a few days - the criminals know they are here and have their local telephone number. Tomorrow the family leaves for the coast, and by the time anyone reads this, they will be safely back across the border.
Countless less well known Mexicans have also fled their homes, if not to the United States then elsewhere in the country so as to escape the seemingly ineluctable criminalisation of their town or neighbourhood.

The wave of violence currently sweeping Mexico reaches virtually every part of the Republic, but it is centred on the northern states - notably those sharing a frontier with the United States.

Proceso - Mexico’s premier investigative journal - runs regular in-depth reports on the drug cartels - or “narcos”. Its 26 September edition - largely dedicated to drug trafficking - includes a headline: “Where the Narco rules”. The place: Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, a border town with a credible claim to be the world’s most dangerous city.
The story focuses on a press photographer from local newspaper El Diario sent to cover yet another murder, this time in a shopping centre two blocks from the newspaper office where he works. A grey car riddled with bullet holes stands in the parking lot, its wind-screen and side-windows shattered. Inside, slumped against the steering wheel, is 21-year-old Luis Carlos Santiago, an apprentice journalist from the same newspaper. He is the second reporter from El Diario to be murdered - the first being Armando Rodriguez who, a year earlier, was gunned down outside his house while taking his daughter to school.
Journalism is a risky business in northern Mexico - but then so is almost any other way of life: on the day of Santiago’s murder, twenty-four others were also slaughtered - including two whole families machine-gunned in their homes.
A three-way war is underway for control of Ciudad Juarez between the army and two rival drug cartels; and anyone who gets in the way is likely to be killed. The scale and bloodiness of the war are spine-chilling. Media reports are common of weddings, festivals and parties being interrupted by the arrival of hit-men carrying sacks of severed heads that they roll out onto the dance floor. In 2010 alone, Ciudad Juarez suffered over 3,000 drug-related murders. Almost a quarter of a million people are believed to have fled the city and its environs. Even the mayor, José Reyes Ferriz, lives in Texas. On Independence day (September 15th) only the police and the military showed up for the public ceremony; and the traditional cry of Viva Mexico rang out from the Town Hall into a space emptied by fear, and by threats from mobsters.
Violence in the eastern state of Tamaulipas receives less coverage than Chihuahua - but it may be even more lethal and widespread. Stories emerge of as many as 200 deaths in a single encounter, of stretches of road strewn with the corpses of men, women and children, of piles of bodies thrown into ditches. Most reports are unofficial and reach the outside world in the form of anonymous blogs, private letters, and verbal accounts made by people who have left. Few are willing to speak up publicly. No records are kept of murders. No one knows where many of the bodies of the slain end up, only that they are not in official graveyards. Politicians, police, journalists, and local bureaucrats are said to be in the pay of drug traffickers. Informers are everywhere, ready to report attempts to clean up or to dispute authority over the area. Government employees in rural ministries can work solely during daylight hours and via main highways. Travel on secondary roads is foolhardy. The local press has been silenced.
Abasolo , a small town 100 km north west of Ciudad Victoria, the State Capital, lost its mayor in August. He simply disappeared. So too the mayor of the little town of Cruillas. In Hidalgo the mayor was assassinated, his replacement has been warned against entering his office, and the Gulf Cartel has imposed a curfew on the inhabitants. A growing number of towns and villages lack a police force - the previous officers having all resigned or fled.
Tamaulipas has many of the characteristics of a criminal dictatorship, the difference being that control is disputed by the Zetas and their rivals the Gulf Cartel. In effect, no one is in charge, unless it be Thanatos the god of death.

Michoacan and Sinaloa are two “drug” states not adjacent to the US border. Drug-running in the former is in the hands of the Michoacán Family, La Familia. Cartel chief, Nazario Moreno González - El Chayo - was reportedly shot dead by troops in December 2010 after a street battle that for two days virtually closed down the state capital, Morelia. If El Chayo is truly dead, then he has undoubtedly already been replaced by another member of the gang. Like the Hydra of Lerna, decapitation merely produces more heads.
Perhaps more than any other figure of the Mexican underworld, El Chayo reflected the strange nether world of the drug barons - a world in which conventional values are reversed yet remain recognisably of the same order - like a photographic negative. He famously published a magazine - Pensamientos (Thoughts) - which he used as a vehicle to set out a personal credo in words that could be mistaken for those of a passionate evangelist. Here is an extract from one of his pieces:
Brothers in Christ, Mexicans, Michoacanos, fellow tropicals, we have so much in common: a humble birth, a harsh childhood, hard labour, little leisure, troubled dreams... Everything we do springs from this..... I dreamed of being someone, of fighting for my loved ones, so that everyone in future would enjoy all the things that I lacked in the days when injustice made me tremble with frustrated rage....thanks be to god that my dreams haven’t changed and now form part of my reality... - and from there I have come to an evangelistic, militant Christianity that the Crusaders would have recognised.
Easy though it may be to dismiss this as the self-justifying ramble of a criminal, the expression of outrage at the social and economic injustices of a deeply unequal country is something with which many Mexicans will sympathise.
Sinaloa is the home of the cartel of the same name, and headquarters of Mexico’s most famous drug baron - Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo. Since his escape from a federal prison in 2001, El Chapo has become something of a Robin Hood figure, a glamorous anti-hero with a reputation for daring and for generosity towards the poor. Countless articles have been written about him, as well as at least one book - Malcolm Beith’s The Last Narco. He is reputed to have a vast and complex network of legitimate as well as illegitimate business, with up to 150,000 people in his employ. In 2009, he made the Forbes list of world’s richest people - an accolade that drew a furious response from Mexican president Felipe Calderón who claimed that the magazine was glorifying criminality. Ever since El Chapo’s jail break, both the previous government and the present one claim to have devoted substantial resources to recapturing him. With the enormous wealth at his command, El Chapo can probably bribe his way out of trouble. He can also, without doubt, fight his way out: all the cartels are known to be equipped with modern weaponry imported - largely - from the United States, but also from other supposedly “respectable” countries like Germany.
Alone among the cartel leaders, El Chapo appears to have a significant section of the general public on his side, not least because many see him as an enemy of the feared Zetas and with a greater chance of bringing them to heel than the federal government.
He is not, however, the only cartel chief to capture the public imagination. Several are celebrated in popular songs - or corridos - composed, performed and recorded by professional groups. It is not uncommon for a drug lord to commission a corrido and, for obvious reasons, no one dares decline. Nor is it wise for local radio stations to refuse to broadcast such songs - despite official attempts to ban them from the airwaves.
There is sense in some quarters that the drug cartels - especially those able to project a social conscience (however distorted) - may be winning the battle for public opinion.
Almost immediately on taking office in December 2006, President Calderón launched a crackdown against the cartels, using the military rather than the police as the main instrument of attack. Part of the rationale for this offensive lay in the increasing bloodshed wrought by the gangs themselves as they fought each other for control over drug supplies and trade routes to the United States. Pressure is also likely to have come from the US administration for Mexico to clean up its act - though Mexicans point out that the US is the world’s largest market for illegal drugs and that a ‘clean-up’ will be unlikely to work unless something is done to restrict demand.
In any case, while Calderón’s anti-drugs war has claimed some successes, notably the capture or killing of several prominent narcos, the overall level of conflict has increased alarmingly. Since Calderón’s campaign began, over thirty-five thousand drug-related murders have been recorded - with the number of deaths steadily increasing. A further ten thousand people have been reported as missing - though the number of these is likely to be much larger. Reforma newspaper runs a macabre “Execution Metre” - an annual “organised crime” death count presented in graphic format. It shows a rise in “executions” every year since 2006, with steep increases over the last two years. Latest official figures for 2010 give a total of 15, 273 executions - making it the most violent year in the country’s peacetime history.
Many interpret these figures as evidence that the government’s war against the cartels is failing; and there are suspicions, too, that some of the leaders - El Chapo being one - are enjoying government protection.
Conspiracy theories abound, with some ministers such as Genaro García Luna, Minister of Public Security, suffering repeated press barrages for his alleged links with mobsters. The distrust of government, however, is not based on hard evidence. It stems from a failure of authority to deal with the savagery that prevails in so many Mexican states, from a sense of living in a country where criminality wins out over the law, from a feeling of powerlessness feeding a suspicion that the government itself is a participant in the lawlessness both through the corruption of ministers and its tactic of responding to violence with violence so that citizens can hardly tell the difference between the behaviour of the official and the unofficial armed forces.
If anything seems clear in this chaos of brutality, religiosity and perverse idealism, it is that President Calderon’s war against the cartels is about a lot more than the drug trade. Unlike the leaders of revolutionary groups such as the Zapatistas, or the kidnappers of national politician Diego Fernández de Cevallos who left a well-written if tortuous justification of their action, the narcos come from the poor and marginalised classes who - a century after the Mexican Revolution - continue to account for over half of the country’s 110 million people. For everyone, from top to bottom of the cartel hierarchies - the petty traders, couriers and hit-men, the marijuana and poppy growers, as well the bosses and their wives and mistresses - the drug trade provides a path out of poverty and access to a life-style unobtainable, indeed not even thinkable, in the world of so-called legitimate activity. Here lies the challenge not just to Mexico but to a wider world.
Capitalism has proved over time to be a prime force for the creation of wealth. By the same token, it has shown a tendency to concentrate that wealth in relatively few hands - particularly in the neo-liberal version that holds sway in a large part of the West. Extremes of inequality can produce in people who are marginalised by the economic or political system a belief that they no longer have a stake in “society”, that the prevailing order is one of injustice and cruelty from which they can expect nothing positive, and that their only recourse is to hold it in contempt. This effect may well lie at the heart of Mexico’s problem; and it also offers a warning that no country can afford to ignore.
In the words of Isaiah Berlin:
Men will suffer for centuries in societies whose structure is made stable by the accumulation and retention of all necessary power in the hands of some one class. Ferment begins only when this order breaks down for some reason...Lack of adequate status, humiliation of the parents, and the sense of injury and indignation of the children are what drives men to social and political extremism.
Mexico’s drug war represents a challenge not just to Mexico but to the West. The turmoil has already spilled into the United States and possibly also to the country’s southern neighbours - Guatemala and El Salvador. Europe, too, has recently become a target market for the Mexican cartels.
In the end, this is a war about fundamental human justice in almost every conceivable sense of that phrase. The solution, if there is one, will require an international response; solidarity with Mexico as the country struggles to find a path to peace, and maybe something more - recognition that neither peace nor justice can be achieved while so many millions of our fellow human beings lack the wherewithal to live a dignified life. Four hundred and fifty years ago, in 1562, the great French essayist Montaigne heard the message in Paris from the lips some of the first South Americans to cross the Atlantic.
....(the visitors) noted that though there were some men among us of great wealth, many were ragged, half-starved beggars; and they found it strange that people who suffered such injustice did not rise up and take the rich by the throat or set fire to their houses.
That may well be what the cartels are about.

Note: This piece was originally published in Open Democracy

Rethinking Labour - A Reply to Anthony Barnett

2011-02-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

I agree with your analysis, Anthony, although I wouldn’t characterize the Cruddas et al. exposition as childish, merely suggest that it suffers - in common, I’m afraid, with most of this debate - from a failure to confront the obstacles that stand in the way of what Jonathan rightly calls the destructive effects of capitalist globalization.

It seems to me that there is a double confusion here.

The political/philosophical confusion is symbolized for me by the left’s obsession with Burke. We find it again in the Cruddas et al piece: England's radical traditions are rooted in the political struggle for the liberty that Edmund Burke describes as ‘social freedom'.” Really? The most casual reader of - say - Reflections on the Revolution in France - will not fail to note that Burke’s radicalism stopped at Magna Carta. He believed in inherited power and entrenched inequality, opposed any idea of political progress ...A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views...!!!, opposed democratic elections ....an election (of a head of state) would be utterly destructive of the unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation..., and did not deign to exclude anti-semitism from his personal Weltanschauung ....like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation....the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.... (All quotations from Reflections.....).

Burke was not a democrat in any sense that Keir Hardie would have recognized, and the attempt by certain Labour party intellectuals to co-opt him strikes me as evidence of how threadbare are the philosophical underpinnings of modern (New Labour) thinking.

This is not a minor issue. It suggests that the Party lacks ideological grounding, and that its leading thinkers do not really know what it should stand for. Hence why the so-called “centre ground” that Labour likes to claim for itself (in common with the other two Parties), has shrunk to a tiny patch of earth about the size of a dinner plate, on which the main issues of dispute are confined to marginal differences in the speed but not the direction of shuffle: should we cut a bit faster or a bit slower...? The debate takes place at a numbingly trivial level and is voiced largely by politicians who have already bought wholesale the neo-liberal agenda that has so damaged the fabric of our society as well as that of more impoverished communities world wide.

There has been much hand-wringing since the onset of the financial crisis. Many have been the calls for radical change. Except at the margins, however the UK political landscape offers no alternative to what Saint-Simon called the “withering away of the state...”; the idea that where ends are agreed, the only issues that remain are of means and these can best be addressed not by politicians and philosophers, but by commercial entrepreneurs and technocrats. The process is exemplified in this country by the single-minded commitment of governments since Thatcher to dispose of every piece of public property and enterprise that can be sold, and to hand to the private sector responsibility for delivering social and economic welfare, and administering ancillary areas of national life.

One hopes that Anthony is correct and that Labour’s fresh young leader is, indeed, ahead of his party in rethinking its future trajectory. The task will not be easy - less because of the resistance Ed Miliband may meet within his own Party than because he will need to break out of the neo-liberal straight-jacket.

This is much easier said than done. Free market advocacy remains part of Labour’s contemporary discourse. Cruddas et al. certainly rail against neo-liberalism, but they offer nothing in its place beyond a vague call for transforming the political terrain... and a statement - more a pious hope - that the neo-liberal era is coming to an end... Anthony Painter’s comment in his post that the global free market is high risk with too many losers... is spot on, but it begs the question of what - in a “globalized world” - we can do about it.

We could do worse than begin by asking what is meant by “free and open markets” or “Free Trade”. In theory, the concept assumes that the playing field is level and that signed-up countries play the game by the same rules. Neither is true. Playing fields are never level and much tilting takes place below the visible horizon or in a form that is difficult to monitor: local subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates, differential tax regimes and regulatory environments, national economic development policies, the nods and winks of political leverage, and so on. Measuring these differences is nigh on impossible; and counteracting them, therefore, infeasible.

Even if the playing fields were level, however, the underlying absurdity of “free trade” would remain. Use of the word “free” in this context is, in itself, misleading. Once a government enters into a free trade accord, the transactions to which the arrangement refers cease to be free. Circumstances may change - as they do frequently - and what may once have seemed a beneficial agreement may come to seem onerous. Too bad. An agreement is an agreement; and in this case it is supported by theory. Ever since David Ricardo we have known that Free Trade medicine is good for us. In the UK, as Cruddas et al. point out, we no longer own our productive sector - a consequence of “free and open markets”. People are thrown out of work on the nod of a Chief Executive who lives thousands of miles away. That, too, is apparently good for us even if, as has been the case for some time, inequality has been rising along, with levels of personal indebtedness among the worst off.

Lest we suspect that the medicine in the bottle may be snake oil, political pundits of all three parties constantly remind us that “free” markets are essential to our prosperity. People thrown out of work by competitive closures are supposed to adopt a Panglossian view of matters, reassured that everything is as it should be in the best of all possible economic paradigms. Yet the most successful developing economies - those of Brazil, China and India, and the Asian Tigers, all operate managed trade regimes. The United States has always protected her own markets, and continues to do so in sectors such as agriculture and agro-industry, even while trumpeting the advantages of free trade in sectors where the country is clearly competitive.

What this means, among many other things, is that while free trade seems highly convincing on paper, in practice the world fails to conform to its cosy promise of rising general prosperity. Trade is undoubtedly fruitful and healthy; but if it is to be truly free, then it should be subject to the wishes of the people not bound to a piece of paper signed and sealed for all time and unchangeable regardless of circumstance. At present, no matter how deep the popular misgivings about open markets, and the agonizing of those who lament its effects, voters have nowhere else to go. No one is offering to tear up those pieces of paper and replace them with something that may in time help us to take back control of our economy.

That, in essence, is the political challenge. Is any Party both prepared to confront the current orthodoxy and able to offer a convincing alternative vision of how we should conduct our economic affairs? Unless, Labour rises to this challenge, the calls for a new, invigorated Party - one truly representative of the people and capable of addressing their fears and aspirations - will fall on barren soil.

People against Power

2010-12-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

Violent strikes in France, the Wikileaks affair, Student protests in London - what’s going on? Do these apparently disparate events have anything in common? The media certainly treat them as entirely unconnected. Yet all three have at their core a common distrust and rejection of those who govern us.

A great deal of the current disaffection stems from the fact that politicians are making tax payers foot the bill for the near ruin visited on Western economies by corrupt bankers and financial speculators. Wikileaks has added to the discontent by revealing details of how governments flout national and international law, routinely lie to their own people and subvert the decisions of their own elected parliaments.

While it is too soon to characterize the present as a turning point in our history, we should not entirely dismiss the thought that we may be witnessing the first skirmishes in a prolonged struggle of the people against their rulers; a struggle between demos and plutos, between the citizenry and an unholy alliance of government and finance, between a people’s Democracy and a Plutocracy sugar-coated with a regular but meaningless electoral ritual in which faces may change but policies emphatically do not.

At first sight, such a conflict may seem ludicrously one-sided, with governments enjoying all the resources of state power as well as the backing of capital and big business. But the people have the advantage of numbers and an ability to attack from unsuspected directions - such as Operation Payback and the 500 and growing mirror sites for Wikileaks.

Rulers dislike and fear the populace; and for that reason, if for no other, we should never trust them no matter how earnestly they claim to act on our behalf. Shakespeare - who knew more about political life than most of us will ever learn - understood the relationship all too clearly:

MENENIUS: The helms o’ the state, who care for you like fathers....
FIRST CITIZEN: They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

Has anything at all changed since the Bard wrote those lines?

