Last week London was hit by mindless violence, so mindless it spread to Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham. Amazingly, the social safety net led to this by both existing and being torn apart. Daily Mail readers (US translation: Faux News watchers) have and will continue to read stories increasing their fear of the feral youths, part of an evil socialist experiment breeding a violent underclass with government handouts. Meanwhile, liberal hearted Guardian readers (MSNBC in the USA I guess?), those who are worried about the impact of fiscal austerity on vulnerable communities, will find material online that confirms their world-view. Most importantly though, thanks to mother media (sure is great to be back from vacation and in her loving arms - not!), we'll all know for certain that the riots were completely unpredictable and the only way to deal with them is to further increase the police state and take away more personal liberties. Outlawing masks? Lucky there's no Halloween I guess.
Before we forget, the spark that set off the riots was the police shooting of Mark Duggan. Of course police brutality couldn't ever lead to trouble in a civilized society.
In a city like London - where at least 333 people have died in police custody since 1998 and not a single officer has been convicted - we're not even allowed to bring up how racial profiling could have been a factor in the undercurrent of rage. It's unimaginable that in the most unequal city in the developed world, where fleets of Rolls Royces ferry oligarchs, tycoons and oil sheiks by them everyday, a mob of youths could flaunt the law in a bid for a piece of faux-luxury, from plasma TVs to fast fashion. A rioter wouldn't say "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" as he knows that the looting of a store isn't tolerated but the looting of the entire economy is rewarded with bailouts, golden parachutes and sky-high financial-sector salaries? It's not like one thing we know about riots is that they are underpinned by perceptions of illegitimacy of authority. Being from a place where upward mobility depends not just on having gone to a handful of top schools (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE), but on having the right accent, postcode, and background they should know to just stand by while the super rich get super richer and the rest hope to tread water. If we questioned any of this we wouldn't be trying to look for solutions, we'd be condoning the violence. Almost makes you wonder why this clip was only aired once on the BBC?
Back to Mark Duggan for a moment. He's been variously described as a hardened gangster and drug dealer or a loving family man, again depending on where you choose to get your propaganda. The media would never use this to distract us from what's important as we know neither love nor drug policies ever lead to violence. I wonder if many of the areas involved in the riots contain strong gang elements which are the product of silly drug laws in the UK which enrich criminal gangs.
No, probably not, after all, thanks to the media we're always well informed and therefore made all the safer. Live conversation between an ITV reporter and a young London rioter:
ITV Reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
Young Londoner: You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?
ITV Reporter: ...
Young Londoner: Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.
It would be blasphemous to suggest there are better ways to spend millions of pounds than on a royal wedding in the middle of an economic downturn that has brought about austerity measures. Sounds a bit like 1981, but no, there aren't any other parallels. The Conservative, cost-cutting government of that time was led by a monster named Thatcher while this Conservative led ConDem, cost-cutting government is led by a two-headed monster called CamClegg. That wedding was between a prince named Charles and a commoner named Diana; this one paired their kid Willie and girl named Kate, a, well, commoner with a hotter sister. The UK riots that took place in that summer of 1981 centered in Brixton and race played a major part. Thirty years later, the riots didn't happen until well into the summer and only some of the problems were in Brixton, and we've already established that race had nothing to do with it, right? Patterns, smatterns, this stuff is unpredictable and needs a heavy hand; after all people can even see patterns in the burning of toast or Wal-Mart receipts that prove their belief in 2000 year old fairy tales.
What about that whole austerity thing? Spending cuts couldn't have been a factor causing riot-like problems, could they? If only there was some proof that they do. If cuts caused the problems they do, the government would avoid them by not throwing billions away in faraway lands such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds of millions to bomb Libya for not honoring oil deals signed with BP on the heals of releasing a convicted terrorist who may have had something to do with the Lockerbie bombing. No, it would be Marxist propaganda to say that economic reality could be a driver of social upheaval. To say that the problems of youth unemployment, cuts in services for young people, the shockingly bad state education in poor areas, the shortage of council-built or affordable housing along with the startling growth in inequality as social mobility has fallen off the cliff over the past thirty years had anything to do with the UK riots would be saying that the rioters had a preconceived political agenda for their actions.
It would be idiotic to notice that the youth of the world seem to be organizing around the idea that they are the ones who will pay the price for the failures of crony capitalism. No, it's just an isolated cloudburst over Camden Lock not a superstorm spreading from Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square to Puerta del Sol (lucky I got outta Spain before pope B-16 got there, too bad the people have to pay for it). Since each example is very different from the others we can ignore the similarities, the lost generation of youths, close our eyes and not make connections with what is happening in Chile, Spain, Greece and even across the north Africa and the Middle East from Tunisia to Israel.
Of course it's silly to try to link events happening half a world away. Fortunately there hadn't been any disturbances in the UK itself that could have given some clue to the underlying tension. It would be even easier to make a connection if they had anything to do with making it harder for the youths to improve their future. No, the student protests that followed the tripling of tuition fees just last November were merely disturbances in which opportunistic vandals splashed some paint on Prince Charles' Rolls-Royce. It wasn't a reminder how governments can afford to bail out banks but the cost of education is somehow beyond their reach creating a system that will see student's loan burdens double between this year and next. Somehow, everywhere you look in this system, the general premise is to keep you indebted and under constant financial pressure just to have a marginally comfortable life. If only nearly a half million people had marched this March to demonstrate their displeasure with funding cuts that finance the tax breaks of some of the very corporations who saw their stores smashed last week, maybe we could have known something was up and done something about it. Funny we haven't heard about Nick Clegg's Nostradamus-like prediction way back even before the election. He's probably just hoping no one brings up his youthful dalliance with arson. Oops, too late.