Peter Mandelson - How to be a Global Consultant

2010-12-06T01:22:00.000-08:00

The media delight in bestowing nicknames on top politicians: Iron Lady, Grocer Heath, Two Jags, Prince of Darkness and so on - the latter being one of several disobliging epithets by which we have come to know the machiavellian figure of Peter Mandelson.

Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool is also widely known under the simpler, more innocuous rubric of “Mandy”. Curiously, he is the second person to enjoy recognition by this name, the first being a good-time girl called Marilyn “Mandy” Rice-Davies who, in 1963, became a key character in a titillating scandal - the infamous and tragic Profumo Affair - involving a government minister, a heredity peer of the realm, an osteopath, and a Soviet official.

In addition to their nickname, Ms Rice-Davies and Lord Mandelson share other attributes across the years: diligence in building an address book with names of the rich and powerful, a sense of how to exploit them, and an ability to arouse the prurient interest of press and public.

We do not need to be told why Ms Rice-Davies proved so fascinating: her attractions spoke for themselves. Lord Mandelson’s charms, on the other hand, may seem more elusive; that is until one considers the allure of power which can be every bit as magnetic as sex, especially when allied to a somewhat villainous reputation.

Villainous? Well why else would he be known as the “Dark Lord” - (yet another of his evocative sobriquets). Here is a man condemned more than once to Hades who, through a mysterious alchemy, has always managed to re-emerge vigorous and refreshed as if he had found nourishment in the barren wastes of obscurity where ordinary earthlings might expect to perish.

His first descent to that ignoble place occurred in 1998 after he failed to declare either to parliament or to his building society a £373,000 loan from fellow Minister Geoffrey Robinson. Mere mortals might well have ended up in court from that double pecadillo, while Mandy was merely put out to grass for a while in his subterranean feeding-ground.

Then, after his mate Tony Blair brought him back and gave him another ministerial portfolio, he was banished anew in 2001 for allegedly nudging a fellow minister to grant a British passport to an Indian billionaire.

Surely that was it for Mandy’s career in public life. But no. Again he resurfaced - led from the underworld by a Prime Minister determined to play Hermes to his Persephone. This time, Blair decided that Mandy was probably better off out of the country and despatched him to Brussels as “our” European Trade Commissioner.

What did Mandy know about international trade? Probably not much more than would occupy the backside of a postage stamp; but that hardly mattered. All he needed to fulfil his role was to answer ”free trade” to every question; after which he could get on with adding more filthy rich names to his address book.

He had not been long on the job before we learned that he was spending time with Russia’s richest man, Oleg Deripaska, on the latter’s super yacht off Corfu. By coincidence, Deripaska’s company - Rusal - had recently benefited from a lowering of European tariffs on aluminium, a decision allegedly sanctioned by “our” European Trade Commissioner.

When Gordon Brown mounted the political throne after Blair’s resignation, no one - least of all perhaps Brown himself - thought Mandy would reappear on the political stage. The two intensely disliked each other, didn’t they? Not enough apparently to overcome Brown’s fear that without Mandy he would lose the next election, nor Mandy’s unquenched desire for the robes and dispensations of office (one is hideously reminded of Lear’s acerbic comment that a dog’s obeyed in office......robes and furred gowns hide all).

After such impressive resurrections, a casual observer might wonder if Mandy truly does possess special faculties. By reputation he has a razor-sharp mind and near miraculous powers of electoral campaign management. Baffingly to this writer, the press seem happy to describe him as the cleverest and most competent cabinet minister of his generation, so clever, indeed, as to have signally failed in every ministerial position he has occupied while evidently leaving behind a quite opposite impression. Similarly, he basks in credit for the glorious New Labour victory of 1997 of which he was reportedly the architect, while escaping any responsibility for the subsequent decline of New Labour’s popularity and the disastrous campaign of 2010 which he oversaw.

Skill of a kind is certainly needed to take all available praise for success while avoiding any blame for failure; or if not skill, then perhaps a sublime indifference to the world beyond oneself. It took the dismal electoral defeat of 2010 to raise doubts about Mandy’s continuing value to Labour, and then a new leader to suggest that the noble lord might usefully consider a dignified retirement.

Not that anyone could expect a man of Mandy’s recuperative qualities to heed such advice. News that he is to embark on a new career as an international business consultant should come as no surprise. What might raise our eyebrows in admiration is that his brand new firm - Global Counsel LLP - has received backing from WPP, the media and communications giant headed by the brilliant, mercurial Sir Martin Sorrell. Let us note, in passing, that Sir Martin was recently appointed to David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group. At this elevated level of money-making, there’s no such thing as political affiliation: everyone, deep down, is a cross dresser.

What exactly do international business consultants do? Basically, they come in two varieties. The first - let’s call them the workers - help companies develop new business in other countries. They conduct market research, find plant locations, negotiate local regulations, raise finance, identify partners and senior personnel, source materials and other inputs, estimate investment requirements and profit expectations and so on. Given that Lord Mandelson has no experience in any of these activities, we may assume that he does not belong among the workers. Consultants of the second kind - let’s call them the aristocrats - essentially do very little. I was about to write “nothing” , but that would be doing them an injustice. Their principle occupation is in introducing business executives to politicians, and politicians to business executives; and their main instrument of work - in fact their only one - is that address book. It is not a very energetic occupation, but it can be very lucrative. This is because many of the world’s large contracts - for example, the building of power stations, or dams, or highways, or the supply of military hardware, are in the gift of ministers, potentates, kings, and dictators. Here we may picture Mandy in his element, conversing on the telephone with the Chief Executives of multinationals, rubbing shoulders with princes and their consorts at cocktail parties, dining with plutocrats in Beijing and Moscow - and offering not to secure deals, which would require perhaps too much effort - but to put them in touch with someone who can.

Mandy may expect to make a handsome living as this second variety of consultant. No doubt WPP will also benefit, though to what extent we may only speculate, for the doors that Mandy opens will remain closed to common humanity. We can only fantasize about what takes place behind them, just as tabloid readers of the sixties fantasized about the antics of Ms Rice Davies and her pretty pal Christine Keeler. There is a difference, however. Mandy Rice Davies was nothing if not transparent about her motives and her tastes, whereas Lord Mandelson, true to his nicknames, seems ever to dwell in the shadows, famous but not quite visible, like a spirit of the night.

The Path to Underdevelopment?

2010-11-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

Every year since 1990, the United Nations has published its Human Development Report, a comparative survey of the world’s nations and peoples measured not just by income, but also by education, health, life expectancy, literacy and so on. The number of measures and the sophistication of the analysis have grown over time, but the objective has remained the same, namely to chart improvements and sometimes - sadly - declines in human development.

The report’s narrative focuses primarily on the Developing World; but the statistical underpinning embraces all countries and is presented in the form of a table - the Human Development Index (HDI) - in which each country appears in rank order of developmental success. The different components of the HDI - income, education, health etc. - are also presented in rank order so that readers can identify how well or poorly countries have performed in these sub-categories.

Anyone hungry for a counterbalance to the bombastic notions of politicians and ideologues who increasingly dominate our economic discourse will find nourishment here. UK readers, however, regardless of political stripe, may find some of the fare unpalatable. Here’s why.

In the first year of the Report - 1990 - the UK placed tenth overall in human development, behind Japan, Sweden and Canada - amongst others, but ahead of West Germany, Italy, Spain and the USA. Twenty years later, in 2010, we have fallen to 26th position, behind not only these four countries (including a united Germany) but also Israel, Korea, Hong Kong and Greece. Moreover, unlike most of our European neighbours, our relative trajectory has been firmly downward:

Much of the UK’s current status has been sustained by the growth of national income - fuelled in part, as we are learning to our cost, by public and private debt.

Take out income from the equation and the picture becomes even more disquieting. We manage a 26th position for health - hardly glorious in view of our much-vaunted NHS; but for education - the mantra of the Blair government and now under blistering attack by the Coalition - we have sunk to 37th, behind - among other nations - Rumania, Poland and Uruguay. The graph below compares the UK’s performance with that of three Latin-American countries - all of them with left-wing governments of which our political classes and our mainstream media make a point of disapproving:

What the HDI suggests is not simply that the UK is being overhauled - which could be a positive development if other countries were joining us at our high level - but that since around 1995, we have been in a process of decline.

How has this happened? One reason may be that the last fifteen years have coincided with a massive privatisation of our public sphere, and the wholesale delivery of our economy to the neo-liberal Washington Consensus.
What we have witnessed during this period is a withdrawal of Government from its traditional role of fostering the nation’s health, education and general well-being, and the contracting out of those responsibilities to the private sector. The Coalition’s recent decision to disinvest in Higher Education and its equally disgraceful plan to sell the nation’s forests are merely the latest insults to our already ragged social fabric.

We should also recognise that the hectoring, authoritarian approach of the Labour Government to educational “standards” has been a manifest failure. What could not be privatised has been bureaucratised into inanition.

Over the last 100 years, the UK has led the world in many things. Radar, aircraft jet engines, the pocket calculator and the World Wide Web were all invented by citizens of these islands. Time was when much of what we consumed in this country we also made here.

Now almost everything comes from elsewhere, including most of the industrial and electronic engineering that once fed our prosperity. We have been pioneers in the hollowing out of UK industrial creativity and the delivery of the nation to financial speculators.

Before long we may earn recognition as another kind of pioneer: the first country of the modern world to sink back into Underdevelopment.

Football, Failure and Laissez-faire

2010-06-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

Fabio Capello remarked some time ago that less than 40 per cent of the players who feature regularly in the Premier League qualify for selection to the England squad.

Accustomed to seeing more foreign stars in the Premiership than home-grown ones, we have also in recent years grown used to foreign managers taking charge of our clubs: - Arsène Wenger, Carlo Ancelotti, Rafael Benitez, Jose Mourinho, Avram Grant, Gerard Houllier, Gianfranco Zola and so on.

Top football clubs, the traditional incubators of national excellence, are now primarily commercial businesses. Their first objective is to make money for shareholders. If there is a dichotomy between the emotions these clubs arouse amongst fans - which are essentially local and tribal - and the demands of capitalist enterprise - it disappears when it comes to winning. Fans and owners alike are happy to have success purchased rather than built.

The rationale is easily framed in the form of a question. Why develop local expertise and skill - which takes time, dedication and the risk of “failure” - when you can buy ready-made brilliance on the world market?

Nothing, perhaps, more clearly demonstrates the denationalization of the game than the passing of so many famous clubs into foreign ownership. Half of the Premier League’s twenty teams are now in foreign hands, including Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and shortly - if media reports are accurate - Arsenal.

The unwritten neo-liberal bible tells us that this is the way to produce the best of all possible results in the best of all possible sporting paradigms.

That the model doesn’t satisfy the larger pretensions, hopes and aspirations of the nation is irrelevant. Or rather, according to the laissez-faire template we have inherited from the Thatcher-Reagan years, it offers - like a linear programme - the least worst outcome, even if at times of national defeat we may think otherwise.

What has happened to football has also occurred in the wider economy, of course.

No significant nationally-owned car manufacturer remains. We have all but closed UK shipyards. Our aircraft industry is a pale reflection of what existed fifty years ago. We no longer make our own clothes, refrigerators, televisions, telephones, trains, computers, printers, footwear, sports equipment. Most of our pottery and tableware is imported; and much of our food too.

Those who lament the passing of UK industry into external control point out that we are still a major exporter of manufactured goods. This is true, but it wholly misses the point. Manufactured products exported from this country come largely from assembly plants, not from centres of creative industrial enterprise. Assembly plants merely put together products designed and engineered elsewhere - often with imported components. Just like football, we no longer invest long-term in the skills and know-how needed for national success. The world’s innovators, the engineers, tool and die makers, industrial designers, increasingly reside elsewhere - most notably in those countries that have eschewed laissez-faire to a greater or lesser extent in favour of managed trade and economic development policies.

Countries that exercise more care about ownership of their industrial profile (Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, India, China, Brazil among them) also tend to be the strongest swimmers when they find themselves plunged in the forbidding waters of an international recession.

Similarly, those with few foreign players in their domestic football competitions - the South Americans are prime examples - have little difficulty putting together first class national teams.

Footballing beneficiaries of the neo-liberal model consist of a clutch of over-paid players many of whom make their fortune here while returning home to foster their country’s success on the international stage.
Another, stranger kind of beneficiary has also emerged. In a fascinating manifestation of material decadence, a select few clubs have become the trophy playthings of billionaires. World-wide, there may be many thousands rich enough to acquire a trophy spouse. But to own a Premier League football club - now that is really something. Short of owning a country, English Premier League clubs are arguably the costliest toys in the known universe.

The solution for English (and UK) football - and for our industrial and economic vitality - is to reduce foreign participation in the game. As far as concerns football, that won’t happen until our Premier clubs enter the final lap of their race towards financial ruin. How long that may take is anyone’s guess, but by some accounts they are well on their way.

Perhaps our national economic profile will follow the same course - ineluctable decay followed, we may hope, by a revival of the creativity and entrepreneurial drive that inspired our first industrial revolution. We should not, however, hold our collective breath, for we have not yet reached the bottom of the hill. Revival, moreover, is far from assured, and the second time round - should it occur - will require us to stand on our own feet rather than on the backs of peoples who right now may well be contemplating the pleasure of standing on ours.

A word about the UK Economy

2010-04-27T01:23:00.000-07:00

The prevailing neo-liberal ideology to which the UK is wedded rests on the idea of completely open borders to trade and capital flows. It is a dog-eat-dog world that places market competition as the prime motif of economic policy-making. Companies are free, even encouraged, to have their products made wherever it is cheapest to do so and to export them into the UK rather than have them manufactured locally.

Countries with the lowest production costs are invariably those with low-paid labour, poor educational and welfare standards and non-existent pollution controls. So while we import cheap manufactures, we export, free of charge, our responsibilities for the welfare of employees and for the environmental impact of industrial production.

The weltanschauung also demands that companies redefine themselves as commodities, as if they were the same kind of substance as potash or sugar. National corporations, no matter how vital to our industrial profile, should be available for sale and thereafter moulded to suit the ambitions of owners who live elsewhere and have no stake in the welfare of the founding country or its citizens.

One obvious result of this economic paradigm has been the denationalization of UK manufacturing industry which - unsurprisingly - now only accounts for 12% - 14% of GDP, down from over 30% in 1970.

Expenditure on R & D - the handmaiden of industry and catalyst of innovation - has likewise fallen dramatically compared with other so-called industrialized countries - and so has the UK’s trade balance in goods.

R & D has faded at least in part because we no longer own most of our major manufacturing base. Innovative effort tends to take place at headquarters - not in foreign-owned assembly plants or in the offices of wholesale importers. Japanese plants in the UK, for example, conduct almost no R & D. With the sale of so many great UK companies, the bulk of our work force has been deskilled with barely a murmur of protest, while politicians blithely ignore the evidence - demonstrated in the above table - of our poor performance.

Both Labour and Tory soothsayers dismiss the decline of UK-owned manufacturing by claiming that the service sector and the ‘knowledge economy’ will henceforth be our main engines of growth.
Except for financial services and tourism, however, most of the service sector does not generate wealth; it merely redistributes existing resources. And the jobs created are usually low-paid, semi-skilled, relying more often than not on government expenditure to survive.

The ‘knowledge economy’ equation rests on the fantasy that somehow we will be able to compete through excellence in design and innovation while the rest of the world remains content to manufacture products for our consumption. Keen-eyed readers will spot the contradiction. An economy dependent on low-grade service jobs is unlikely to have the wherewithal to command the heights of technological innovation. Nor are countries like China and India going to cede the territory to us, just because our politicians say so. On the contrary; with the manufacturing base at their fingertips, they will be almost inevitably become innovators as well. Given the current commitment of our politicians to the neo-liberal economic model, it is not wholly irrational to wonder whether we might be in the first stages of progressive underdevelopment of the kind that happened to other centres of excellence in the past, like ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.

What has been the effect of UK economic policy on incomes? At first glance, the statistics seem reasonably positive. With the exception of 2008 - 2009, real wages appear have risen over the last decade

But if that is true why do so many people feel they are treading water? The answer is slightly complex. Inflation was certainly kept in check during most of the past decade - largely through the importation from low-cost countries of cheap food, clothing, footwear, electronics and other modern ‘essentials’. This, by the way is the source of Gordon Brown’s famous boast about the end of boom and bust. Where inflation showed itself, however, was in ‘goods’ that couldn’t be imported, of which the most important and obvious is property. House prices where I live, for example, have risen five fold over the last dozen years - against an average wage increase of about 15%. That is a staggering difference.

How can it be that house prices rose so much faster than wages? The answer lies mainly in the amount of money available to buy them. It is not wages that have risen astronomically but debt.

During the boom that led to the current crisis, many will recall receiving countless offers of loans through their electronic or physical mail box. We should remember that under a Fractional Reserve Banking System - which is what we have - every time a bank makes a loan it effectively creates new money and thereby increases its own assets. Granting loans was good business for the banks, and securing one became scarcely more arduous for the applicant than buying a sofa. Many people took the bait. Private indebtedness soared, and with so much debt money sloshing around in the economy, property prices shot through the roof. Other “unimportable” costs rose as well, like education and health care, though health costs were partly attenuated by the “importation” of nurses from elsewhere and by contracting out cleaning and janitorial services to companies using low-cost immigrant labour. In other words, the underlying inflationary pressures in the economy only showed up in certain “immobile” sectors. Elsewhere they were disguised by cheap imports both of goods and labour.

Who has benefited from the UK’s neo-liberal version of globalization? Answer: bankers, financiers, major business owners, commodity brokers and corporate executives. News that the UK’s richest people enjoyed a massive increase in their wealth last year should come as no surprise. The present economic system foments the concentration of wealth at the top. Mega profits are the wages of a system in which capital is free to go where it will regardless of the effect on national economies and on the local labour force.