Instead, we'll let the media paint a picture the plutocrats want us to see, a blurry canvas of racism with stacatto streaks of mindlessness and capricious dabs of unpredictability. As in the aftermath of the 2005 Banlieue uprising in France, this will facilitate the continued drift toward authoritarianism. In somewhat similar circumstances the political right was the major beneficiary as Super Sarkozy's rise from interior minister to president owed a great deal to his role in expressing the anxious aggression of a mass constituency that lived far away from the burning cars and public buildings. In the UK it may help the BNP or even Cameron's Conservative coalition if he can just get tough enough, further entrenching the police state. New powers will be bestowed on our benevolent protectors and personal freedoms will be further eroded.
This seems to be the pattern of problem solving in the 21st century, the implementation of policies that further exacerbate the completely unexpected problem. No one could have foreseen an event like 9/11 coming, not with the continued occupation of Palestine, the bombing of the same ill-fated towers in 1993, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole bombing in 2000 and the CIA being ordered not to kill bin Laden ten times before the Twin Towers were taken out. Instead of examining the lead up and looking for cures, the remedy was to make the problem worse by bombing Afghan villagers and imposing a democratic government on Iraq by killing a million people. Presto, more hatred and terrorism.
The financial crisis of 2008? Completely blindsided almost every economist as the explosion in soon-to-be-toxic triple-A securities created to feed the furnace of the perpetual growth fantasy was hard to notice. Unless you looked. The solution? You guessed it. The debts of banks that were too-big-to-fail were passed onto states that are too-big-to-bail facilitating further consolidation of the financial monoliths. The credit rating agencies such as S&P who gave the triple-A ratings to the sliced and diced derivatives for a fee have gone from mere service providers to policy dictators(and not just for PIIGS anymore, America too! Debt has been piled onto debt in order to solve a debt crisis. Executive pay tied to short term results has returned and even surpassed insane pre-crisis levels. Corporations and the rich who were the beneficiaries of deregulation and tax cuts have been donned as our job creators and saviours while hoarding trillions in cash from record profits thanks to being granted interest free loans, extensions on tax cuts and the magic of quantitative easing. Oh, and there's promises for more.
So there is no single meaning in what happened last week in London and elsewhere. Sure, it was more Harrod's Boxing Day than Paris '68 but there are connections that we can make, that we should make, that we need to make. Much is the consequence of decisions made by governments and there is little hope of rapid improvement. The same politicians now denouncing the mindless violence of the mob all supported a system of political economy that was as unstable as it was pernicious. They should have known that their policies would lead to disaster. They didn't know. Who then is more mindless?
Let's assume that the Ruling Class was taken by surprise by these events. This presupposes ignorance of the fact that austerity regimes and slave wage capitalism ultimately lead to demonstrations, strikes, riots and revolutions. I would argue that they know perfectly well what they are doing. Rebellions like this one are not simply a cost of doing business as usual they are, in fact, opportunities to further impose their will on the populace as the media minions stoke calls for more draconian measures and police powers. There will be finger pointing and hand wringing by the so-called left but the program will move forward. We are trapped by the late-stage decadence Marx predicted as we have finally created a crisis that seems to have no solution. A succession of treatments have caused side-effects we would know to avoid by opening our eyes and reading the label. The symptoms will get worse if we don't scream the solution in unison - yes, revolution. More likely though, we'll all go back to being happy again with plenty of nothing.
"Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world"
- Walid Rachid, member of the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement
Reading the headlines and commentary from the mainstream media one would think the revolutions in Tunis and Egypt have succeeded. The corrupt, authoritarian regimes have been toppled and a future of freedom guaranteed with the only question being who will be next, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain or Iran. However, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the people's uprising in Egypt and Mubarak's forced departure constitute the end of the beginning of their revolution. Mubarak's second choice to succeed, Omar Suleiman, AKA Snidely Whiplash is still calling the shots in a country where the army is in charge, the constitution has been suspended and the parliament dissolved. Worse, nothing has happened that will change the fact that 40% of Egyptians will now return to living on less than $2 a day in an economy set up by Hosni's first choice, his son Gamel, for the exclusive benefit of the oligarchs. However, I'm going to don my Panglossian cap and imagine that we are in fact living in the best of all possible worlds and imagine how the chaotic scenes in Cairo and Tunis could be an inspiration to spur action against repression around the world. Perhaps we've been given a wake up call and a template on how to break free of the bonds holding us hostage on an accelerating crash course for disaster woven by all of the threads that make up the tapestry of global control which we're watching fray in front of our eyes.
While the 24 hour news cycle will have us wondering if the Muslim Brotherhood will hijack the Egyptian revolution like the theocracy did in Iran over 30 years ago, I'm hopeful it will stir us to focus on what we can do to break the corpocracy which has taken a stranglehold on our democracy. Nobody wants to be told that their life is based on a lie. From the cuckolded husband (orcuckqueaned wife)to the fundamentalist fanatic the job of the propagandist is facilitated by the fact that it's much easier to continue to accept the deception than to question one's very beliefs. After sleepwalking through the aftermath of the financial crisis many people are now waking up to the reality of its consequences - draconian austerity measures are being taken by governments around the world to combat ballooning deficits fueled largely by bailouts given to large corporations combined with falling tax revenues that were the result of the greed and hubris of those very same institutions. We're told there is no other way, that we must pay. In a time of permanent war, exploding poverty, threats to civil liberties and ecological devastation, humanity faces the challenge and opportunity to choose powerful and creative nonviolent alternatives. We can continue to opt for the devastating spiral of violence and injustice, or we can build civil societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met.