Let’s return for a moment to those loans. On both sides of the Atlantic we have long been sold the idea that a dignified life includes ownership of our own home. To borrowers who couldn’t muster an initial deposit, many of whom were unemployed or in low-paid employment, lenders - notably in the United States - began offering mortgage loans of 100% or more of the value of the property. They knew these loans were risky, so they charged borrowers a high rate of interest to reflect the risk level - thereby making monthly payments even more difficult and unlikely. Then they bundled these risky loans up with others that seemed a little less risky, tied them with plenty of string, and sold them as solid “securities” to other organizations with the promise of a steady income stream from the very attractive rate of interest being charged. All entirely legal - and fundamentally corrupt. Then began the chain reaction. Borrowers defaulted because they couldn’t keep up with their payments, and when the banks repossessed the properties they found that the market for them had shrunk and their value had plummeted. Meanwhile, the organizations left holding those parcels of high-value securities - RBS was one - suddenly discovered that the contents consisted of nothing but cool air.

How easy it is to forget that behind every loan default and property repossession are impoverished lives, people made homeless because they bought the dream of economic independence and discovered that the system itself made the dream impossible. The current financial crisis is not an aberration that can be addressed by a few changes in the banking regulations. It is a precise function of the neo-liberal model.

How have other countries approached the issue of western-style globalization? Many have taken it with a large pinch of salt. German nationals have retained ownership of a substantial proportion of their manufacturing base - and as a result Germany has remained an important source of technological innovation as well as one of the world’s largest exporters of manufactures.

In France, government regularly intervenes to prevent foreign takeovers of key industries. Denmark and The Netherlands have put huge resources and effort into horticulture and agroindustry - sectors not conventionally associated with high-tech but which demand as much scientific, engineering and managerial know-how as many of the more glamorous ‘knowledge’ activities. Selective protectionism has remained a part of economic policy.

China meanwhile, has taken a different route - ignoring the western neo-liberal model altogether and conducting a highly-managed industrial and trade strategy that includes exchange-rate manipulation as well as state oversight of foreign investment in China and Chinese investment elsewhere.

What does all this mean for the UK? That is precisely the question our three main parties have studiously avoided in the run-up to the election. Both Tories and Labour are irrevocably wedded to neo-liberalism, while the Lib Dems watch placidly from the sidelines apparently afraid to comment. None of them seems inclined to question, let alone reverse, the laissez-faire trajectory on which we are embarked.

Yet if we are to avoid a future of ineluctable decline, we will have to tackle the issues of re-industrialization, R & D, and the need to start making things once more for ourselves. We will also have to face the implications - as even Peter Mandelson has finally understood - of allowing our industrial base to fall into foreign hands.

A Grumble about UK Economic Policy

2010-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Nowhere is the idea of consumer choice more absurd than with schools and hospitals. A choice of schools can only be meaningful if some are "inferior" - and therefore unpalatable; while the idea of choosing a hospital when we are sick presupposes that we are in a position to distinguish between available options - something that would lie beyond the expertise of most of us even when we are not sick. What, I suggest, we would prefer are good schools and good hospitals so that choice is rendered unnecessary.

But these are not the only absurdities of modern capitalist theology. Another is the idea that corporate efficiency is always compatible with national or regional economic efficiency. In fact, the two are different and, in many cases, mutually exclusive. In a capitalist economy it is always efficient for the firm to produce at the lowest possible cost - and its techniques for doing so include maximizing sales, reducing labour costs, and externalizing social costs. But it is not economically efficient at the national level for people to buy superfluities (and create the associated waste), nor for a nation to cope with employment instability, the displacement of small farmers and business-owners by multinationals, the ravages of industrial pollution, and the societal disruptions that accompany extremes of inequality. Inequality itself is arguably a spur to capitalist enterprise, but it is also a charge on the social fabric. Investment banking, and currency and commodity markets can net vast rewards for a few businesses and individuals, but they often do so by devastating vulnerable populations and, as we have recently seen, inflicting significant harm on national economies.

One of the most interesting ways in which companies externalize their costs is by laying them off on their own customers. Banks, for example, have been closing branches not a result of a loss of clientele but as a cost reduction measure; and the direct result can be measured in longer queues and more waiting time for customers. A similar effect can be noticed in the widespread practice of imposing multiple layers of alternative "choices" to customers trying to make a telephone enquiry, at the end of which, as often as not, they are invited to call back because "we are experiencing a large number of calls". Practices such as these are a means of transferring costs from the firm to the customer - making them wait for a service that "efficiency" suggests they should receive well...efficiently.

Recently while waiting in a bank line-up, I made a stab at estimating the value in lost working hours to the UK economy if my own waiting experience were representative of that of bank customers in general. The sum came to £320 million per year based on a modest average labour value of £20 per hour.

A couple of weeks later, I found myself making a similar calculation for time wasted trying to get BT to resolve a broadband issue. In this case I spent a total of just under four hours on the telephone over two days (including time "on hold") and spoke at length to no less than five different people. My estimate of the value of the time lost projected onto the UK population as a whole came to £1.5 billion - not including the cost to BT of having five staff members involved of whom four proved unable to help.

These are tongue-in-cheek calculations, of course. But could they also be food for thought?

Idealism, Politics, Uruguay

2010-01-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

A small country in a region generally ignored by the anglo-saxon world is undergoing a remarkable transformation. Five years ago, for the first time in its history, the people of Uruguay elected a socialist government and a left-wing president, Tabaré Vásquez. They came to power with an idealistic mission not just to raise the general standard of living of the people but to institute a series of social and economic reforms that would both strengthen their democracy and fundamentally improve their quality of life.

At the heart of this mission - which to outsiders may well have seemed naively ambitious - was a plan to ensure that Uruguyan children had access to the same educational and informational resources as the most privileged children of the so-called First World. With this in mind, Vásquez announced at the end of 2006 his Plan Ceibal - to give a free laptop equipped for internet access to every child between the ages of 6 and 12 ..."so that each of them is not only equal in law but equal in opportunity".

Just under three years later, as Uruguayans were preparing to elect his successor, President Vásquez completed the task by personally handing a laptop to the 6-year-old who stood last in line. Every school child in Uruguay now owns a reader's ticket to the vast library of human knowledge and learning offered by the World Wide Web.

Don José Mujica - Uruguay's new president elect - belongs to the same left-wing coalition as Vásquez - the Frente Amplio - and he has made clear that he intends to make the same commitment as his predecessor to education, social welfare and justice.

Most of us have heard politicians voice similar intentions, and we are familiar, too, with their subsequent failure to carry them out. What makes Uruguay different, is that these apparently utopian dreams are being implemented - not in half-measures but fully, openly and with the participation of the people.

Uruguay's new president has a remarkable and colourful history. He is a former member of the Tupamaro movement - an armed revolutionary group formed in the 1960s. Apprehended several times, he spent nearly fifteen years in jail - where, in addition to being tortured, he was confined for two years at the bottom of a well. He was finally released after the restoration of democracy following the military dictatorship of 1973 - 1985.

In appearance Mujica could could scarcely look less like a guerrilla fighter or even a national leader. He never wears a tie and rarely a suit, and one could easily imagine him as a retired school teacher or bus driver spending his time chatting in a local café or dozing over a newspaper on a park bench. When he speaks, however, one becomes instantly aware of a quiet but deeply impressive charisma, and intelligence of a high order. His style is simple, his voice, tone, vocabulary those of the man and woman in the street. In every conceivable sense he appears as one of the people.

A speech he made to a gathering of intellectuals shortly after his triumph in the polls is as deeply inspiring in its own way as Obama's victory address to the US nation a year earlier. In it he lays out an Athenian vision - not of a country where citizens are offered a banal series of consumption choices, but of one where everyone is empowered by the quality of their education to lead fulfilling lives and to participate in the well-being of the nation and of their fellow citizens.

One senses that Uruguay is breaking new ground, and that if the country continues to travel the road on which it is now embarked, it will likely emerge in twenty years time as the Switzerland of the southern hemisphere: at once the most deeply democratic, technologically dynamic and culturally creative nation in Latin America.

In the anglo-saxon West, with our usual hubris and contempt for poorer nations in distant parts, we will probably refuse to see the lesson offered by this small country. Instead, as likely as not, we will watch in mild bewilderment as it scoots past us on the UN Human Development index. And then we will settle back to the petty squabbles of party politics, and the vacuous blather of political leaders who have long since traded in whatever idealism and principle they might once have possessed for the chintzy accoutrements of office.

Obama, the Crisis and the American Dream

2010-01-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

Most of us were too thrilled by Obama's victory to worry about how he would perform. From the outset, as his choice of key cabinet members clearly demonstrated, he showed a lack of conviction about what he wanted to achieve: Clinton at State, Geithner at the Treasury, and Gates at Defense. Gates, of course, was CIA Director under Bush, Geithner comes straight out of Wall Street, while dear Hilary is nothing if not "old Washington". At a moment when Obama had a chance to blow some fresh air over the Potomac, he inhaled the stale DC air instead.

His dithering over Afghanistan and backtracking on key elements of health care reform once again show an absence of decisive leadership and maybe even of genuine political conviction. There is an old saying that it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees; but on health care in particular, Obama appears to have dropped to the floor as soon as the GOP shook a fist at him.

But where Obama - and indeed the US - are truly in a hole is with the economy. The flaw in the American version of capitalism lies buried in the heart of the American mythology about itself: that everyone can "make it", that individuals are responsible for their own success or failure, and that government should keeps its hands out of people's pockets and its nose out of their affairs. The US system is the best because - well - it's the best.

Unfortunately, international comparative statistics tell a different story. Social mobility in the US is among the lowest in the developed world (the UK's record is, if anything, even worse); and the US is at the bottom of the developed country list for life expectancy and infant mortality. Most people, in other words, don't "make it". Nor are they great at looking after themselves. Low educational standards is another US "achievement".

Meanwhile, and perhaps in the long term even more important, the neo-liberal, laissez-faire economic model has not only hollowed out industry in the US by fostering the flight of production facilities to low-cost areas of the world, but it is proving defenceless against the state-guided, protectionist capitalism of China and some smaller eastern countries. Much of the West's decline has, until recently, been masked by the availability of cheap imports (thereby disguising the relative reduction in quality of employment and in average remuneration) and the massive financial profits generated by Wall Street and the City. But the current recession, the gargantuan greed of western bankers, and the West's huge indebtedness have torn away the mask to reveal a sickly visage.

The US is very far from moribund, but she is unquestionably in trouble and her citizens are palpably angry about it - hence the voter volatility in the Massachussetts senate race. Ironically, voters want Obama to get the country back on its feet even though many of them don't believe government should be involved. They want health care fixed only if it comes tax free, and while they are wedded to laissez-faire, they want the bankers reined in and maybe even punished (unless punishment means more government in which case - maybe not). In a nutshell the problem isn't government involvement but the American weltanchauung.

What the country needs, one suspects, is a reevaluation of its sclerotic economic model, a searching re-examination of its collective myths, and a far more courageous administration in the White House.

Drug Nutts

2009-11-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, I attended a celebration dinner at a well-known British university. A head of department had just been nominated to the position of vice-chancellor of another equally prestigious seat of learning, and we were gathered to celebrate his achievement. The food was more than acceptable and the wine both drinkable and in copious supply - so that when, over coffee, the speeches began, we were all in good humour. First in line to speak was the guest of honour himself and, as usual, he gave a brilliant and witty oration. After that, however, matters went rapidly downhill as a succession of mediocre wits - all heads of department - rose to their feet. Listening to one especially dull contribution, the Dean of Studies, next to whom I was seated, whispered "...there are professors and professors (pause) unfortunately".
Many years later the spat (November 2009) between the UK's Home Secretary Alan Johnson and Professor David Nutt - recently sacked as head of the Drugs Misuse Advisory Council - brought that Dean of Studies' pithy aside back to mind. The good Professor Nutt had claimed that the drug Ecstasy was no more harmful - perhaps less so - than horse-riding. Since he appeared to have most of the press and a handsome proportion of the pundits on his side, I decided to throw in a protest - choosing for my target a gruffly strident anti-Johnson polemic in Open Democracy.
Please understand, I'm no defender of any of the major UK political parties - but still less am I ready to be bludgeoned into intellectual submission by professors like Nutt who prefer to be believed (and even obeyed) because they are professors rather than because they are learned.
Here are my two submissions; the second in response to a suggestion by another contributor that I might not have understood the professor's use of statistics.

Submission One

The chattering classes are having a ball with this one - with everyone who thinks they are on the progressive wing of political correctness lambasting Alan Johnson for his sacking of Professor Nutt. Although I am cautiously in favour of legalization - and therefore probably on the professor's side with respect to policy, I find the widespread belief that a professor's advice should be taken as gospel to be no more credible than the fantasy of papal infallibility. When the professor demonstrates evidentially that alcohol and tobacco cause more harm (to health?) than ecstasy and cannabis, I assume he knows his stuff; but when he moves from there to speculating about the different effects of government policy, he seems to me to be laying claim to a level of authority and wisdom that exceed his professional qualifications. I even wonder if he has truly evaluated - scientifically - the evidence for his statement that ecstasy (also crack? Heroin? skunk? LSD?) and horse-riding are about equal in the degree of harm they cause. If so, I would be interested in seeing that evidence and would be mightily impressed - and astonished - if it proved to be watertight. Statements of this kind are a form of playing to the gallery: unnecessary if the audience consists of fellow scientists, but otherwise merely provocative.

Nor are they illustrative of anything. Lots of things can be said to cause harm. It might just as easily be shown, for example, that walking at night, or jogging are as dangerous as horse-riding. The argument rests on the fallacy of assuming that a comparison of two dissimilar elements sheds light on either of them. And if the professor truly thinks that banning horse-riding would be easy, one wonders what he's been smoking.The statement itself could not be more revealing of professorial naivety.

History shows that scientists frequently get things wrong. But even if Professor Nutt is entirely correct in his analysis, this doesn't mean his advice is equally correct. Politicians have to consider a great deal more than their scientific advisers: international treaties and understandings on the issue in question (the drugs trade), public opinion, the tabloids, the welfare of vulnerable members of society, and not least the opinions of other advisers (or are we to assume that professors always agree with each other?) etc.

Advisers merely give advice. They should not expect their advice always to be taken, still less expect ministers in effect to obey them. Nor should they conflate the right to freedom of speech with throwing a tantrum if their advice is rejected. If they want to influence policy, they should stand for office. They might then learn something about how difficult these issues are to deal with politically, however straightforward they may seem in the white-coated confines of the campus laboratory.

Submission Two

Okay. Let's have some fun.

The use of the word ecstasy in this context presumably means the practice of ecstasy consumption. The data obtained on its harmfulness are derived from the population of ecstasy consumers (NOT the proportion of the population that consumes the drug).

Similarly the data on harm caused by horse-riding are derived from the population of horse riders.

Statistical data are, of course, taken from population samples.

In order for a comparison to be valid, the two samples have to be derived from the same (or at least very similar) populations. A simple random sample of the UK population will not work because it could not be guaranteed that it would contain any ecstasy consumers or horse riders. So in order to conduct a comparative analysis of "harm", we need a sample of ecstasy consumers and a sample of horse riders.

The population of horse riders in the UK includes:

1. Adults who ride horses as part of their profession: jockeys,
police officers, cavalry etc.

2. Adults who ride purely for recreation.

3. Hunters (or cross-country animal chasers)

4. Sports men and women, some of whom participate in national and international competitions.

5. Children

6. Circus and other performers.

The population of ecstasy consumers is...well no doubt Professor Nutt can tell us who consumes ecstasy and under what circumstances.

It's a fair bet that Professor Nutt's ecstasy population sample is different from that of horse-riders (if he ever used one). Children are unlikely to be represented among the drug-takers. Nor sports riders for that matter. Nor professional consumers - i.e. people who get paid for taking ecstasy.

You may think that if you remove professional horse-riders and children from your "rider" population and, say, restrict it to adults who ride for recreation, you can select ecstasy consumers of the same age range and thereby get comparable samples. The problem here is that the two samples would be selected differently and not randomly, which would invalidate the comparison.

Now let us look at how you define each activity. By ecstasy consumers do we mean anyone who consumes the drug once, or regular consumers. If the latter, what constitutes a regular consumer? How many acts of consumption qualify an individual for inclusion in the data sample?

We ask the same kind of questions of horse-riding. How many person-hours of riding per unit of time (say per year) qualify someone as a rider?

And once we have defined our sample populations, we still have to work out how to make one activity equivalent to the other (how many person-units of ecstasy consumption equal a person-unit of horse-riding or vice versa). This is necessary in order to be sure of a roughly equal chance a priori (i.e. before conducting the analysis) of finding "harmful effect" in each sample.

We then have to identify degrees of harm and its victims (the self and other parties). Do we choose, say, admissions to hospital, as our benchmark? Should we also include benefits (i.e. negative harm) as well as positive harm to health, happiness and long-term success or failure? In the case of horse-riding we can probably limit the definition of harm to injury suffered by the rider and the horse (okay there will be some third party injuries too).
Harm from drug-taking, however, is much less straightforward since the relationship of cause and effect may be less easy to establish and might only reveal itself in the long term. Harm to others may be significant - although we would have to be sure that ecstasy was involved (say a drug-induced driving accident), and this, of course, may be a matter of opinion unless we restrict ourselves to the decisions of a court of law following a trial.

All statistics derived from population samples are based on assumptions, but the assumptions themselves have to be reasonable, credible, defensible. The point I am making is that you can't simply take national statistics on aggregate horse-riding injuries, put them against figures (derived from where?) of harm caused by ecstasy consumption and say that one is more or less harmful than the other. To give an extreme example, breathing oxygen - something we all do - is 100% fatal. But it would be meaningless to say that breathing is more dangerous than warfare.