We knew the cuts would be brutal and of course regressive in the UK with the incoming Tory government last year. Yet there were hopes by some (including me, sorry guys) that their junior coalition partners, Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats could moderate some of the cuts and would ensure that the rich would pay as well as the poor for the devastation caused by the banking collapse. Instead, Clegg, Prime Minister Cameron and his Eton cohort George Osborne cut a deal with Vodafone to forgive £4.8 billion in unpaid taxes while tripling tuition fees and making social cuts so deep there won't be enough libraries, housing or services to provide jobs or any hope for the future, let alone support Cameron's creepily Orwellian sounding Big Society. Seems the river Styx has been crossed and like Cerebrus this three-headed monster will ensure there's no escape from Hades once every public service is thrown open to outside providers, be they private companies, charities or voluntary organizations.
In a rerun of 1981, it's hoped that the public will be pacified by the pomp and circumstance of another royal wedding while the fabric of society is cut to pieces to knit a jumper for those who caused the crisis. If you live in the UK, where the economy shrunk again last quarter, and are afraid of the future being imposed on you, take a look at UK Uncut. They are calling for a Bail-In to replace the Bail-Outs of the banks to be funded by tax evaders, both corporate and personal, such as Sir Philip Green who gets to advise the government on cuts while avoiding paying taxes. They are focusing their efforts on raising awareness of how big business manages to escape corporate taxes and receive government largesse while the majority of the population is forced to pay for their losses. It is an open platform for self-organizing direct action, in other words, it's a revolution engine. Anyone anywhere can list an action anytime. Last weekend featured day cares and libraries in many Barclay's branches while next weekend will focus on RBS. Sign up to take part in one of their events near you, the biggest coming Saturday March 26th in London.
While the UK is ConDem'd by a coalition trying to channel Margaret Thatcher, across the pond there's a Democratic president doing his best Ronald Reagan imitation to please an opposition guided more by biblical scripture than scientific or economic principles. The task of waking the public from its slumber won't be easy where much of the population was so easily duped by a pair of billionaires into creating a movement that blamed the government for the economic meltdown. Conspiracy theorists no longer need rumors of the proceeding of the likes of the Bilderbergers when we've got the real life Koch brothers manipulating public policy in the open. Helped in part by last year's Supreme Court Citizens United decision, they managed to put Tea Partiers into Congress to work directly for corporations. New levels of absurdity were reached in a political process already too subservient to lobbyists by deciding that election spending is speech and that since corporations are people (really), that spending on elections by corporations can't be restricted as neither can people's speech. If you don't think it's right you can join Common Cause who are leading the fight to bring to light the conflict of interest the Supreme Court justices, particularly Clarence Thomas, who made the ruling have managed to keep hidden until now.
You may also have noticed the $1.1 trillion in cuts over 10 years announced by Obama the other day didn't take enough heating oil from the poor to placate the Republicans while bankers' bonuses have returned to eight-figure levels and corporations made record profits last quarter. Yeah, you guessed it, the cuts will ensure the poor and middle class pay for the banks and corporations screwing up the economy. You hear a lot of wingnuts complaining about the onerous 35% corporate income tax rate yet it's rarely mentioned that 115 of the S&P 500 companies actually pay less than 20% while 39 of them paid less than 10%. Oh, and that doesn't include the 37 companies like Citigroup and AIG that received more in tax credits than they paid. There's also Exxon who made $37.3 billion in profits but didn't pay a penny to Uncle Sam and most egregious of all Bank of America who made $4.4 billion pre-tax in 2009 and received $1.9 billion tax benefit and GE whose $10.3 billion in pretax income was supplemented by a tax benefit of $1.1 billion. Hoping to highlight this injustice, thanks to the 10-step guide provided by the Nation, a fledgling US Uncut movement was born. Sign up and join in the fun of the February 26th Day of Action.
On the heels of extending the Bush tax cuts which cost the government $2.48 trillion over the last 10 years (PDF comparing that to health care costs), Obama's budget cuts need to cut off grandma's heating oil. Only religious fundamentalism can explain cutting off funding for a program that saves $4 for every dollar spent (PDF) as that's exactly what the House just did by passing a resolution to end funding for Planned Parenthood. Oh, and increase military spending by $22 billion while the media repeats the duckspeak lie of cutting $78 billion. Strange, if they really wanted to cut $100 billion out of the budget, all they needed to do was end the killing of brown people in a far away land that no one seems to care about anymore. If you care, why don't you check out Russ Feingold's new movement Progressives United. You might remember him as the only good senator besides Bernie Sanders until the Tea Party money came along to unseat him; now he's got some time on his hands and a corpocracy to expose and depose. Speaking of Feingold, you might have heard there's been some action in his home state of Wisconsin.
Madison, Wisconsin has become the epicenter of the fight against the Shock Doctrine and turned it once again into what Teddy Roosevelt called America's "laboratory of democracy". The state capital might not be Tahrir Square but Feingold's home state has become the site of the most important fight in America today. New Governor Hosni Mubarek, er Colonel Gaddafi (it was Republican Representative Paul Ryan who said "It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison") no, Scott Walker has decided not to let a crisis go to waste by taking a complex problem, making it worse and using it to push through his ideological agenda. Yep, a crisis caused by rampant inequality which led to a financial crash is being paid for by public employees instead of those who got rich by fleecing the system. Should we be surprised that the Koch Industries PAC was Walker's second biggest campaign contributor?