The chances of Professor Nutt having conducted a valid comparative statistical analysis between ecstasy and horse riding are - in my view - vanishingly small; and by making such a comparison he was, therefore, grandstanding. In other words, given that he was a government adviser, he was not making a scientific point but a political one.

JF

PS The above assumes a direct relationship between 'use' and 'harm' (i.e. the more you do the more you are likely to suffer or cause harm). For ecstasy, this is probably a safe assumption. In the case of horse-riding, however, the relationship could be inverse, i.e. harm may be more common among neophytes than experienced riders. If this is so, then Professor Nutt's comparison could be more accurately described as being between ecstasy and inexperience - which would render it even more nonsensical.

Chavez - a Response

2009-05-07T02:07:00.000-07:00

Enrique Krauze's anti-Bolivarian diatribe against Hugo Chavez is a typical product of the right-wing Mexican intelligentsia.

Like so many of the species, Krauze establishes his credentials in the eyes of readers with 'learned' references to European currents of thought (although the learning seems to me superficial). Even on the subject of Bolivar he defers to a single European source - John Lynch (with whom I studied at London's Institute of Latin American studies). Although Krauze omits to say so, Professor Lynch's biography is clearly in sympathy with its subject and admiring of the Liberator's achievements, as are most of the other manifold biographies (the literature both by and on Bolívar is immense). Salvador de Madariaga's "Bolívar" (1949) is an exception - the embittered, rather nasty account by an unsympathetic gachupín (Spaniard). But in case there should be any doubt about Professor Lynch's position, here is how he summarizes Bolivar's contribution to the struggle for independence: Bolivar
....showed the mental determination and physical skills required by the situation. He was the intellectual leader of the Spanish American revolution, the prime source of its ideas, the theorist of liberation whose arguments clarified and legitimized independence during and after the war.

Let us take as given that Krauze has read the relevant pages of Marx, Plekhanov and Carlyle and more or less understood them. To claim, however, that these Europeans are fundamental to interpreting Bolívar and Chavez is an astonishing leap of imaginative effrontery. And it leads Krauze to conclusions about them that are widely at variance with reality. This is not surprising when one considers that another familiar characteristic of Latin American intellectuals of the Krauze variety is that their knowledge of Latin America beyond their own country is often flimsy and tends to rest, at best, on a narrow range of sources supplemented by rather too much armchair reflection. For inspiration and content, they look first to Europe and the United States, and only secondarily, if at all, to the countries whose language they share and with whose history they have so much in common. Hence why almost everything that Krauze says about Bolívar is factually incorrect (one wonders, indeed, if he actually read Lynch's biography or merely skipped through it).

On that point, at least, he resembles Marx - whose virulent attack on the Liberator was based on little more than hearsay, since the history of the Latin American wars of independence and Bolivar's role in them had yet to be written. But facts didn't detain Marx any more than Krauze. What Marx detested in Bolivar was, above all, the idea of the great man, the charismatic leader, whose existence was ideologically repugnant if not inconceivable because it ran counter to historical materialism and the "inevitable" triumph of the proletariat. I think it possible to argue that it was not so much Bolivar's person that Marx reviled, but his reputation, the legend that had grown round him.

Krauze nevertheless quotes Marx's views on Bolivar at length, allowing to go unchallenged the canard that the Liberator wrote his Bolivian Constitution with the aim of awarding himself the position of Dictator for Life. In fact, Bolivar's attempt at writing a constitution was an honourable failure and Sucre - not Bolivar - became, with the latter's endorsement, the first effective (though short-lived) president of the country.

Bolivar may well have drawn his inspiration for the idea of a life presidency from the British system which he much admired, even though he would not countenance the idea of hereditary monarchy. Hence why the position of "President for Life" outlined in his Bolivian Constitution expressly states that
The President may not deprive any Bolivian citizen of his Liberty nor impose any sentence....he cannot prevent elections nor any other institution decreed by law...
An elected vice-president was to be the real head of government.

Throughout his political and military life, Bolivar struggled (unlike Marx) with the practical as well as the theoretical complexities of establishing a viable political system in the vast regions whose independence he had done so much to bring about. He saw that without a strong central government, regionalism and factionalism would tear the region apart and pave the way for the military coups and caudillismo that, in effect, have characterised so much of its post-independence history.

Bolivar himself complained that his name
...is used in Colombia for good and evil and many people quote it in support of their stupidity.
Nevertheless, his views on government are well known and documented. And nowhere, perhaps, were they better articulated than in his famous speech to Congress at Angostura:
Repeated elections are essential...because nothing is more dangerous than allowing the same citizen to remain in power over a long period. The people become accustomed to obedience, and he becomes accustomed to command. A republican government, that is what Venezuela ... should have. Its principles should be the sovereignty of the people, division of powers, civil liberty, prohibition of slavery, and the abolition of monarchy and privileges. We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom.

Despite these views, and his frequent attempts to turn them into policy, be began to despair of achieving them in the short term. Throughout his life as a public figure, he struggled with the issue of implementation in a region where most of the population was uneducated, while few among the tiny, ambitious elite were interested in anything other than a continuation of their privileged status. How far, Bolivar wondered, should democracy go without defeating itself? It is a question central to any effort to find a balance between liberty and equality, and one that continues to perplex philosophers and historians of ideas, and to exercise social scientists. To characterise Bolivar's struggle to shape and democratize the region as the blind ambition of a self-centred dictator is both ludicrous and disingenuous. Bolivar is not a South-American hero because the people are deluded - as Krauze implies with patrician disdain - but because he symbolizes and embodies ideals of justice and equality that have eluded - and continue to elude the vast majority of Latin Americans.

Krauze's virulent assault on Chavez is similarly riddled with distortions and inaccuracies. Perhaps the most unpleasant accusation, and arguably the most serious, is that the Venezuelan leader is anti-semitic and engaged in orchestrating a campaign against the Jewish community. I have looked long and hard for evidence of this - so far without success. All I have found are expressions by Chavez of disgust and disquiet about Israel's behaviour towards the Palestinians - a view many people share - including, it seems, the United Nations. The conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is, of course, a commonplace and should not detain us in the absence of more convincing evidence. If Chavez is anti-semitic - that is unacceptable and unforgivable; but I have yet to be convinced that the accusation has any foundation, and Krauze doesn't offer any. Anyone inclined to add this accusation to the many others directed at Chavez by the western media might do well first to listen to the Venezuelan government's response to the assault on the Mariperez Synagogue.

Right-wing attacks on Chavez invariably include - indeed often begin - with attempts to smear him with the rubric of dictator. The word occurs 22 times in Krauze's article; dictatorship 10 times. In fact, Chavez is a democratically-elected head of state who has survived at least one highly undemocratic attempt to unseat him, as well as a recall referendum. He has won and retained power in elections that all international observers agree to have been free and fair. Anti-chavista claims that the government controls the media also conflict with the evidence; as do the hysterical condemnations of the Venezuelan government's decision not to renew RCTV's licence. In truth, Venezuela has vigorous, independent media and - as Krauze admits (perhaps without quite understanding the implications) - a powerful, vociferous, well-financed and extremely muscular opposition. These would appear to be characteristics of a democracy.

Among Enrique Krauze's distinctions is that he sits on the board of Televisa - Latin-America's largest purveyor of mindless trash. He is a middle class intellectual in a country with one of the poorest and most disgraceful public education systems in the middle-income developing world. He is an intellectual fellow-traveller not of Bolivar - which would do him honour - but of Santander - the Liberator's duplicitous lieutenant, of Chile's Carrera Brothers, or more accurately (since Krauze is Mexican) of Iturbide the would-be emperor, of Porfirio Diaz and - post revolution - of Aleman, Echeverria, Lopez Portillo and Salinas de Gortari, all skilled at adopting the language of revolution and social justice while embedding privilege and sanctioning corruption.

One conclusion a casual reader might be tempted to draw from Krauze's account is that the Venezuelan people vote for Chavez because they're stupid and uneducated (perhaps like those who voted for AMLO in Mexico's stolen election), something that Krauze doubtless believes he understands a fondo because Televisa helps to keep them entertained (and no one with half a mind would pay attention to the pap it produces). Here Krauze (though he does not say so) joins Bolivar in acknowledging public ignorance and low educational attainment. But while Bolivar deplored this, saw it as a fundamental weakness, and did what he could to address it (including building schools and universities at state expense and paying the salaries of teachers); Krauze, 180 years later, earns money from it while excoriating figures like Castro and Chavez who have made public education a prime motif of government policy.

If there is an outrage perpetrated on the people of Latin America it is not the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, but the centuries of impoverishment and exploitation visited on the populace by successive generations of feckless leaders and the middle class elites that have sustained them. Bolivar at the end of his life was painfully aware that he had found no solution:
They will say of me that I liberated the New World, but they will not say that I have improved the happiness or stability of one single nation in America.
The condition of the poor in Latin America has changed far too little since Bolivar wrote those valedictory words. Latin-America's middle and upper classes have had a long run and they have manifestly failed the people they were supposedly in power to represent. Castro, Chavez, and Morales are not unfortunate aberrations but a direct consequence of the refusal of elites - ever since the Conquest - to address the savage inequalities that disfigure the continent.

Let us turn now to Krauze's view (such as it is) of Venezuela's economy. No one who has given the issue more than cursory attention disputes that Chavez has targeted the poor since he came into office - not just with rhetoric but with action aimed at improving their standard of living. Since the government gained control of the national oil company in 2003, Venezuela's GDP has almost doubled and - contrary to Krauze's account - most of the growth has been in the non-oil sector of the economy and in the private sector. Over the same period, the overall poverty rate has halved and extreme poverty has fallen by over 70 per cent. Between 1998 and 2008 social spending tripled in real terms, the number of primary health care physicians grew by a factor of 12, and infant mortality fell by a third. By any standards, these are remarkable achievements. Readers interested in understanding some of the real reasons why Chavez is repeatedly successful at the polls might wish to consult the study recently published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (from which the data referred to above are sourced). To borrow the words of a famous American lawyer, Krauze's economic case against Chavez amounts to "ten pounds of hogwash in a five pound bag."

Assuming that Krauze is not merely grandstanding and that he actually believes what he writes, the only possible conclusion is that he simply hasn't bothered to ascertain the facts. This, more than anything, shows him up as an intellectual poseur, concerned not with exposing truth but disguising it with fake erudition in the service of a drearily familiar set of fatuous upper middle-class prejudices. And those who know something of Latin American history may well read the last sentence of his essay less as a prediction than as a threat. For it is couched in precisely the kind of inflammatory language that all-too-often has proved to be the prolegomenon of violent intervention.

Bibliographical note for English-language readers: An excellent brief account of Bolívar's thought can be found in J.L. Salcedo-Bastardo: Bolívar - A continent and its Destiny. The English translation (1978) is abridged - but contains most of the essentials. Of the biographies in English, the two best are those by John Lynch (2006), and Gerhard Masur (1948) - the former easily obtainable, the latter only in libraries. A fascinating contemporary narrative by Bolívar's aide-de-camp, Daniel Florence O'Leary seems to have been written in English, but it has only been published in Spanish as part of a multi-volume collection of papers that O'Leary assembled during and after the War of Independence. Bolívar's own writings were vast, but there is a good representative selection in Bushnell (ed): El Libertador: Writings of Simon Bolivar.

The Financial Crisis, Protectionism and Bullshit

2009-03-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Katinka Barysch's recent article in Open Democracy on the current financial crisis and the G20 neatly summarises the conventional view of how to retrieve the situation. She could have managed an even neater summary by simply writing "more of the same - but with a little closer regulation". That, effectively, is the spartan recipe that Gordon Brown and many, if not all, economic soothsayers are trying to thrust down the gullet of a bewildered public both in the West and elsewhere. What has to be avoided they tell us - in dutiful obedience to received opinion - is a new round of protectionism, like the "disastrous" one of the 1930s. Nicolas Sarkozy has come in for special criticism for reportedly "tying" financial support for French car-makers to the employment of French workers.
In the new world order of global capitalism, governments can't be allowed to use national funds to protect national economies. International treaties on free trade and globalization oblige them to ignore the problems and, indeed, the wishes, of their own electorates if these conflict with the prevailing orthodoxy. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this constraint is anything other than fundamentally undemocratic.
Such is the dilemma that Sarkozy is confronting in France where a highly politicized citizenry expects the President to be first in line to protect them in times of economic difficulty. Assertions that they will be better off losing their jobs now so that " in the long run" they can earn a little more later cut no ice with the French. Nor should they with any other electorate. Do we have to keep reminding ourselves of Keynes's warning about what the long run means?

Anti-protectionist rhetoric is misleading in many respects - too many for the compass of a short note such as this. I will briefly touch on just two that seem to me of particular importance.
First, if the free-traders are to be believed, we have been living - at least up to the onset of the crisis - in a world of largely free and unfettered commercial exchange. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. All western countries routinely provide a variety of overt and covert types of support for nationally-based industries, examples of which are export marketing assistance, investment incentives, tax holidays, infrastructural projects related to plant location, special utility rates, farm subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates and so on. In the United States, a great deal of assistance to US corporations is provided at state and municipal levels, and through regional agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority Economic Development Division, and it passes below the visible horizon of foreign onlookers. In fact, the range of protectionist devices is limited only by the ingenuity of the economists and bureaucrats who are paid to invent them. While most political leaders in the West pay lip service to free trade, many governments beaver away behind the scenes to evade its implications - as the French President appears to be doing; and so too the President of the United States. Where the working population is in trouble is if they find themselves governed by leaders who really believe in the free trade nostrum - like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson.

Here we come to our second point. The vast sums being ploughed into economic recovery by western governments is to be paid for by - you guessed it - western taxpayers. So what an obsessive adherence to open commercial borders may mean is that a good proportion of the £billions and rising that Gordon Brown and co. are putting into circulation could be going straight into productive activities in some other part of the world, leaving the UK's unemployed scarcely better off than if the sums had not been spent at all; worse off, in fact, when the increased indebtedness is taken into account. The question that Obama and Sarkozy are trying to tackle, but that no UK politician or commentator appears to acknowledge is this: why should national taxpayers foot the bill for an economic stimulus package that is not aimed primarily and fundamentally at employment creation in their own country? Put more simply, why should I pay for someone in Slovenia to make cars? Or someone in China to make t-shirts? Are the Slovenian cars and the Chinese t-shirts truly cheaper? In an era of full employment, they might be; but in conditions of unemployment, their prices rise exponentially. They rise first because I am financing the production, and second because I am financing my own unemployment. In this light, free trade, in the version foisted on the world by the West, is fundamentally unstable. It works most efficiently for countries with full employment; but. as unemployment increases, its efficiency decreases. For developing countries with high unemployment it is plainly nonsensical. And it is not the way any of the developed countries achieved their privileged status, as Cambridge University 's Ha-Joon Chang convincingly demonstrates. See also his recent interview with Democracy Now.

As I write this, the UK car industry is reportedly fighting for survival. Trade theory has it that industries that falter should be left to die, while their workers should retrain for some other - unspecified - activity in which the country enjoys an equally unspecified comparative advantage. In reality, it is not lack of competitiveness that is hitting the UK car industry, but the severity of the recession. It is also hitting the industry in many other countries. Car manufacturing plants that survive will not be the most competitive but the ones receiving enough state aid to nurse them back to health.
In the current conditions of crisis, competition is not taking place between semi-comatose companies, but between politicians. The smartest (Obama and Sarkozy among them) will ensure one way or another that their key industries live to fight another day; those who are wedded to extremes of free trade ideology can be assured of one thing: they will lose the next election.

Free Speech, Wilders and Fire Alarms

2009-02-26T05:59:00.000-08:00

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes’s overrated example of the impermissible was falsely to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. What he was referring to was the likelihood that the people in the theatre would react in a way that would prove injurious. Note that there is nothing intrinsically subversive about the language of such a false warning. Its impact would depend on the audience’s inclination to panic and a belief that it was a genuine fire alarm and not part of the drama taking place on stage. Even then, it is perfectly possible to envisage circumstances in which, in the absence of any corroboration that the fire exists,the warning would be ignored. It happens all the time in hotels and offices when an errant alarm bell rings. Mostly our response is to stay put and carry on with what we were doing until and unless we hear otherwise. In other words, even when confronted with a warning, we use our own judgement about whether the warning is valid. And if the alarm proves false and no harm is done, we don’t ask for the janitor to be jailed.
In the case of Wilders, he was being invited to shout “fire” in the house of lords to an invited audience. Any assumption about the damning nature of his film is an assumption about the reaction of those who see it; namely that they would be incited to feelings of hatred that they did not already entertain. Such an assumption is likely to be made only by those who consider themselves exempt from the contamination they fear in others. It’s the same old prejudice once used to justify the theatre censorship role of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and that still sustains the Obscene Publications Act.
Banning acts of expression before they have been made or can be shown to have caused harm seems to me a dangerous path to tread. It is the path traveled by authorities that, no matter how benign their intentions, believe they know what’s good for us better than we do.
Wilders’ film has been widely seen already. Many have undoubtedly found it offensive. I thought it simply nonsensical: unpersuasive, poorly argued, misleading, crass, technically inept, and in summary worthless. Has it incited me to violence or to break the law? No chance. Has it had such an effect on anyone? There appears to be no evidence that it has.
The most offensive language imaginable can have no impact if it merely evokes ridicule or indifference, or indignation, or revulsion. We may feel, rightly, that children should be shielded from it until they are old enough to form an opinion on its validity. But unless speech can be shown to have incited violence or mischief, there is no good case for banning it. Unless, that is, we are content to be treated forever as children - too immature and credulous to make informed judgements of our own - or even maybe to vote.

Originally written for Open Democracy

Climagen

2009-02-22T08:04:00.001-08:00

Generic word for plants and animals that have been genetically altered to permit their survival in unfamiliar or hostile environments. Climagen Palm Trees, for example, have been modified to allow them to thrive in temperate climates, which is why they are to be seen growing on northern European beaches, and round the Great Lakes of North America. Similarly, a Russian billionaire has recently stocked his estate in the Urals with woolly-haired climagen elephants in honour of the extinct mammoths who once roamed there
During the last decade, the word appears to have extended its meaning to denote any kind of accommodation of one thing or person to another. People of gentle disposition are being referred to as “climagens”, as are politicians who change their mind.
A compound of “genetic” and “acclimatise”, the expression was originally coined by scientists at the University of Newfoundland who were working on a project to replenish the Grand Banks - once the world’s largest source of the now extinct northern cod - with several species of fast-breeding fish of tropical origin. The original project failed, not for want of technology, but because as soon as the new breeds settled to their northern environment, the fishing industry scooped them up and left the region as bereft of edible marine life as before.

The Convention on Modern Liberty - 28 February 2009

2009-02-03T14:30:00.000-08:00

I believe we need to approach the question of Liberty in the modern state more broadly and deeply than is suggested by the initial comments of Convention participants.
The tendency of all three main UK parties - and notably the two largest - to converge in the centre of the political spectrum means that in respect of many, if not most, of the significant issues of the day, the electorate has no effective choice. If we were to conduct a national poll, for example, on whether the people want private sector involvement in the NHS, or in state schools, or running the railways, or taking over the London Underground, or a third runway at Heathrow, it’s a safe bet that the answer would be a resounding “no”. Yet most of our parliamentarians think otherwise.
Despite the enormous weight of government and opposition propaganda, did the people of these islands agree with the Iraq War, the introduction of fees for university students, the draconian measures embedded in omnibus legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill, ID cards, pervasive street cameras, the madness of the Private Finance Initiative, the organization of our economic life on neo-liberal principles?
According to the polls, they didn't. But most of our parliamentarians did.
Government and Parliament alike appear to have sailed away on a trajectory of their own leaving a disarmed and bewildered electorate watching from the shore.
These issues are fundamentally about democracy. They are the apparel in which Liberty shows herself. If we have no voice in what happens to us, our freedom remains theoretical, an empress with no clothes.
Equally critical is the international dimension. European unity may be a wonderful thing, but the EU's unelected officials wield substantial powers and the people of Europe have no direct means of influencing their decisions or removing them from office. Beyond Europe, our government's political posturing and military ventures in other parts of the world are inextricably linked to the imposition of intrusive and authoritarian legislation at home. Is it feasible any longer to think of our freedom as just a national matter, capable of being addressed in isolation from our international alliances and commitments, from global warming, migratory movements, our apparent subservience to transnational capital and the world market?
I do not believe the government's assault on democratic freedoms is solely circumstantial - a reaction to real or imaginary threats; nor that the problem is this government and that its removal would bring the nightmare to an end. Rather it reflects a sclerotic and probably outmoded political and economic system, one that rests on extreme levels of inequality and disempowerment both within our country and internationally. Attempting to reverse repressive policies may achieve some limited success in the short term, but it is unlikely to change the prevailing imbalance between government power and the rights of the citizen, between our image of who we are and the reality of power relations in this country and beyond, between our commitment to neo-liberal capitalism and the multitudes who remain in abject poverty, between cheap imported goods in our local high street and child labour in the back streets of Dhaka, between the unemployed on the picket line in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire and the unimaginable profits of multinational corporations.
My ambition for the Convention on Modern Liberty is twofold: that it will signal the beginning of a root-and-branch examination of the way we are governed, and that it will lead to an exploration of political alternatives that more closely reflect the democratic aspirations of the people who live here.

Israel and Gaza

2009-01-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

My grandfather - whom I never knew - was Jewish, and I married into a Jewish-Israeli family, but I belong neither to the race nor the faith. I have always disliked organized religion and any form of tribalism, both of which tend to inspire their adherents with feelings of exclusivity and superiority over those who do not share the same allegiances. I see myself, romantically, as a citizen of the world; though if anyone thinks this an easy option they have not truly experienced the loneliness and isolation such a position involves. To have no tribe, to join in no faith too often leaves one standing at the periphery of human warmth, drawn in, if at all, as a guest, and looked upon as a stranger - a word whose significance Jews as much as anyone will recognize.

This sense of being an outsider, coupled with the personal baggage of being a scion of an impoverished, English working-class family has no doubt spurred my hatred of the class system, of racism and of neo-liberal capitalism - all forms of oppression against the weak and the disadvantaged.

The Holocaust stands out as one of the most extreme examples of such oppression, but I have long questioned whether it's true significance - not just to the Jewish people but to Humanity - has been adequately understood. Some time ago, I wrote an essay in reaction to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary in which I tried to grasp the meaning of that horrific event for all of us. Here is an extract:

There is a sense in which we are indeed all guilty. However much the Nazi atrocities may repel us, they were committed by people; the same people who write poetry and music, who can speak to us in language of sumptuous beauty; the same people as we ourselves are. Somehow, along the road of human development, we reached a fork and were led in a direction of unspeakable criminality, of which the Holocaust is simply a recent and terrible example. We have all been forced along that road; and the experience has left an indelible stain on our skin. No serious definition of what it means to be human can avoid that stain. Our free will, of which we are so proud, has been shown to be a freedom to create hell. The Nazis made one such hell; but they are not alone. Wherever the diseases of blind prejudice, unthinking xenophobia, or just petty racial arrogance lead us to see other men and women as essentially different from ourselves, inferior, less intelligent, alien, evil perhaps and threatening, then we offer ourselves a licence to treat them as disposable items, creatures to be coerced or, if necessary, extinguished. None of us is immune to such spiritual infections.
It would be easy and comfortable to blame circumstances, or the evil play of chance, for this state of affairs. But it is not life or circumstances that are evil, only we who make them so. And we will continue to do so so long as we believe that we alone are glorious in the sight of God; so long as we visit hatred and contempt upon the children of others; so long as we cannot see that all of us are Nazis just as much as we are Jews.

In this context, I offer here a series of images of the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza. All but one of the collages were sent to me by a friend. The quotations accompanying each image were added by me. I don't own the copyright to any of the photographs and, in the absence of any information to the contrary, I am assuming they're in the public domain.

Greed, Privatization and the Financial Crisis

2009-01-10T04:52:00.000-08:00

News clips of shoppers fighting each other to reach the bargains at post Christmas sales remind us that greed is not confined to financial wheeler dealers. Our annual end-of-year shopping frenzy is not a consequence of shortages, as might have been the case in post-war Germany or communist Russia, but of surpluses. Stores are laden with unsold goods for one reason alone: because no one really needs them. That, in a nutshell, is how our economic system works: namely by inducing people to buy things they don't need.

Few better examples exist than New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's post 9/11 plea for people to return to New York and shop. Commerce, in the end, was more critical to the city's health than the loss of a couple of iconic buildings and a few thousand lives. Shopping - constant, unremitting acquisition of material goods - fuels our way of life. If our lust for new cars, new clothes, new refrigerators, new houses, falters - capitalism falters too. Wall Street's recent scandals - greed written large - are merely a wide-screen version of a soap opera played out daily in every high street in the hemisphere.

If our political leaders are to be believed, the way to resolve the current crisis is to inject a few billion dollars into failing corporations, throw some ne'er-do-well hot-shots into jail, and tinker with the financial regulations. Then we can all go back to buying and selling, and all will be fine in the best of all possible worlds. Right?

Well, maybe not.

For the first time in decades, dissenting voices are beginning to question the consensus. Doubts are being raised about the long-term viability of our economic system. Marx is finding new advocates and not without reason.

Marxist theory tells us that for the system to work, most of us must spend our lives enriching the owners of capital. This seems to be precisely what has occurred.

Those hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who took out mortgages that were beyond their means are a direct reflection of increasing inequality and - yes - poverty. People were promised the dream of home ownership and then found - too late - that carpet-baggers, corporate directors, and feckless politicians had placed it beyond their reach.

Hence why the response of Western governments to the current crisis gives cause for alarm. Effectively, the corporate sector that got us into this mess is now proposed as the only viable means of getting us out of it.

A more bizarre solution could hardly be imagined. If we turn from the current crisis to a more fundamental one, like global warming, the absurdity stands out, perhaps, more clearly. Without "incentives", industry will do little or nothing to help clean up our environment: such is the message from Washington and Westminster. Yet expecting global warming to be resolved through the same greed that created the problem - and that creates periodical economic crises too - is like inviting a thief who's just stolen your purse to burglarize your house as well. Capitalism isn't concerned with social welfare - and the notion so beloved of neo-liberals that individual selfishness promotes the general good is almost too easy to refute. That it continues to hold sway over Western governments and their economic soothsayers probably reflects the familiar human difficulty of owning up to error.

Though government trust in the private sector to do things better remains unswerving, like gospel it rests less on fact than on faith. Let's take the UK as an example. In addition to building the National Health Service and an education system that has produced more than our fair share of Nobel prize winners, the state runs military, police and fire services, and has developed almost all our transportation infrastructure. It created most of our utilities and ran them superbly until they were practically given away to the private sector. Along with allies, it helped to orchestrate the defeat of fascism in WWII. In the past 100 years, the state's achievements on behalf of the citizenry have been nothing short of spectacular.

Still, we are told that if most public services were subject to market discipline, they would be more efficient and cost-effective. It is a baseless argument. In the commercial sector, the consequences of inefficiency are bankruptcy or closure -- and there are no public service obligations such as delivering mail to remote "unprofitable" areas or treating impoverished patients. Unfortunately, water and electricity supplies, rail schedules and rubbish collection can't be closed down if the companies that run these services are poorly managed or unprofitable. Instead, they go cap-in-hand to the government for subsidies or price increases. In place of market discipline, we get licensed extortion -- often accompanied by a net reduction in the quality of service. My water, gas and electricity supplies have not improved since privatization, they have simply become more expensive.

This does not mean, of course, that the public sector always gets things right. Incompetency is a human failing - and an ubiquitous one. But the idea that it is, by definition, blundering, inefficient, and unresponsive is not based on evidence but on ideology riding on a cloud of woolly thinking.

Deaf both to the lessons of history and to the cries of public unease, ministers nevertheless continue to shed state assets and the responsibilities that go with them. In the UK, the latest divestiture has been of our remaining participation in the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons establishment. Next to go will be a handsome share of Royal Mail. Details of such transactions, of course, remain secret, in order - so we are told - to protect "commercial confidentiality". This repellent phrase now stands on a par with the Official Secrets Act as one of the UK government's prime tools for evading public scrutiny. And this despite the obvious - and obviously inconvenient - fact that publicly-owned facilities belong to the tax payer (a.k.a. you and me) and that, as shareholders, we should have a right to know what deals are being struck on our behalf.

Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers, theatres and museums, schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its rooms. Public investment in social infrastructure constitutes the bedrock of economic activity without which private enterprise could not function. Taxpayers are by definition investors in private enterprise, and privatization is, therefore, largely a transfer into private hands of the means of producing what Marx called "surplus value" - publicly-generated profits.

If, as I suspect, our current economic arrangements are inadequate to meet the future needs of humanity and of the planet - then our first question must be to decide whether or not we care.

Assuming we do, then the challenge that faces us - and that sooner or later we will have to confront - is how to develop an alternative economic model geared to the general welfare rather than individual enrichment, to meeting need rather than stimulating greed, to preservation of the environment rather than its exploitation. Exactly how such a model could work is open to debate; but it's a sure bet that greed, superfluous consumption, and privatization of public assets won't be in the plan.

Civilian Casualties

2008-12-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

Victims of military aggression, whose injuries or death are seldom itemized but may occasionally enter the historical records as a statistical estimate.

Circumvention (by proxy)

2008-12-16T04:02:00.000-08:00

Illegal activities conducted through third parties or in places not subject to national or international law.
Governments have always abused the law, of course, as Moise Finkelbaum points out in his seminal study of the phenomenon³³. Circumvention by proxy, however, came into its own in the early years of the second millennium when the United States - enthusiastically supported by Great Britain - established offshore concentration camps in places beyond any legal jurisdiction so as to be able to abuse prisoners at will and detain them indefinitely without trial. Both countries also acquired the habit of quietly sending detainees off to be tortured by nasty regimes in distant parts of the world.
But to what purpose? Finkelbaum provides a credible answer. “No one considers information obtained under torture as in the least reliable,” he writes, “Truth is not the aim. What matters is to obtain confessions or simply to fabricate evidence that can be used to convince people back home that their lives are in permanent and irremediable danger, that repressive methods are necessary for their protection, that they too must accept injustice, suspension of democratic rights and limits on their freedom, and that their best hope of safety and security lies in this government and this party and no other.”³⁴
_______________

³³ Power, Principle and the Law, São Paulo 2111.
³⁴ Finkelbaum, op.cit. pp 214-5.

Chaos

2008-11-24T07:03:00.000-08:00

Unpredictability as a constituent of the universe.
History is the story of human effort to impose order on life, to refashion as much of the universe as possible into a set of complex but organized - and therefore ultimately predictable - events. Most of us are bureaucrats at heart, conscious that things occasionally go wrong but determined that they will do so less and less, and that by taking due precaution we can protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of fate. Wise to the fact that we like to feel permanently armed against extinction, Hollywood earns plenty of cash by having heroes rescue humanity from disaster when all seemed lost.
Acknowledging chaos as part of life’s fabric means leaving that cosy scenario behind in the cinema.
At a personal level we are familiar enough with uncertainty. We know that brakes seize, pipes spring leaks, rains fail, smokers may or may not get lung cancer, we may or may not bump into an old friend on our next trip into town. We know, too, that some chance events are fatal. Yet we like to pretend that, far from being a product of happenstance, the planet earth has a purpose. Day-to-day randomness we can handle, ultimate purposelessness is another matter.
Most of the orbs out there in space (maybe all of them) are devoid of organic matter. It follows that life must be an anomaly; because if the universe worked predictably, it would be uniform, and we couldn’t exist. As it is, we occupy no more than an infinitesimal blip in the space-time continuum; and cosmically speaking, there’s no reason why we should be around for long. When we’ve finished ruining the planet, or the planet has finished with us, we’ll doubtless leave it. And all the beauty of which we make so much, the green fields, the desert sands, the snow-clad peaks and verdant valleys, the masterpieces of our own making, will melt back into the primeval soup from which they and we emerged.
Since we can count ourselves lucky to be here, maybe we shouldn’t lament the fundamentally chaotic nature of existence; for though chaos may one day cause our extinction, it has brought us into being and moulded our aesthetic and emotional response to the world.³¹ The harmony we find in natural landscapes, in the intricately disordered branches and twigs of trees, in overgrown gardens, in the ephemeral patterns of passing clouds is not accidental. Our brains are tuned to them. Artists understand this, which is why their works so often seem disordered, untidy - complexity being the overriding condition of human experience and the medium in which our imagination floats most easily. Shakespeare who saw many things, saw this too:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish
A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.³²

By contrast, we can’t inhabit a world in which everything that takes place accords with Aristotelian logic. Drama trimmed to the unities of time and place, architecture stripped of ornament and quirkiness, music played strictly to beat and measure - these may offer simple pleasures and even evoke admiration; but we experience them distantly, and tire of them easily. By contrast we enter and move within the worlds of War and Peace, or Lear, or The Iliad, recognizing in the messiness of the life depicted, the multiplicity of characters with whom we mingle, the thoughts they express, the diversions and tangential paths on which they and we embark, a parallel to our own. The best music works in just this way also, by creating expectations in us, and then satisfying them not with the notes our ears might anticipate unaided, but with a sequence that at once meets our expectations yet surprises us with an appeal to something tangential and more involving than we could have imagined for ourselves. All great art is, in that special sense, complex - satisfying to our brains which are complex too, and inimical to our instincts, which are self-protective and conservative. Art best plays its role in our lives when it defies the bureaucrat in us; when it beats against imposed order; when it simulates the chaos that we know lies at the heart of all that exists, and thereby helps us understand how wondrous strange it is to be alive and conscious.
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³¹ “Impurity,” wrote Primo Levi, “which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life.” - The Periodic Table, Turin 1975.
³² Anthony and Cleopatra, IV.14