Class warfare anyone? How is it that people making $50,000 a year are the ones who caused the crisis when John Paulson can make $5 billion and pay only 15% taxes? Ever get paid overtime? You like having weekends off? Safe workplace, health care? Remember the middle class? All courtesy of unions, a dying institution in America; coincidentally(?) the middle class is going extinct as well. Hate child-labor laws and prefer kids working in sweatshops to going to school? Well, get ready, that's what they're trying to bring back in Missouri (seriously, look). Walker wants Wisconsin wants to join Virginia, Texas, Georgia and North and South Carolina in banning collective bargaining for its teachers; those states rank 44th, 47th, 48th, 49th and 50th respectively in ACT/SAT scores nationwide while Wisconsin is currently 2nd. The oligarchs are still in control of the message, stirring up a culture war in which we blame everyone else except those who actually blew up the economy. Wake up and smell the irony, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.
It can be argued that many unions are in desperate need of reform but they represent the only protection we have against corporations and government. Wisconsin, considered a cradle of US labor rights and progressive social policies, was the first state to give its public workers the right to bargain collectively, a right that Scott Walker is now proposing to take away. Yep, one could understand asking workers to take pay cuts as well as contribute more to their health and pension plans but this animus goes too far and that's why people are fighting back. It's great to see Democrats finally show some spine and the people finally snap out the their trance; legislators on the lam (thank them here) and protesters on the streets. Want more crazy? Walker channeled his inner Gaddafi and ordered the National Guard to get ready to respond to a strike or any resistance to his plan. I suppose he doesn't know the last time Wisconsin called in the National Guard was way back in 1886, when they shot on a rally of Milwaukee workers advocating an eight-hour work day - five unarmed workers were killed in the massacre. We shouldn't be surprised, it was such freedom loving patriots as Limbaugh, Beck and Santorum who denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.
Even crazier? You betcha! The deficit that needs to be addressed by the cuts was manufactured by Walker and his cohorts. January 31st, the state had a $121.4 million surplus which was wiped out when Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups. Crazier? No, can't be. Yep, the proposed bill would allow for the selling of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants without bids and without concern for the legally-defined public interest. Best yet, Walker is only proposing to strip the bargaining power of the unions who didn't support his election campaign. Coincidentally, it is the firefighters and police officers whose unions were spared that will be his last line of defense if the protests turn violent. Maybe you oughta send MiniMubarek an email to govgeneral@wisconsin.gov to let him know what you think. It might be an exaggeration to compare Cairo to Madison but what we're seeing shock resistance to the exploitation of a manufactured crisis by constricting the democratic space through the reduction of the ability of the workers to participate in the formation of their economic future. Contrary to what Faux News et al will tell you, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications (PDF). This isn't about being fiscally responsible so much as it is about power - taking it away from the people and handing it to the oligarchs. Who better than Naomi Klein herself to explain the importance of shock resistance and then why not join the Wisconsin Wave?
Exploding inequality and grinding poverty were the match that sparked the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions when struck by new and old media technologies provided by Twitter, Facebook and Al-Jazeera. Taking a more practical path and serving as a reminder that inequality in the US is greater than in Egypt Tunisia or Yemeni is the Progressive Strategy Handbook(PDF) from Cognitive Policy Works. Their proposal is set out in four parts from setting the landscape to the strategic need to set the agenda as well as the psychological nuances involved in preparing to engage the public along with the technological power of social media for driving cultural and political change and finally and perhaps most importantly, the need to be an innovator in the ultimate goal of changing how politics is done.
Perhaps you're not stirred to action watching $4 billion being given away to oil companies while cutting $1.6 billion from the EPA. There's a chance you don't care that in Arizona, cuts to the Medicare system have already killed two people and 98 more are waiting to die as the state won't pay for transplants but can give tax cuts to corporations which will cost the state $538 million by 2018. But maybe you've caught the doublespeak coming out of your telescreens and are starting to wonder why no one else has noticed the hypocrisy. How does Hillary's head not explode from the cognitive dissonance as she urges countries to embrace internet freedoms while the US is moving in the opposite direction. The House just voted to extend three controversial domestic spy provisions of the Patriot Act, customs officials seized 18 more internet domains without giving the pirate website owners a chance to challenge the forfeiture and the administration is trying to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which already requires telecoms and internet access providers to have wiretapping capabilities. The FBI wants Congress to demand that same requirement for encrypted e-mail services like Blackberry and also wants it for social networks and peer-to-peer messaging networks like Skype. Oh, and the Justice Department is in federal court trying to get Twitter to cough up records related to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others, including an Icelandic parliamentarian.
Fancy a little vigilante justice? Think you know your way around the intertubes? Then you might want to think about joining the gang over at Anonymous. Love 'em or hate 'em, in addition to adding another computer word to the lexicon, their brand of hacktivism has gotten the attention of the powers that be. All you need is to get the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), log onto Twitter, find the latest Anonoymous tweets (if an op is in progress) and join in the revolution, but remember, you'll be up against powerful enemies with friends in high places. The first target of their information warfare was the Church of Scientology in 2007 followed by the Australian government for introducing internet censorship laws. By far their most publicized attacks however have come in defense of Wikileaks and its supporters. Operation Payback saw them take on/out Mastercard, Amazon and Paypal for behaving like the US government's lapdogs. While Assange's persecution has been well-documented, the forgotten hero may be Private Bradley Manning who may have supplied Wikileaks with the bulk of their stash of illicit trash. Based on the testimony of one extremely untrustworthy source Manning has been locked up in solitary confinement in a military brig for nine months and the torture is having the desired effect. Did we mention he's a UK citizen? No trial, indefinite detention, torture, sound familiar? Guess this is what happens to a society once they condone torture. We should all Stand With Brad, or help all soldiers who have the Courage to Resist when their conscience tells them.
Anonymous' most recent actions have revealed the most sinister face of corporatism. One moment HBGary, a private cyber-security firm, thought they had unmasked Anonymous, the next the self-styled, new-age Robin Hoods had implicated the corpocracy in a smear campaign. Among 50,000 hacked emails was a report the firm had prepared with several other online security firms on how to destroy Wikilieaks for Bank of America in their defense against yet to be released cables expected to reveal corruption and fraud at the bank. It's too complicated for my little brain, so here's the story in the words of one of the targets, Glenn Greenwald:
The Chamber of Commerce, that once upstanding organization that used to help small business, has become a corporate tool to hammer home the conservative agenda. While Citizens United allows unlimited election contributions, not many corporations want their names attached to the spending and therefore funnel most of the money through groups such as the Chamber, hiding their influence and actions from the public and shareholders alike. Ironically, they sued the Yes Men a couple years ago for deceiving the press and public yet engage in that very same behavior when it comes to sullying the reputations of those who would oppose them. Not to mention their disinformation campaign in opposing healthcarereform, employee free choice and other labor legislation, veterans' rights, banking regulations and, of course, transparency. An honest person in the media is dangerous, just knock off a couple of the honest journalists and activists who are left, then there's nobody left to defend the truth. Bring on the Lindsey Lohan stories!
The Yes Men have been trying to fight irrationality with the ludicrous for over 15 years, managing to pull off some audacious stunts whose ridiculousness is only matched by the inanity of those being mocked. They've recently launched their Yes Men Lab in an effort to help grow their movement by sharing their experiences of the past decade and a half. Networking with social justice organizations to spread their ideas for activism. Though their victims such as the Chamber of Commerce seldom seem to get it, their brand of consciousness awareness can be hilarious as well as contagious, so join the fun!
It's hard not to see the election of Ronald Reagan as the last inflection point, one of his first acts as President was to break the air traffic controllers union. It was the beginning of the class war waged by America's corporate oligarchy to transfer wealth from the working and middle classes to the rich and to deregulate the economy in order to increase the wealth and power of the corporate and financial elite. Since then, the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% (the richest one in a thousand households) has grown from 2.7% to 12.3%, a fourfold increase. The same time frame has seen an identical growth in incarceration rates and costs thanks to a war on the poor cleverly disguised as the war on drugs; 1 in 100 American adults are now behind bars. We've managed to trade in a cold war for a warmer war on terror as an excuse to ship off just enough of our youth to keep the official unemployment rate under 10%. California came close but we still need to organize if we want to legalize and end the war at home so sign up with NORML.
The women's liberation movement helped the other half of the population into the workforce just in time for middle class families to keep their head above water for awhile and when that wasn't enough, we worked more hours but still couldn't offset stagnating wages. Finally, the promise of never falling real estate prices meant people could use their homes as cash machines which worked great until the curtain was lifted on the wizards of Wall Street. Now, everyone is being decimated by a mortgage system that became so complex no one knew who owed or owned what leading to foreclosures on families who have never missed a payment and people who have never even had a mortgage. Whether you're facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage. Better yet, turn the system to your advantage and foreclose on the bank.
The right screaming about government taking over the private sector and the left about the reverse has distracted us from the reality of landing somewhere in the middle where a government by and for corporations control one another. Just look at any industry and corresponding government department, financial, military, agriculture, energy it doesn't matter which, the pattern is the same. A revolving door of an elite class with occasional holidays in the world of academia. Yesterday's institutions were built to narcotize us into sleep and while we dozed, they purloined our future, looted our societies, trampled nature, eviscerated our communities, ransacked our values, and body-slammed our very sense of self-worth. There are many positive signs that people are waking up to the nihilism of the present system where industry provides the regulators to write the rules so they can later be rewarded with executive positions in the board rooms of the very firms they once regulated. Perhaps this new 'Nile-ism' is a sign that enough people see what's happening around them and realize the system is broken, desperately in need of being torn down and built again. We're told we have a choice, after all, this is democracy, when in fact we can choose between a wolf and a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's a false choice, just like the austerity packages being introduced from Madison to London which tell us that we need to pay for the excesses of the past by punishing the poor and middle class.
The stock market has completely disconnected from the economy and is little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money. The casino's high rollers room is roped off to the masses while the VIPs engage in flash trading and front running stocks in a computer power arms race rendering the idea of stocks representing value obsolete. Any attempt at regulation will be stymied by Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary who believes what we need is a financial deepening. Crisis is good for his buddies, as the more Americans there are on food stamps, the more money JP Morgan Chase makes; thanks to food speculation opened up by deregulation, business is sure to be good. It's not surprising in a country where the government spends more on military bands than it does on public broadcasters. Oh, yeah, forgot the old saw: Funding NASCAR is freedom while funding NPR is tyranny.
The unnatural coalition of wealthy corporate capitalists and poor social conservatives who drive right wing ideology is exemplified by a couple of US congressmen. Chairman Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee is at the service of his corporate overlords. Add in a little John Shimkus who will chair the Subcommittee on Environment and Economy and there's no end to the destruction they can wreak. Some may think it's not a good idea to put a guy who quotes biblical scripture to explain why climate change isn't occurring in charge of anything to do with the environment but god still sells in the bible belt. For those who don't think Yahweh will save us from ourselves or don't think it's fair that mining companies are allowed to blow the tops off mountains to extract the minerals, you can arrange a sleepover in your governor's offices. That's what they did in Kentucky where they decided to push back against a corrupt government which has joined in a lawsuit against the EPA for trying to block some of the more harmful aspects of the practice. Never mind that these companies get the profits while the commons of the people are destroyed, the very earth, rivers, streams and air.