Capitalist Theory of Corruption

2008-11-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

The theory - first proposed by George Hiram Arbuthnot¹⁷ - that corruption has been a prime ingredient of human progress and remains an elemental component of economic development in capitalist societies.
Oxford’s famed dictionary defines corruption as moral depravity, but Arbuthnot disagreed, arguing that murder, abandoning children, and spreading AIDS were morally depraved but we wouldn’t normally describe them as corrupt. The definition he proposed was the acquisition of power or material advantage through a betrayal of trust; and he gave some intriguing illustrations: lobbying a politician was permissible, murdering him illegal, bribing him corrupt; impartiality was desirable, favoritism inevitable, nepotism corrupt; and so on.
Corruption has probably always been with us, but Arbuthnot was not concerned with tracing its origins or assessing its role in human psychology. His aim was to expose it as one of the fundamental pillars of our way of life.
The corrupt, in his view, have always been the breakers of moulds, the iconoclasts, the novel thinkers and doers, the darers, the explorers and the ruthless. Cortés conquered Mexico by lying to his host¹⁸, taking him prisoner and destroying his realm¹⁹ . Pizarro performed the same feat in Peru. England lied, swindled and murdered her way to domination of half the world with the help of carpet-baggers, slavers, religious charlatans and power-crazed politicians out to build a reputation.
Not everyone, even of their own kind, thought the pilgrim fathers such respectable creatures. “’Tis a great misfortune,” writes one of them, “that most of our travellers who go to this vast continent in America, are persons of the meaner sort, and generally of a very slender education.”²⁰
Locals - the inaptly-named Indians - treated the newcomers well until their hospitality was repaid with such cheating, hostility and viciousness that they could do no other than try to repel the invaders. “They really are better to us than we are to them,” our author continues, “...they always give us victuals at their quarters and take care we are armed against hunger and thirst; we do not so by them, but let them walk by our doors hungry....We look upon them with scorn and disdain, and think them little better than beasts in human shape, though if well examined, we shall find that, for all our religion and education, we possess more moral deformities and evils than these savages do or are acquainted withal.” One is reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s pithy appraisal of Gunga Din:
“You’re a better man than I am...”
By the time Lawson wrote up his travel adventures in the Carolinas, the natives he described and others like them had seen their women raped, their sons enslaved, their villages burned, and vast tracts of land sold from beneath their feet “...in consideration for valuable parcels of cloth, latchets, beads and other goods...”²¹
Property prices on the eastern seaboard have risen a little since then.
“The conquest of the earth,” opined Conrad, “which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing....”²²
Arbuthnot’s familiarity with the details of colonial conquest led him to suspect that modern capitalist societies stood on corrupt foundations - an idea that he was to spend most of his academic life examining. His research focused primarily on the period of fully-fledged capitalism, roughly from the late nineteenth century to the present. With the help of an admiring coterie of radical students - who idolized him - he assembled a unique collection of case studies on corporations that had benefited from corrupt practices. Regrettably, like Freud with many of his patients, he was obliged to conceal the identity of those he studied to protect himself from ruinous litigation, which meant that his results could not be independently verified. Even so, he spent much of his life at PISS fighting off law suits from firms and individuals who claimed to recognize themselves in his work.
One of Arbuthnot’s most celebrated cases involved a firm he called International Home Machinery (IHM) which began life as a manufacturer of domestic refrigerators. The company was founded by Irving Mountebank and Eric Pilfer²³ two former shop floor operatives at Thornton Refrigerators which was then the dominant brand in the US market. IHM succeeded in establishing a toehold in the market but then found itself losing ground as Thornton reacted to the competition by increasing its advertising, bribing retailers with loyalty discounts and launching a price war potentially ruinous to IHM. Mountebank and Pilfer, who had taken IHM public, sold out when the going got rough; and in their place the Board appointed former traveling salesman Bert Advent as president. Advent’s qualifications for the job were unimpressive but he was known to be hard-nosed, ruthlessly competitive and unafraid of ethical compromise in pursuit of a sale. His plan to topple Thornton was ingenious. He launched an IHM product range identical in every detail to Thornton’s best selling lines - even down to the labeling. No casual observer could distinguish between the machines. Even retailers thought they were selling Thornton product. Only one problem: the IHM copies had built-in flaws: motors overheated; cooling pipes leaked, doors fell off, thermostats failed. A few months after Advent’s faulty copies reached the stores, complaints began flowing in. Before long, the press smelled blood: Thorntons, they hinted, was in financial trouble and in order to save money was compromising on product quality. The firm reacted quickly, offering a free replacement to every dissatisfied customer, but its reputation was shot. Sales plummeted, the stock price nose-dived, and within a couple of years IHM had bought out Thorntons and effectively closed it down. IHM went on to become the largest and most trusted refrigerator supplier in the world. According to Arbuthnot, IHM’s story demonstrated how ingenuity in the service of corruption can give dynamic firms the edge in competitive markets.
That this is well understood in the world of commerce will be clear to any attentive reader of the business pages of the serious newspapers which are riddled with hints, suggestions and occasionally - where the evidence is clear - accusations of malpractice by company executives and government officials.
Early objectors to Arbuthnot’s theory pointed out that if he was right, then capitalism would be at its best in the most corrupt societies - a patent absurdity. But Arbuthnot responded that this was a misunderstanding. Universal corruption simply ruined everyone and produced either chaos or its obverse, repression and tyranny - circumstances directly opposed to the stability needed for a properly functioning market economy. Capitalism, by contrast, required most corporations and most of society to observe the unwritten laws of honesty and integrity. Few prospered in the long run; but their general probity was what allowed the creative few to bend the rules; and what gave rise also to the commodification and exploitation of labour, and to the triumph of wealth concentration over wealth distribution, of resource extraction over environmental conservation, of Mammon over Mankind.
Arbuthnot himself was a complex and somewhat eccentric figure. Born in South East London, the son of an Ethiopian father and Vietnamese mother, he grew up in a multi-ethnic community of working-class, first-generation immigrants and refugees. His fascination for languages and the use of language began early; and his mixed racial origins gave him entry to many different ethnic and social groups in the area of his home. By the time he won a scholarship to Oxford - only the third to do so from the inner-city school he attended between the ages and twelve and eighteen - he was fluent in Amharic, Vietnamese and French as well as English, and had acquired the rudiments of several other languages including Punjabi, and Polish. He met his wife Greszyna at Oxford where she was employed as a college cleaning lady. She later, of course, became one of the most successful plastic artists of her generation as well as a successful actress and founder of the influential Art Renouvelé movement of the sixties. Commenting on the marriage after his wife’s death in a car accident at the early age of fifty-eight, Professor Arbuthnot had this to say: “Greszyna and I made love the first time she came to clean my room at Oxford. And we made love an hour before she died. Throughout thirty-four years of mutual support and companionship, we never tired of bonking each other. It was the basis of our relationship. Men dream of having a sexual companion like Greszyna, and I was lucky enough to have the dream fulfilled. If I have ever in my life attracted envy, she was the reason.”
After taking a brilliant first in Amharic language and literature²⁴ and gaining a fellowship at All Souls, Arbuthnot came to international prominence with two books, “The aetiology of allophylian languages - a study in the decline of meaning,” and its sequel, “From multicolour to monochrome”, a historical analysis of the impact of language on vision which concluded shockingly that, after a long efflorescence between the dawn of history and the mid 1950s, our imaginative and intellectual horizons, as reflected in what we say and see, are now shrinking at roughly the same rate as the polar ice caps.
Arbuthnot would probably have remained at Oxford had it not been for the commotion that followed this second work, which aroused a volatile blend of controversy and ribald mockery. Students in Oxford demonstrated noisily outside the gates of All Souls, and hurled eggs at him during his weekly lectures at the Taylorian Institute. Opinion columns in the media prosecuted and defended him with equal vigour. Pickets at the West End theatre where Gryszyna was appearing as Madame Ranevsky shut down performances, forcing the management to replace her with an understudy. In the end Arbuthnot gave in to pressure from his university colleagues and resigned his fellowship.
As so often happens, American academic institutions proved less squeamish than their staid British counterparts, and Arbuthnot’s disgrace resulted in a flood of offers for his services from across the Atlantic.
After a brief spell as a visiting professor at Yale, he was offered a tenured professorship at PISS, initially in the department of linguistics. Two years after taking up the post, in an open letter to the Connecticut Journal of Palaeography , he announced that he had abandoned linguistic science, having concluded that the store of meaningful statements about language was exhausted and replenishment improbable. The remainder of his life he devoted to corruption - the field for which he is best known. At first PISS reacted adversely to this unilateral role change and tried to revoke Arbuthnot’s professorship; but his employment contract, leak proofed by New Haven litigation guru Max Sprackett, would have made the cost of paying him off ruinously expensive for the institution. Later, Arbuthnot took delight in recalling PISS’s failed efforts to fire him which he cited as corroboration of his corrosive view of capitalism. “I reneged on my contract, but I won anyway,” he was fond of saying. “I myself am corrupt insofar as corruption is available to me.”
A new phase of Arbuthnot’s career now began which eventually led to a reconciliation with PISS and accession to the Chair of Semiotic Casuistry which was created specially for him. Over the following years, he produced a stream of books and monographs, the most important of which is his seminal “Double Dealing and Double Dutch” a monumental two-volume attempt to demonstrate that capitalism flourishes best in societies openly hostile but covertly tolerant of corruption. Most of the first volume is devoted to addressing what he called the “blithe assumptions” of Max Weber and later Richard Tawney in their attempts to equate the rise of capitalism with the Protestant Ethic.²⁵ Weber thought that protestantism sanctioned wealth as the reward of ascetic devotion to work. Tawney, who disapproved of acquisitiveness, tried to reverse the equation by positing an accommodation of religion to the capitalist ethos. According to Arbuthnot, neither understood the power in the European Christian tradition of biblical strictures against wealth. Every Christian in Europe was brought up with the idea that personal enrichment was sinful. It was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.²⁶ Love of money was the root of all evil.²⁷ He that hastened to make riches should not go unpunished.²⁸ Etcetera.
Jews, who interpreted their Torah differently, had no problem with believers getting rich provided they observed the requirement to share a portion of their good fortune with those who had too little wealth or none at all (a mitzvah). Hence why Jewish prosperity, which is open and generous, struck Christians as the moral equivalent of an alliance with the devil; and also why lovers of gold like Shylock, Volpone, Uriah Heep, and Scrooge - are counted among the villains of European culture.
Protestants - and puritans most of all - advocated not personal enrichment but cooperative productivity: work for the good of all. Even Adam Smith’s invisible hand was supposed to promote the general welfare.
If opulence was illicit and its getting corrupt, the desire for it had to be concealed, or at least cloaked in dark puritanical cloth. And so riches were best accumulated underground, out of sight of men - and of God.
In the United States, home of capitalism, the founding fathers and their descendants rebelled against their puritanical forefathers (as children do) and publicly set personal enrichment on a pedestal next to holiness. But since they remained among the most religious people on earth, their wealth needed to be justified in the eyes of the Lord. For, as Orwell noted, “Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt. Like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.”²⁹ No accident, then, that in the United States charitable donations became big business, for they were a salve of conscience - a bulwark against the schizophrenic paradox of being at once richer and holier than everyone else.
By the same token and for the same reasons, corruption became bigger, bolder, and ultimately more ruthless than elsewhere, on a par with the size of the country and the bluster of its history.
One of the most interesting sections of Volume II of Arbuthnot’s great work deals with money-laundering - which he interpreted as a desire on the part of those who had transgressed in amassing great wealth to return to the way of heaven and to the path of probity here on earth. For, he argued, most great fortunes rested on some kind of skulduggery at their origin, even if with the passing years their possessors had acquired an aura of graceful respectability. The trick with ill-gotten gains, then, was to disguise their origin by re-deploying them in a legal activity.
At the end of his life, Arbuthnot wrote a series of valedictory essays³⁰ , somewhat in answer to his many critics, in which he explained that far from considering corruption a necessity of life, he saw no reason why humanity could not progress happily without it. As a scientist, however, he did not see himself as an advocate of one mode of being over another. “People talk to me of morality,” he wrote, “and accuse me of a dreadful neglect of duty because of my refusal to condemn the corruption in capitalism. I recognize no such duty. Human nature is what it is; and insofar as I am human, I share humanity’s foibles. If that makes me a scandalous reprobate, a vile apologist for evil, so be it. If the Maker of all things exists, I can expect shortly to encounter Him. When that moment arrives, perhaps He will take the opportunity to acquaint me with His views.”
___________

¹⁷Professor of Semiotic Casuistry at the Princeton Institute of Semantic Sciences (PISS) (2012 - 2039)
¹⁸ Moctezuma.
¹⁹ Tenochtitlan, “the world’s most beautiful city,” according to the Spaniards who burned it.
²⁰ John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, London 1709.
²¹ Shaftesbury Papers and other records relating to Carolina and the first settlement on Ashley River prior to the year 1676,” Langdon Cheves (ed), 1897
²² Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902.
²³ All names have been changed.
²⁴ As the only Amharic expert in Oxford, he was obliged to examine himself and mark his own papers.
²⁵ See Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1902; and R.H Tawney “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926.
²⁶ Matthew 19:24.
²⁷ 1 Timothy 6:10.
²⁸ Proverbs 28:20.
²⁹ George Orwell, Essay on Dickens, 1939.
³⁰ Notes for the nether world, Plainsboro Paperbacks, 2038.

Sub-Prime Poverty

2008-11-11T07:48:00.000-08:00

Bank failure and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco have provoked so much debate, analysis, hand-wringing and finger-pointing as to leave the impression that everything that can be said about them already has been said. We all know by now that the banks loaned too much money to folk who could neither muster an adequate deposit on the house they wished to buy, nor keep up with their payment obligations.

Nobody, however, seems to have wondered why - after a decade of prosperity and economic growth - so many people were unable to get a conventional toehold on the property ladder. Why the need for sub-prime mortgages in the first place?

Part of the answer lies in house price inflation. But why did house prices rise by so much when other prices didn't? To answer this, we need to understand that when banks make a loan - not just a mortgage loan but any loan - a large of proportion of the funds will consist of money that didn't exist before the loan was made. That's right. No matter the guise under which it appears, or the complexity of the financial instrument that creates it, under a fractional reserve banking system - which is what we have - new debt means new money. And when new money unlinked to output enters the economy it causes inflation. Remember those loan offers that dropped into our mail box every morning? Many of us took the bait. Result: loads of new cash scurrying in search of something to buy. We spent a great deal of it on cheap imports from the far East and elsewhere and thereby hid some of that inflationary pressure. But you can't import real estate; and that's where the underlying inflation showed itself. House prices went skyward.

The second part of our answer is more sobering. During the five years from 2000 to 2005, the US economy grew 14% and productivity grew even more - by nearly 17%. Over the same period, median family income - the level at which half the households earn more and half earn less - actually fell by 3%, while unemployment rose slightly. So where did the income from growth go? Mainly to corporate share-owners and company bosses. By 2006, Chief Executive Officer pay was over 250 times that of the average wage. In the 1960s that ratio was only 24 to 1.

Therein lies the source of the sub-prime phenomenon.

Those hundreds of thousands maybe millions who took out mortgages beyond their means are a direct reflection of increasing inequality and - yes - poverty. People were promised the American Dream and then found - too late - that carpet baggers, corporate directors, and feckless politicians in Washington and Westminster had placed it beyond their reach.

Built-in Obsolescence

2008-11-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

Originally, a means of ensuring that consumer goods like cars, refrigerators and computers are periodically thrown away and replaced by new models.
Companies have adopted a variety of strategies for inducing people to jettison old products. The crudest method - much used in the early and mid-twentieth century - involved the use of poor-quality components which were guaranteed to cause a breakdown shortly after the expiry of the warranty. Like many industrial innovations, this one is widely attributed to American enterprise - the world’s number one source of corrupt ingenuity in the service of private gain.
The danger of embedding imperfections into a product is that disenchanted consumers might switch to a competing supplier. Extended warranties - for which the buyer pays a premium - resolve this little difficulty. They also reinforce the case for shoddiness. Since no one likes paying for something they don’t need, a breakdown confirms that the warranty was worth the money.¹²
Other methods of ensuring obsolescence have joined the fray.
Changes of style make old products stale and new ones fresh and exciting. Expiry dates induce us to discard what we might otherwise still be inclined to use or consume. Manufacturers refuse to provide parts or to service goods they would rather see replaced by new purchases.
Sometimes producers use a cocktail of techniques to turn a product they trumpeted twelve months before as the quintessence of everything to which a sane member of the human the race might aspire into a tired disgrace worthy of the scrap-heap. Bud Eccles, the American consumer guru of the 90s, recalls how for years he received an annual brochure from America’s number one luxury car maker describing a farmer from the outback - a man that lived tough and bought tough and deserved his little perquisites - who exchanged his car for a new one every year. Twenty-five at the last count and still faithful to the world’s finest model the brochure proudly proclaimed. Eccles wrote to the Chief Executive Officer and secured an interview. “If the car needs changing every year, the conclusion must be that it’s no darned good,” he told the CEO. “And that farmer o’ yours is a goddamn fool for wastin’ his money on crap.”¹³ The CEO threatened Eccles with legal action and had him escorted from the premises.
Business executives and entrepreneurs aren’t alone, however, in their attachment to obsolescence. God also seems to approve the idea. Everything that lives wears out; and by the time we humans make our final departure, many of us have been obsolete for years.
Our creations - of which we make so much - likewise crumble or pass into desuetude. Philosophies, - modes of interpreting the world - may seem in their pomp to yield eternal truths - until the next generation refutes them. States - even “impregnable” empires - rise and fall. Species flourish for a time, only to succumb to the multiplicity of ways in which it is possible to become extinct. Our species will doubtless follow suit - if not at our own hand, then by some other means: perhaps a celestial catastrophe; or maybe because limits exist to the number of reproductive cycles available to any life form before it mutates into some other creature, or disappears altogether.¹⁴ In any case, the Earth seems set one day to expire, taking its creatures with it.¹⁵ If the astrophysicists are to be believed, not even the heavens are immune to exhaustion: the stars - our sun included, - will one day burn themselves out. “The cosmological eye, “ writes Barnaby, “in the end sees the varied, pulsating colours of life as no more than millisecond flashes of strange order in a dark and disordered night”.¹⁶
If we accept - as perhaps we must - that the universe will for all useful purposes come to an end, product obsolescence becomes no more than a reflection of a wider reality. Can we blame corporate executives for marketing goods of limited durability when God appears to have done the same with life?
___________________

¹²But note that repairs usually carry less than six months’ warranty, except for goods with second-hand value - such as cars - where lifetime warranties are cavalierly offered based on the probability that the owner will sell it within 12 months.
¹³Bud Eccles, “Memoirs of a Marketing Man,” unpublished monograph, University of Scunthorpe Business Faculty Library, 2000.
¹⁴Dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period were not at all the same as their older cousins of the Triassic Period, 140 million years before.
¹⁵“...life is no more than a glaze upon the surface....as delicate as the bloom on a peach.” comments Richard Fortey: “Life: An Unauthorized Biography”, London 1997, p 300.
¹⁶ Janet Barnaby, “Quarks, Quirks and the End of Life,” Sydney, 2013, p 72

Bushit

2008-11-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

The practice of disseminating lies that are so transparent as to be unequivocally recognizable as falsehoods. Named after the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush, under whose presidency Bushit emerged as the most common method of communicating policies of dubious merit to the electorate. What the Bush administration discovered was that a majority of the public attends far less to the content of a political message than to manner in which it is delivered. Provided a leader looks presentable, sounds confident, and is sufficiently partisan, he or she can undermine democratic rights, tamper with electoral procedures, ignore constitutional protections, and give voice to lurid nonsense with impunity.
Some historians view the advent of Bushit as marking a watershed in the development of political demagoguery. Before Bush, politicians thought it necessary to keep their mendacity within the bounds of plausibility. Even tyrants like Hitler and Stalin grounded their deceits in elaborate fictions designed to convince the populace of their honesty and to justify their worst actions. Their mistake, according to Bushit theory, was to assume that people pay attention to facts, to evidence, to rational argument passionately delivered. Bushitters know otherwise. They lie and cheat openly, and deny the rationality, even the humanity, of whoever disagrees. In this they are invariably supported by those large sections of the media whose commitment to truth is in inverse relationship to the intensity of their political affiliation. Anthony J. Blair, prime minister of Great Britain (1997-2007) became the first European political figure to base his leadership on Bushit principles when he employed fabricated evidence to justify military action against Iraq. He went on to obfuscate many other issues, in a manner that seemed to some observers bizarre, if not whimsical.

Bonhoff’S Law

2008-10-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

A curious paradox, first noted and subsequently develop by mathematician Umlaut Bonhoff, which states that no matter how prosperous a capitalist society becomes, the amount of wealth generated will never be sufficient to meet the demands placed upon it. Bonhoff observed, moreover, that in free market economies growth tends to widen inequalities, allowing the “winners” to claim an ever larger share of resources without the “losers” being willing to accept a smaller share for themselves. Governments of countries that shun redistributive policies (taxing the rich to serve the poor) find, therefore, that increases in national prosperity reduce their ability to fund basic public services (public transport, health and education, sports facilities etc.) at the level of their ambitions or their promises. In the midst of wealth, they plead poverty. Some fairly sophisticated mathematics underpin Bonhoff’s Law, which may be why, although not universally accepted, it has yet to be disproved. On the other hand, daily experience of life in the “free world” seems to bear out its fundamental accuracy.

Blairism

2008-10-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

A coinage of the early second millennium, Blairism may be defined as the policy-making equivalent of deductive thinking, whereby reason, knowledge and facts are marshalled after an event to justify whimsical statements, decisions, or judgements made before it. The derivative “Blairite” denotes a (generally slavish) exponent of the practice.
Based on the surname of British Prime Minister Anthony J. Blair, the word originally referred to the prime minister’s habit of generating policy on the hoof - usually in the form of an off-the-cuff response to a journalist’s question or, occasionally, an aside from an American president. Colleagues were then obliged to incorporate the new policy in their departmental budgets, to defend it to the country and in parliament, and to proclaim it as the outcome of deep reflection, exhaustive research, extensive debate, and wide consensus.
During his years in office, Blair’s cerebral eruptions produced such loopy initiatives as the 2003 war against Iraq, the indefinite detention without trial of people the government didn’t like, the suspension of habeas corpus, intemperate promises to rescue Africa from penury and Europe from lunacy, the despatch of tanks to Heathrow Airport, and countless other grotesqueries large and small that events later showed to be misguided. Since Blairism appeared in the language, it has acquired additional pejorative resonances and its adjectival form - Blairite - is often used to describe someone who, lacking opinions of their own, passionately defends someone else’s.
Blairism has survived its progenitor along with the practice to which it refers and for the foreseeable future seems set to remain a grim feature of the political landscape.

Government and Terror

2008-10-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

A characteristic irony of western democracies is that elected leaders often end up despising democracy and fearing public opinion. Having stepped over the threshold of the White House or Number Ten or the Elysée Palace, they find their ability to act circumscribed by the same forces that enabled them to achieve power in the first place: the checks and balances and safeguards - congress, parliament, the separation of powers - developed over time to prevent any of them from running off with the rule book. And they respond, invariably it seems, with efforts to undermine the system they are in office to defend.

Terrorizing the population with stark warnings about - well, terrorism - has emerged as a tactic of choice. Hence, the UK government's fascination with the idea of detaining people without charge for lengthy periods - a common recourse of dictatorial regimes but not one expected of what we like to think of as a "mature" democracy. Voted down more than once, it will doubtless be re-introduced at the first available opportunity, perhaps in the wake of a starkly-worded warning from a favored government soothsayer.

Omnibus legislation - the parceling up of vast amounts of legislation into one bundle in which repressive clauses lie buried in a thicket of innocuous ones - has also become a useful anti-democratic weapon. It should come as no surprise that the government found it could use the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill not only to forbid public demonstrations - aka "criticism of the government" - within a mile of parliament or anywhere else that took their fancy, but also to freeze Icelandic assets in the UK. Neither of these initiatives has anything to do with terrorism, but that is not, fundamentally, why the legislation exists. Its purpose - its sole purpose - is to provide legal cover for the government to seize, suppress, prevent, restrict, coerce, and subdue; in other words to do whatever it wants whenever it wants.

That includes invading our privacy. Walk through the centre of any significant UK city and you will be followed by a succession of cameras charting your progress. Car journeys are scrutinized no less assiduously. If the government gets its way, your details (how many details we don't yet know) will be etched onto an ID card so that they are available to whatever callow bureaucrat demands them.

The reason for all this surveillance? To make sure we aren't terrorists - the one piece of information that won't, of course, show up on camera or find its way into the card's electronic coding.

One of the shibboleths of democracy is that those in power work for the people. It's time we stopped believing in this nonsense. Politicians - most of them at any rate - work primarily for themselves; and they don't much like interference from the rest of us. Nor do they want our opinions. Once we have exercised our quinquennial vote (quadrennial in the US, sexennial in Mexico etc.), our role is to put up and shut up. They are the bosses; and we work for them - or rather we do their bidding. We have become - to abuse a wonderful phrase of Ved Mehta - flies in the fly-bottle.

If we are ever to take back our democracy, we will have to reacquire our right not to be scrutinized at the whim of ministers. And we will have to reverse our relationship with those who govern in our name. It is they who should be in the bottle while we, the public, remain on the outside looking in at them and making sure they never again get a chance to run off with our freedoms.

Believing is Seeing (BIS)

2008-09-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

A reversal of the trite cliché “Seeing is Believing”, BIS implies that far from believing only what we see, we see only what we are disposed to believe and remain blind to whatever our mind can’t - or refuses to - conceive. Hence why “truths”, once accepted, often seem so blindingly obvious that we find it difficult to understand how our anyone could ever have thought otherwise; and why, conversely, resistance to innovative discoveries can be so fierce. Learned professors who looked through Galileo’s telescope thought the stars they observed were bits of trickery cunningly lodged between the lenses, and Pope Urban VIII had Galileo arraigned for refusing to place the earth at the centre of God’s universe. Nowadays, we regard the time when people were taught that the heavens revolved round the earth as unimaginably distant and almost incomprehensible.
Klaus Steinhausen, in an entertaining essay, recalls an encounter with a group of indigenous Ecuadorians from the remote eastern slopes of the Cordillera Condorcillo who had recently arrived in the capital, Quito. Emerging onto the sidewalk of a busy street they wandered, chatting and joking, into the roaring traffic, oblivious of the danger, deaf to the screeching brakes and the furious honking of irritated drivers. They saw and heard the commotion, but absorbed only what could fit into a landscape of mountain paths, the sedate progress of pack donkeys and llama, and the occasional asthmatic bus clattering unsteadily over rough terrain en route from village to village.
Not so different, according to Steinhausen, was the mental process that allowed US and UK politicians in 2003 to conjure Iraqi chemical and nuclear warheads from grainy photographs of desert ruins and wind-swept dunes.³ They formed a mental image of what they wanted to believe, and demanded that their eyes should see it.
Far from being a frivolous catch phrase, BIS suggests that most of what we think we know is more or less wrong. Dead wrong often; sometimes maybe a little right, though there’s hardly anything useful, valuable or meaningful that won’t end up being disputed, or disproved and superseded.
Life and truth are assertions; but so are illness, death, ignorance and untruth. We can only have a partial view even of the tiny portion of reality that confronts us; which is maybe why the Canadian speech habit of turning declarations into interrogations⁴ makes more sense than pretending to certainty.
Descartes rejected seeing and believing as sources of knowledge altogether, largely because the first was deceptive and the second unprovable. Instead he asked himself what could be said that was absolutely irrefutable. The answer he came up with made his reputation: Cogito ergo sum⁵. From that simple foundation he tried to build a picture of the world based on other “irrefutable” sentences. The trouble he ran into was that the “Cogito” tells us nothing about the external world, only about ourselves; and so far no one has come up with a way of leaping from one to the other without use of the senses.
Samuel Beckett shows us just how deceptive the senses can be. His hero Watt recalls lying in a ditch listening to three frogs croaking Krak! Krek! Krik! If we had heard that sequence, as we passed in and out of earshot, we would not have known that the frogs didn’t croak one after the other, but at nine-beat, six-beat and four-beat intervals respectively, which meant they would croak 79 times before the sequence Krak! Krek! and Krik! would be heard again.⁶ A passer-by would probably not have reported the frogs in the same way as Watt, though both would have heard the same croaks. Our certainties, Beckett is telling us, are merely assumptions.
Not that anything discourages us from claiming to see the light. Politicians notoriously do so - their vehemence, taste for propaganda, partisanship, and general mendacity being invariably proportional to the flimsiness of the platform on which they stand. They are not alone. Philosophers, historians, neighbours, colleagues, spouses, and children arguing in the playground all proclaim the primacy of their vision and the feebleness of their opponent’s. Rival churches have always aggressively defended their own versions of the eternal verities. And today, their lieutenants still solemnly tell soldiers that in murdering other folk and destroying their homes they do but the will of god.⁷
Who better than scientists to demonstrate that Believing is Seeing? For they have always shown a remarkable capacity to see what they believe and, for that matter, to believe what most fits the convenience of theory. Sometimes the thrill of discovery coincides with convenience - as it did for Newton and Einstein at the height of their investigative powers. But though Newton claimed to see further because he stood on the shoulders of dead giants, like Copernicus, nothing could dissuade him from stamping on living ones, like Leibniz, who was his equal in mathematical invention⁸,.. . Leibniz and Newton might have become colleagues had not jealousy blinded the Englishman to the qualities of everyone other than himself.
Einstein, a kindlier figure, nevertheless refused to countenance Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle⁹ because it conflicted with his belief that uncertainty was not an acceptable property of the physical world: “God,” he insisted, “doesn’t play dice”¹⁰.
Arguments about novel theories are the common currency of academic discourse. Professors commonly dress up theory as fact, form cabals, and excoriate opponents. Human-induced global warming, for example, is either “scientifically proven” or “an absurd myth”, and the advocates of each view “highly-respected” or “purblind embarrassments to themselves and their profession.”
The side on which we stand depends on... well... on what we believe. Or maybe on what we want to believe; or maybe on what the person who pays our salary wants us to believe.¹¹ In science, said Einstein, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Once we’ve seen something in our mind’s eye, we should be able, with a little effort, to find it in the street.
___________
³ Klaus Steinhausen, “The Elusiveness of Truth”, in Transactions of the Trelew Philological Society, Vol 10. No. 9.
⁴ New Englanders share the habit.
⁵ ‘I think therefore I am’
⁶ Samuel Beckett, Watt, Paris 1953.
⁷ “Thus we have learned that one of the duties of a decent citizen is to slaughter people,” Rousseau, Discours sur L’Origine de L’Inégalité.
⁸ Both independently discovered Differential Calculus - a method of calculating rates of change.
⁹ A basic tenet of Quantum Mechanics which states that we cannot determine both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time.
¹⁰ Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born, 4 dec, 1926. But did Einstein really imagine he knew what God got up to in His spare time?
¹¹ The world is naturally averse
To all the truth it sees or hears,
But swallows nonsense and a lie
With greediness and gluttony.
- Samuel Butler (1612-1680), Hudibras

Cuba Libre

2008-09-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally written for Open Democracy.

When writing about Cuba westerners do well to begin - as Fred Halliday did - with their credentials. His are as lamentably inadequate as are those of most people whose comments about Fidel Castro's resignation have found their way into the press. Very few western journalists - or academics - have visited Cuba other than fleetingly, and the majority, like Halliday, base their accounts on conversations they claim to have had with Cuban officials - fortified not infrequently by quotations drawn from the underground river of hostility that runs between Washington and Florida.

To the above, of course, Richard Gott is an honorable exception. He knows the country well - and its history very well - although his historical summary for Open Democracy would have benefited from an attempt to address some of the more well-founded criticisms of post-revolutionary Cuba such as Che Guevara's naive economic policies, and Fidel's reluctance to build a political system independent of his - or anyone else's - personality.

In any case, before adding my two cents to the discussion, I will follow the lead of both contributors and offer a summary of my own experience of Cuba and Latin America.

I have worked in and been a student of the region for roughly thirty years. I lived in Mexico during the 1970s, which was then the only country in Latin America where it was possible to meet and converse with Cubans who supported the revolutionary government. For a time my apartment was one of several where Cuban visitors knew they would find a welcome - and sometimes a bed for the night - during their visits to Mexico's capital city.

At the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económias (CIDE) in Mexico City, where I taught from 1974 - 1977, my colleagues included former government ministers, senior politicians and university professors from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay - all of them refugees from the right-wing military regimes of the 1970s. I was on the editorial team (the only non Latin-American) of CIDE's first serial publication. Its rather clumsy title - Estados Unidos, Perspectiva Latinoamericana - was sufficiently alarming to evoke adverse comment in the US congress - and for several of us to have our telephones tapped (mine among them). My encounter with a good selection of ministers and senior officials of Salvador Allende's government led me to conclusions similar to those of Fidel himself after his visit to Allende's Chile. Looking back over the period from the comfort of his spacious house in a Mexico City suburb, one of those refugee ministers quietly admitted to me over a glass of wine that - "Most of us were armchair revolutionaries. We didn't think it was for real". None of my CIDE colleagues noticed nor cared to hear about the wretched slum, built on a city garbage dump, that stood in all its appalling ugliness and stench just across highway - the old road to Toluca - that ran at the back of the splendid campus that the institution took over when the Universidad de las Americas moved out of town.

Following my years in Mexico, I worked at various times in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and most of Central America. And about twelve years ago, I finally got to know Cuba first hand - not as a tourist or journalist - but as a consultant charged with the task of establishing a joint venture between a Canadian corporation and a Cuban state-owned enterprise. During my several visits to the island, I traveled extensively and met a wide range of Cuban citizens, from government ministers to small farmers, from writers and intellectuals to taxi-drivers, from students to bricklayers, from bureaucrats to laborers, from teachers to waiters. I met and chatted with soldiers and police officers; with engineers and agronomists trained in the Soviet Union and who spoke fluent Russian; and with fans of American baseball.

At no stage, during my sojourns in Cuba, did my movements or conversation come under scrutiny; nor did anyone I spoke to show any unwillingness to discuss even touchy subjects like domestic politics or the economic situation. One of my Cuban friends was a key adviser to Carlos Lage - a powerful, long-serving member of the government. From the hours and days spent with my friend, I learned much about how government really works in Cuba - and also about how readily Cubans criticize political decisions and make fun of bureaucratic procedures. Cuba is not in any meaningful sense a police state. Not, in fact, in any sense at all. And it operates a form of internal democracy that would put some of our own democratic processes to shame.

Certainly Cubans are not well off by our standards. Years of economic embargo have taken their toll. Nor, however, do they suffer the abject poverty so widespread elsewhere in Latin America. The villas miserias, the ciudades perdidas, the favelas are mainland specialties. To be sure, there are disagreeable aspects of Cuba's internal economic arrangements, not the least of which is the dual economy that virtually excludes nationals from tourist hotels and restaurants - though contrary to the misrepresentations of conservative pundits - they are not forbidden to enter such places or barred from accepting invitations from foreigners. Cubans may not enjoy the consumption patterns of middle-class Americans or Europeans, but they are among the healthiest and best educated citizens in Latin America. Readers who doubt this may like to consult the UN's Human Development Report, where they will find that Cubans have a life expectancy similar to that of Americans and higher than that of all the other Latin-American countries except Chile; and Cuba's literacy rate of 96.9% is exceeded in Latin-America solely by Uruguay's 97.2%. This is a remarkable achievement in a country which the most powerful nation on earth has spent considerable time and effort trying to undermine.

Other negatives?

Perhaps the most obvious - and in my view the most inexcusable - are the government's control of the media, and ludicrous over-sensitivity to public criticism. It seems unfortunate that, fifty years after the revolution, the government still has not learned to trust its own citizens. This is, of course, a failing shared by many governments - not least that of the UK where we have a free press but can no longer walk down city streets or drive anywhere without being spied upon by cameras. Were those cameras located in Havana, we would be told that they were the typical hallmark of a police state.

Undoubtedly there are prisoners jailed for their political activities. These so-called "prisoners of conscience" have been convicted in Cuban courts of plotting or encouraging the overthrow of the government. As recent "anti-terrorist" legislation has shown only too clearly, they would also find themselves incarcerated in the UK - and for that matter everywhere else in the western hemisphere. Western journalists make much of Cuba's "political prisoners"; but nothing at all of the Miami five - Cuban patriots jailed in the US on trumped up charges by what effectively amounted to a kangaroo court.