Don't let them convince you that the small stuff doesn't add up. Get out of your car, buy locally produced produce, turn off your TV - it all counts. Join 350.org, take part in Earth Hour March 26th at 8:30 pm, hell, plant a tree. If you're in Italy you can join the call for Silvio Berlusconi to resign for any of a myriad of offenses (he's defending himself in four separate trials). Bunga-Bunga is the most titillating and you probably think it's not right your prime minister pays for sex with an underage girl and later uses his influence to have her released from prison by claiming she was a relative of, you guessed it, Hosni Mubarak. Move your money out of the big banks, buy silver to help crash JP Morgan, join the Common Good Bank or flamenco dancers in Spanish banks. In Greece, why not turn transparency detective to expose the rich who camouflage their swimming pools from satellite pictures in an effort to evade taxes. French? Maybe you should question who sold the fighters being used to bomb civilians in Libya. Irish? Probably a good time to vote for a government who won't sell your future to the banks. If you think funding for the future is a better idea than buying bombs when 50% of the schools in Detroit have been ordered to close, sign a petition here or rally for education in Texas here. With media consolidation picking up speed, there's no wonder so many don't even realize there's still a war going on, but you can help bring an end to the longest war in American history (now in it's 10th year!) by helping Rethink Afghanistan. Tell Congress to protect the open internet. End the next war, the one on women, before they win too many battles. If you still believe in the American Dream, heed the MoveOn.org call to action this weekend. Finally, don't forget to join US Uncut or UK Uncut for their next big action February 26th, find a creative way to highlight why we need a bail in as they make us pay for the bail out.
It's now or never, something needs to be done soon as those in control of the economic and political levers are the same ones making the rules of their use. The plutocrats know the limits of growth have been reached economically and environmentally and have doubled down to get as much out as quickly as they can before the game's up. The North and South Poles are melting, Brazilian rain forests and the Russian tundra are burning, the Australian outback and Indus river basin are drowning. Crying orange men who used to hand out tobacco company bribes on the floor of the House are dictating a penny-wise and pound-foolish policy guaranteed to destroy his nation. Turn Facebook into a weapon to spread knowledge and form alliances instead of a tool to dull the senses. Question why Google exhorts us to do no evil while doing just that by dodging taxes through income shifting schemes known as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich". I'd call reducing their overseas tax rate to 2.4% a Dutch oven for the rest of us. Join a movement, spread the word, read an article longer than this post to learn about a subject instead of simply feeding off the informational tit of the corporate controlled mainstream media. They have an interest in propagating the system as their ownership is that system and in places like Canada now have a license to lie.
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Editor's note: While the author's choice of title does paint a spaghetti western showdown portrait, we the editors believe a better choice may have been Kakistocracy or perhaps some variation of Koproscracy. This may have saved much typing and reading time. Please accept our apologies.
The United Kingdom is a paradox and this year's general election campaign is no exception. A 21st century parliamentary democracy where the Queen has to hop a chopper from palace to palace to give her consent to an unelected Prime Minister to dissolve a parliament in which some still wear tights and wigs. The monarchy has seen its royal power eroded over time ever since Charles I was beheaded in 1649, replaced by a parliamentary system which theoretically puts the power of government in the hands of the people. This year's whirlwind month-long campaign got a little bit of American updating, well to 1960 at least, as for the first time a series of live televised debates were held between the party leaders to help the attention-span challenged masses decide whether to take the red or blue pill.
The election call had been long expected. Ever since assuming the prime ministerial office from Tony Blair, analysts had been watching the polls trying to determine when Labour's Gordon Brown would pull the trigger. Unfortunately for him, an election must take place at least every five years, a window that would have closed in June. Therefore, despite still trailing David Cameron's Conservative party, on April 6th Brown revealed "the least well-kept secret of recent years", elections would be held exactly a month later. Up until the first of three debates, the term coalition government didn't even have any meaning in UK politics. Instead, when talk of the possibility of neither the Conservative or Labour party attaining 50% of the seats in the parliamentary elections came up, the term 'hung parliament' was used - and still is as a scare tactic. The last time no majority was heldby either party ABBA had just burst onto the music scene, it was 1974 and Ronald Reagan was just some former actor governing California and Margaret Thatcher was the Education Secretary. Fast forward to 2010 and it could be #NickCleggsFault that the world they helped create is facing it's Waterloo.
It's been 30 years since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan revolutionized politics on both sides of the pond. Their one-two punch of anti-communist rhetoric and pro-market fundamentalism, warped the political spectrum for a generation. The center veered wildly right leaving Democrats in America and the Labour Party in the UK floundering for nearly a decade. Yes, I'm looking at you Michael Dukakis and Neil Kinnock. Margaret Thatcher's landslide reelection in the 1983 general election and Reagan's crushing victory that saw him reelected in 1984 left the Democratic and Labour Parties in shambles. Reagan didn't just beat Walter Mondale, he humiliated the 'left' winning the most electoral votes in history, 525 out of a possible 538, taking 58.8% of the popular vote to Mondale's 40.6%. Meanwhile, Thatcher won the the most decisive victory in a British general election since 1945. Labour lost 3 million votes and had their worst performance since 1918. Suddenly, what was known as the political left was scrambling, looking for a new way to get elected while it's voting base was being destroyed.
Lucky there was an answer. Neoliberalism. There, I said it. Just mentioning the word has probably scared off half of the readers. Part of the ease with which this ideology's proponents are able to deny its very existence stems from the difficulty in defining it. Making it even harder is the American/European split on the definition of its root - in the US a liberal is usually someone with an overriding belief in state intervention as a cure for social problems and market inefficiencies, but in the European tradition a liberal is committed, above all, to personal freedom, including a belief in free competitive markets as a means to this end.
Who would've believed that a meeting in a Swiss spa resort called Mont Pelerin in 1947 would lay the foundations for the most successful propaganda campaign of all time. The society, which took it's name from the spa, was founded by Friedrich von Hayek who knew that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it. Money poured in from oligarchs and their foundations. Think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute were set up in the US along with the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK; business schools were founded while university economics departments were transformed into bastions of near-totalitarian neoliberal thinking.
The evidence of the success of this indoctrination program is disheartening scary. Not only have we seen a generation of our brightest minds funneled into MBA programs, producing a legion of quants and analysts whose main economic activity is the destruction of wealth thus leaving other fields barren of talent, we simply don't have an alternative it seems, no other viable system ready to replace the broken one. Other ideas and ways of thinking have been relegated to the fringes, openly mocked and derided. Even the financial meltdown wasn't enough to shake us from our stupor, as instead of questioning the system, we simply propped it up by backing a truck up to the taxpayer to bail out the banks and clear their gambling debts. Sure the US has a few voices of near-sanity, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren come to mind, but the intellectual silence of the left is deafening in the UK. Whisper the word socialism and before you know it you'll find yourself branded a fascist. In fact, I consider us lucky that no charismatic political leader from the far-right has emerged, fortunately the sound of Sarah Palin's voice is enough to push many into contemplating suicide while someone like Cameron has about as much personality as unbuttered toast.
As the Golden Age of high economic growth that followed WWII suddenly collapsed in 1973 with the oil shocks, stagflation and the breaking of the gold standard, Keynsian economics with its stress on social democracy and central planning gave way to those concerned with liberating corporate and business power and re-establishing market freedoms. Neoliberalism is most closely related to the adoption of the doctrines of the aforementioned Austrian-born Friedrich Hayek, the 20th-century economist turned political philosopher best embodied in his magnum opus The Constitution of Liberty. This is the book that Margaret Thatcher famously banged down on the table at a meeting with her staff in 1975, saying, “This is what we believe”.
Thatcher and Reagan, well let's be honest, really their advisors such as Keith Joseph in the UK and Donald Regan in the US, carved out their nations' industrial bases and sold them off to Wall Street and the City respectively (oh, and China for cheap stuff). Union busting, privatisation and free trade combined to cripple productive employment creating a new permanently out of work underclass. Instead of admitting flaws, a neoliberal simply changes the definition of employment (32 times by Thatcher and Major in the 80's) to try to soften the picture. Despite this, the official rate of unemployment in the United Kingdom increased to 9.1% in the years 1979-89 after it had been 3.4% between 1973–79 and 1.9% between 1960-73. Another good way to lower the roll call of the eligible workforce is to put them behind bars. Prison populations have exploded due in part to market incentives driving prison providers to influence (read: bribe) judges to incarcerate more and more people. All the while prisons are being built by private contractors and filling them with bodies sent to them by their judges. The US has the largest prison population in the world while the UK has easily the largest in western Europe.
Predictably, this pain was masked by foreign policy adventures, most notably the Falklands War whose victory helped Thatcher expand her majority in the 1983 general election. The Iron Lady cultivated the special relationship with the United States and president Ronald Reagan, backing defense policies championed by Reagan, including the doctrine of nuclear deterrence in the Cold War. Yes, it's their Trident missiles being renewed today under both Labour and Conservative plans, at a cost of more than £80 billion, a decision the Lib Dems want reviewed at the very least. A strong proponent of NATO, Thatcher supported the 1979 decision to base nuclear-armed cruise missiles in the United Kingdom, a controversial move that aroused mass protests in Britain. Yeah, they were also marching on the street against Blair's Iraq big lie. In 1986, Thatcher permitted U.S. military forces to launch bombing raids against Libya from British air bases. In our times, there are more rendition stopovers.
It's no wonder the British media are giving Clegg the Obama treatment. From his Iowa moment a couple a weeks ago to comparisons with JFK in 1960, UK politics and culture is intricately linked with it's "special" partner. It may not be Friends or The West Wing, but maybe hope and change could actually work if the Lib Dems can just gain enough seats in the Parliament. There's the problem though, believe it or not, having to ask the queen's permission to hold an election isn't even the biggest problem with the British electoral system. The UK's first past the post electoral system features 650 ridings. Not only does such a plurality system produce a two party system thanks to Duverger's Law, additionally, the ridings are skewed in favour of the incumbent big two, Tory and Labour, with a concentration of seats in their respective strongholds which will force the Lib Dems, whose support is more spread out, to get a higher percentage of the total vote to win enough seats to form a government. If you have the time, check out the BBC's election seat calculator. By sliding the percentages around, it's easy to see approximately how many seats each party will win with varying percentages of the total vote.It's possible for Labour to wind up in 3rd in the total vote but winning the most seats! As you can imagine, true electoral reform isn't at the top of the priority list for the big two parties but will likely be a Lib Dem demand in any coalition talks.