And how easily these commentators slide over the unpalatable fact that, in addition to the innumerable attempts on Fidel's life, the US financed and armed an invasion force to "retake" the island: the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco. Then, as now, the US government put out the story that their purpose was only " to bring freedom and democracy to the people". But now as then, the Cuban people don't want to be set free by the United States - or indeed by anyone. What is not generally understood in the West is that the Cuban revolution of 1959 was a war of national liberation; and its success marked the first time in the island's modern history that it became truly self-governing. What the US lost in 1959 was, in all but name, a colony - of which the last remnant is the now infamous Guantanamo Bay - land leased against the wishes of the Cuban people by their former colonial master. Independence, and the fact that, for fifty years, Cuba has stood as an example to other Latin-American countries are what stick in the craw of the US body politic. More important still - and equally unpleasant to neo-liberals - Cuba offers a message - some may call it a dream (though a compelling one) - that alternatives to raw, neo-liberal capitalism exist and that, in the end, these alternatives may offer the best hope for the future of mankind and of the planet.

And Cubans do not stop at theory. The island is a movingly generous contributor of aid to other developing countries. Unfriendly commentators like to refer to Cuban "interference" in Africa - by which they usually mean Cuba's assistance in liberating Angola from Jonas Savimba and his US/South-African backed militia. They prefer to pass over the fact that the small island of Cuba was the largest provider of medical aid to Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake. Nor do they mention that over a thousand Cuban doctors are currently providing free medical services to impoverished Bolivians. These doctors are not there to foment revolution or to meddle in local politics, but to demonstrate solidarity with the Bolivian people by helping to improve the lives of the poor. By contrast, far richer countries of the West seem content to stand back, criticize and do little else.

Recent critics of Cuba have become fond of describing the island's economy as "in ruins" thanks to the "failed" economic policies of a "discredited regime" (the references are drawn from the BBC, The Guardian and The Independent).

Every regime makes mistakes - and Cuba's is no exception. Some of its economic policies - particularly during the early years - were nonsensical. But the economy is not in ruins. On the contrary, the regime has survived years of US hostility and the "período especial" following the demise of the Soviet Union for the best of all possible reasons: because on the whole, the people believe in the tenets of the Revolution; and they work to sustain it. The image of Fidel Castro as an evil dictator who oppresses his people is simply false. When he dies the people will not rejoice, they will lament the passing of a man whom many regard as the father of the nation; and they will fear the arrival of McDonalds and what it symbolizes: the wretched social inequalities of the neo-liberal model. They will remember what the Revolution overthrew: the US puppet government of Batista , the slums on the outskirts of Havana, the racial apartheid that forbade blacks to be seen in the elegant suburb of Miramar after 6pm. And this contributor, at least, hopes they will resist any attempt to turn back the clock.

Obama's Mountain

2008-09-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

The 2008 US Election

On August 28, Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, the first "black" American to run for the highest office with a real chance of making it. Something new and strange must be taking place in the American political landscape. We are accustomed to American presidents with anglo-celtic names: Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy. Barack Obama resembles none of these. A different world radiates from his name no less than from the colour of his skin, the rhythmical lilt of his voice, and the hope he embodies for the America of our dreams.
What are those dreams? Well they are doubtless different in their detail, but in outline they are surely one: a kinder, less corrupt, more socially inclusive country at home; and a nobler, less venal and trigger-happy one abroad. Would Obama deliver? Probably not; but judging by his popularity beyond US borders, we foreigners will expect him to try.
First, though, he has to get there over the hard-bitten, racist prejudices of redneck middle America, the vicious smears characteristic of Republican campaign advertising, and the corrupt meddling in the electoral voting procedures of Republican politicians and their factotums.
All of these hurdles are difficult to negotiate, but by far the most difficult will be racial prejudice. None of us know how many Americans remain infected by this wretched mental aberration; but the chances are that it's more than we think, and more, far more, than any of the pollsters and media commentators would have us believe.
Common sense tells us that what voters are prepared to tell a pollster can differ radically from what they choose to do with their vote in the privacy of the polling booth. Even so, small town America - the deeply reactionary heartland of traditional Republicanism - tends to be less shy about expressing illiberal views than big-city America of the coasts and Great Lakes. So it's no surprise to hear a BBC interviewee at the Republican Convention tell the world that Barack Obama may be intelligent but 'You never know what someone of mixed race might do. You can't trust people like that.' And the insidious suspicion spreads like a contagion over the air waves and the prairie landscape that Barack Obama can't be a true American.
Because to be a true American, you need a white skin, a small vocabulary and a taste for guns. If you're a good American as well as a true one, you believe God created the universe about 5000 years ago, abortion is evil and it's okay to torture 'suspected' terrorists. Around thirty-five percent of the U.S. electorate belongs in this last category. Rock-hard right-wingers with a virulent hatred of anyone or any idea bearing a 'liberal' sticker, they are the torch-bearers of righteousness, the enlightened ones, the new children of Israel, inheritors of the promised land. They form the backbone of the Republican Party, and no Republican Candidate can afford to ignore them.
These sanctimonious, poorly educated 'true' Americans have the power of numbers: there are enough of them in the US hinterland to sway the election. America's fate and maybe that of the world is in the hands of dullards; people brought up on prejudice and betrayed by an educational system that neither cares nor caters for them.
Hence why John McCain, the Republican candidate, chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. A maverick himself, and regarded with suspicion by the mainstream right, he needed one of their number on his side: an all-American, huntin', shootin' an' fishin', god-fearing, creationist. Palin fits the bill nicely. A former beauty queen with a modest intellect, she radiates all the timeless Republican values: admiration of the military, a fake contempt for the Washington elite, and vacuous patriotism proclaimed for no other purpose than to win applause for herself and cast doubt on the loyalty of the Democratic nominee whom, she noted in her speech to the faithful at the 2008 Republican Convention, had never pronounced the word 'victory' in his reflections on the US government's military folly in Iraq, and by inference was therefore a borderline traitor.
Like most of her kind, Palin makes a virtue of ignorance. She doesn't know what the US vice-president does or stands for - and obviously hasn't thought about it - but that's why she's the ideal candidate: an outsider, a Mrs Smith going to Washington with a mission to clean it up.
Commentators agree, by the way, that she understands nothing about foreign policy; but that particular weakness has never troubled the American electorate. And besides, nobody even tries to dispute the received orthodoxy, namely that McCain's spell in a Vietnamese prison camp some thirty-five years ago qualifies him as an expert in international affairs. Nobody in America anyway. The rest of us are baffled. If jail is the place to acquire expertise, then the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay can look forward to glittering foreign service careers - assuming they make it out of there one day.
Republicans believe - and act as if - US elections are won by toadying to prejudice and keeping it simple. Therein lies another problem for Obama. He is bright, passionate, and inspiring, and he wants to win by the superiority of his ideas, the quality of his vision and the clarity of his arguments. But a good 50% of the US population wouldn't recognize a well-expressed idea if it knocked them over in the street.
Should we care who wins? Before you answer, take a look at Jonathan Friedland's article in The Guardian.
If you'd like a redneck view, click here.

Automatic Translators (ATs)

2008-08-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

Devices programmed to translate from one spoken language to another. They are now the principal means by which travellers, diplomats and drifters communicate with speakers of other tongues. Widespread use of ATs has meant that only specialists bother with the hassle of learning foreign languages, most of them low-level academics bunkered down in the few remaining university language departments.
The demise of language learning - once considered an important element of civilized life - has not gone without protest, one focus of complaint being that since ATs work from a database of clichés, discourse between people of different cultures has been reduced to stock phrases, vulgar expressions of sentiment, and intellectual commonplaces. Even original thoughts, when filtered through ATs, are reduced to banalities. AT enthusiasts retort that 99% of oral communication is banal anyway, and that “what a good AT can’t translate, is probably not worth expressing.”
On a more philosophical level, concern exists over whether ATs overly sacrifice accuracy for the sake of intelligibility and whether they - along with other electronic media - are contributing to a decrease in the variety and depth of human culture. Driving the debate is a fear that the number of meanings available to humanity may be falling as our expressive devices become more uniform. The reduction in the number of spoken languages from about 10,000 in 1900 to less than 4,000 today, likewise suggests that we may be heading towards a future shorn of the quirks and colours that constitute the main source of human creativity.

Artificial Humour (AH)

2008-08-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

Some recondite but influential thinkers continue to claim that Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot resemble Human Intelligence because machines, no matter how sophisticated, can neither replicate nor “understand” the human emotions involved in humour, wit, aesthetic response, taste and so forth. Their argument is summarized in the catch-phrase “computers can’t tell jokes”. Defenders of AI have struggled for generations with this problem, whose importance may be more related to an internecine struggle for theoretical dominance amongst experts than for the practical value of endowing machines with human attributes. In any case, attempts to humanize computers have not so far been encouraging. Domestic computers can certainly now be programmed to decorate their output with an occasional witticism, but subtleties of mood and context, without which humour doesn’t work, continue to elude them. In human terms, they have remained “dull-witted”.

Alleged

2008-08-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

Modifier used by journalists when making assertions they know to be false or questionable. Adverb: “allegedly”. See SPOKESPERSON.

ACREM

2008-08-25T01:25:00.000-07:00

The Artificial Creation of Employment Act (2032). A World Council-supported solution to the problem of surplus unemployment. Social scientists have established that in order to ensure a reasonably tranquil world, the number of people with jobs must at least marginally exceed the number of unemployed. On the other hand, a large pool of well-qualified people who are out of work is essential to controlling inflation, keeping wages down, maximizing profits and ensuring that wage-earners remain docile and fearful of losing their livelihood.
Experts now agree that while the ideal economic level of planetary unemployment probably lies somewhere between 35% and 49%, even the smaller figure may be too high to be certain of avoiding periodic outbreaks of public unrest. To maintain the peace, therefore, many people have to be given “artificial” jobs with obvious costs to the net level of productivity.
An irony of technological progress is that an employment level of only 10% to 15% of people of working age would theoretically be sufficient to satisfy the entire world demand for goods and services - which means that an estimated two thirds of existing private-sector jobs could be eradicated with no loss of production and a significant increase in quality.¹ In other words, most people are simply not required for purposes of productive work, and their prime social function is simply to consume.
As usual, the private sector is in two minds about ACREM. On the one hand, it is clearly a burden on taxpayers - and particularly on corporations²; on the other hand, in addition to maintaining public order, it ensures the existence of enough credit-worthy consumers to keep the wheels of business turning. In a nutshell, business needs to maximize sales and the number of shoppers, while minimizing tax liabilities and the number of salaried employees, a contradiction reflective perhaps of the impossibility of finding a perfect solution to the administration of life.
ACREM is specially burdensome for corporate downsizers because companies denuded of personnel may sometimes be obliged partially to re-staff; and although ACREM salaries are paid by the government, the taxes required to fund them are levied on the private sector. Moreover, the new staff, who are seldom the ones originally made redundant, require training at company expense, which in turn gives rise to additional administrative costs. Since ACREM came into force, the advantage to corporations of reducing staff numbers has become negligible; which is why a campaign is now underway to have the Act rescinded. Licensed street begging and “holding camps” for the unemployed are among the alternatives under consideration.
___________
¹ See, for example, Wetherspoon and Thorpe, “More for Less - The Drive for Global Maximization”, Megalo Press, New York, 5th edition, 2015. Also ERROR THEORY.
² All companies are obliged to pay an ACREM premium.

Architectural Piles

2008-08-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

A double entendre: the practice of cramming as many dwellings as possible into the smallest square footage. The concept originated in Japan in the late twentieth century with the design of hotels in the form of multiple chests of drawers, with each drawer containing just sufficient room for one or two adults (luggage restrictions applied). After spending a night in one of these compartments and surviving a panic attack brought on by the sensation of having been caught fresh and packed for export, the great British architect Hilda Danegeld began work on the world’s first designed-from-the-ground-up, hot-wired, limited-headroom micro apartment. The idea came to her at thirty thousand feet during her return flight from Tokyo to London, when her eye fell on a newspaper article about a broom cupboard in the upscale district of Knightsbridge that sold for a tidy sum as a pied-à-terre. What was good for Knightsbridge, she realized, would be even better for less distinguished neighborhoods where the demand for accommodation came predominantly from single people and couples on modest incomes. Always content to squeeze the most from the least, building developers needed little persuasion to adopt the idea; while Government, anxious to increase what it optimistically referred to as “affordable housing”, joined in with the offer of subsidized mortgages to help key workers to buy their first home. Within a few years, micro-living became the norm for the less-well-off throughout the developed world.
Hilda Danegeld was knighted in 2014 for architectural innovation in support of the homeless. By the time she died, however in 2029, serious flaws in micro-living had become apparent. Suicides among UK micro apartment dwellers had risen to over twice the national average, and, on a per capita basis, were even higher in the United States, perhaps because living in a confined space seemed to be in flagrant conflict with the American dream of personal freedom.
Observers noted that the architects who made fortunes out of designing micro apartments - and their work-place equivalent, micro-offices - neither lived nor worked in their own creations. For themselves, they preferred elegant country residences set in established gardens on the outskirts of picturesque villages, and offices in spacious high-tech towers, or converted city mansions designed by builders of a more gracious and stately age. In an interview at her Palladian mansion just outside Oxford some two years before her death, Dame Hilda admitted that her experience in that Japanese hotel all those years before had made her determined never again to spend so much as a night in a confined space. “No modern architect worth her salt would live in a micro,” she confided. “Matter of fact, few would be seen dead in anything they’d designed.”
A codicil to her will specified that her coffin was to be “at least one cubic centimetre larger than the washroom in a typical “Danegeld” micro-home.

An Introduction

2008-08-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

The subtitle of this work is "A glossary of Contemporary and Future Life". It currently runs to about 300 pages, and I will publish them all here, entry by entry. In this first posting, I include some preliminary quotations, a foreword and a Table of Contents. The second posting contains the first entry, and so on.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions, - such I call good books.
Henry David Thoreau

Qui n’ose se contredire ne va pas au bout de sa pensée et n’a jamais fait le tour d’une idée.
Those who fear to contradict themselves avoid real thinking and have never truly examined an idea.
Maurice Maeterlinck

Cum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini.
Reading over what I have written, and despite being the author, I’m appalled to find so much that deserves to be crossed out.
Ovid

...tout ce que j’aperçois me blesse, et je me reproche sans relâche de ne pas regarder assez.
...everything I perceive is painful, and I blame myself ceaselessly for not looking hard enough.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
_________________

FOREWORD

I originally envisaged this little work as multi-authored - a literary forum perhaps with myself as editor. It hasn’t turned out that way, partly because I have made no serious attempt to arouse the interest of a conventional publisher, and partly because - as I now realize - this is a highly personal view of the world and its contents. It was born and grew out of anger (as such books often are and maybe should be), and out of bewilderment at the infinite duplicity and ruthlessness of humankind, at the nonsense we unearth in our search for meaning and purpose, and at the impossibility of finding a final answer - I mean the truth - about anything.

Since this is a glossary, entries are ordered alphabetically rather than thematically which means you can dip in and out at any point. Some are short and simple, others sufficiently complex to give me pause when I re-read them.

Mistakes doubtless abound - typographical, grammatical, logical, ontological, theological, and every other kind available to textual expression and human endeavour. Corrections welcome. But remember: this is an unedited draft; and my eyes glide over errors,
....as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...
(If Keats were alive, I’d apologize for quoting him here - but he isn’t).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ARCHITECTURAL PILES
ACREM
ALLEGED
ARTIFICIAL HUMOUR (AH)
AUTOMATIC TRANSLATORS
BELIEVING IS SEEING (BIS)
BLAIRISM
BONHOFF’S LAW
BUSHIT
BUILT-IN OBSOLESCENCE
CAPITALIST THEORY OF CORRUPTION
CHAOS
CIRCUMVENTION
CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
CLIMAGEN
COFFEE
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
COMPUTER PHILOSOPHY
CONTIME
CREDIT RATING
DAWKINS DISEASE
DEBT CAPACITY
DEBT RELIEF
DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT
DEMOPHOBIA
DIYSEX
DPT
DO
DRD
ECONOMIC JUSTICE
ECSTATIC HYGIENE
EFFICIENCY QUOTA
EGO
ELECTORAL MANIFESTO
ELECTROSEX
ENCYCLOEXCITANT
EPD
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
ERROR THEORY
EVENING PRIMROSE
EVOLUTION
EXTINCTION
FACING
FIFTEEN
FLOPS
FRB
FREEDOM
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
FREEGEM
FREE TRADE
FUN
GLOBAL SWARMING
GOD
GÖDLICHER’S THEORY
GOVERNMENT INSPECTION
HISTORICISM
HOME SPACE DESIGN
HUMAN SOLIDARITY
IDOL WORSHIP
IMPUNITY
INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF
INEQUALITY
INTELLIGENCE
INTERNAL DECAY
LASER FENCE
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
LOCH NESS SYNDROME
MARCEL’S MALAISE
MARKET DISCIPLINE
MONOTHEISM
MUTUAL CONTEMPT
NATURESCAPE
NEO-CONS
NETCO
OBSCURANTISM
OUTSOURCING
OVERLOAD
PARADISE
PEACE INITIATIVE
PE
PERTWEE’S PARADOX
PLOUGHING THE SEA
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVE
PROGRESSIVE TAXATION
PUBLIC SERVICE
AL-QA’IDA
QUEBEC SEPARATISM
REGRESSIVE TAXATION
REPOPS
REVERSE DEVELOPMENT
RIGHT TO INFORMATION
ROBOTIC SENSIBILITY
SARS
SEX-TEL
SHOP SOILED
SIMSCAPE
SIX(TY) NINE
SLEEPEYE
SOLIDARITY
SOLIPSIST MOVEMENT
S.O.N.G. (Something for Nothing)
SPINSTERISM
SPIRIT DIALOGUES
SPOKESPERSON
STAGE SEX
STATISTICAL WALL
SWAMPLAND
TERRORISM
TIME FLIES
TOURISM
TOYS
TRANSUIT
U.N. (United Nations)
UNDERDEVELOPMENT
UNIFYING THEORY
VIRTUAL ENTERTAINMENT
WAFER
WAR
WMDs
WHOLE LIFE DESIGN (WELD)
WORLD COUNCIL
WORLD PERSONNEL DATABASE
WOT