The scared animal reaction to the Lib Dem surge by the vested interests is sadly predictable, releasing the dogs of war, the media. Former chancellor Ken Clarke ominously insinuated, no wait, not insinuated, screamed, that the financial markets would collapse, you know as a result of a hung parliament: "Bond markets won't wait," the shadow business secretary said of the likely City reaction to post-election backroom deals at Westminster. "Sterling will wobble". Too bad he sorta has a point there. IMF intervention will be necessary to bring the UK's finances under control, but it's the old tired party duopoly that brought us to this point.
The claim that either Labour or Tory could be the party of change or progress is laughable. Measurements such as teenage pregnancy rates, debt levels, living standards, income mobility, educational achievement and number of wars currently being fought are supposed to move in the opposite direction they currently are. I was a bit surprised to hear Clegg make a reference to the Iraq war in his opening comments in the 2nd debate which was based on international affairs for the first half. By most accounts he fought the debate to a draw with Cameron while Brown at least managed to get one prepared "squabbling at bathtime" line to remind the electorate how much younger his rivals are. Chances are most are most debate TV viewers are Peter Griffined thanks to their TV viewing:
The TV, in a weird twist, might break the Murdoch headlock on politics. His cross-Atlantic control came thanks in large part to their Iraq war coverage which somehow legitimized Fox News as a news organization and as always, sold newspapers. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership that comes with the absurd increase in concentration of wealth, it seemed Murdoch's forces would be able to anoint Cameron as the next Prime Minister. Yet the TV debates let people see and hear the difference in an easier to digest format despite, maybe even thanks to, the rules. Up until now, most of the electorate hadn't had a chance to even be exposed to Clegg and the Lib Dems.
Of course the dominant theme of the past decade has been the governing powers along with their media allies continuously playing the fear card to maintain the status quo. David Cameron's "I thought I'd never utter these words, but I agree with Gordon" (25:15) remark in the 2nd debate was a lame attempt at humour to cover up the evil overtones of their two parties' overlapping military vision. It's hard to remember, but Labour dropped their policy of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament along with other key policy differences with the Conservatives such as their policies of re-nationalisation of public utilities and Trade Union rights. Funny how Democrats and Republicans also agree the best thing to do is keep killing brown people. What will make people safer in the United Kingdom? The "war on terror" has made the UK and the world less safe than we were when it began. How will we fight this open-ended war where the fire is constantly being stoked by stirring the embers and watching as hot spots develop around the world? Well, the second debate also featured Clegg's quip about Brown and Cameron that "The more they attack each other the more they sound the same" so we know spending hundreds of billions renewing the cold war Trident nuclear missile system and Euro fighter Typhoon is their plan.
The real propaganda victory though is the ability to convince people who are victimized by this very system to support the system and see it as a good. Somehow supporting bank profits through worrying about our credit ratings so we can more productively use the equity we've built up through years of hard work became more important than actually producing anything. The trick is to wake people from their stupor in places like Liverpool Riverside where they perennially have the lowest voter turnout in the UK, which results in as few as 34.1% of the voting population bothering to cast votes for Labour time after time despite half their children living in poverty. Don't get me going on income inequality, but thanks to the New Labour/Tory policies of the past, Danny Dorling shows that the UK is the fourth most unequal country in the developed world - only Singapore, the US and Portugal being more unequal. The wealth of the top ten percent is worth on average 13.8 times that of the bottom ten percent across the UK. London is the most unequal city in the Western world with levels of inequality which even put the rest of the UK to shame. The top ten percent living in London have wealth worth on average £933,563, while the poorest ten percent have on average £3,420, you know, some 273 times less. An equitable society is one is which there is an equal opportunity to become unequal. This simply isn't the case anymore as exemplified by the growth of charter schools in the US and the fact that in the UK 25% of education goes to the 7% of students attending private schools, higher than anywhere else in the world except Chile.
Ah, Chile, where it all really got going. Where Pinochet and the Chicago Boys had to use death squads to take away the Chileans' choice, Britain got New Labour while the US got Government Sachs. Bruised and confused by four election defeats, the Labour party of the 1980's needed to respond to the success of Thatcherism and the changing nature of the economy and society. New Labour emerged and became dominant for many reasons. The supposed left wing alternative was left with a reduced voter base and desperately needed an alternative to Big Labo(u)r union support so they whored themselves to Big Finance. They simply adopted the belief that every social institution should be based on market exchange seeing no reason why services that are very different in nature should be supplied in some other way. The New Labour project was based on the belief and corresponding electoral strategy that Labour must appeal to ‘natural’ Tory voters in middle England or it faced the prospect of permanent opposition.
In order to do this the Labour Party was transformed starting in 1987 through a series of Policy Reviews, each presented to party conferences as a fait accompli with the accompanying free media coverage. Gradually, planned action by government was replaced with market solutions as the idea that the market was a good servant but a bad master was abandoned. In contrast to previous Labour thinking, the market was now both self-regulating and self-correcting. Following Labour's 1997 election victory Blair said "the post-war Keynesian dream is well and truly buried". Never mind that different goods meet different human needs, and the idea that we always need choice or worse, we always behave rationally, is silly. People don't pick and choose their rail service or prisons the way we pick our coffee at the supermarket, so why do we treat them the same? Rail privatisation has delivered a worse and more expensive service at a higher price in subsidy. The notion that public services are there to mimic market choice has lodged itself in the minds of a generation of politicians and voters and they are incapable of thinking in any other way.
Markets sprang up everywhere they hadn't previously existed, from education to health care as the quango was born providing near virgin territory and the perfect breeding ground for the pursuit of greed and profit as exemplified by the growth in the financial industry's share of both the US' and UK's total economy. This has continued despite obvious signs that unfettered markets cause more harm than good as we see what happens when finance corrupts every sector of the economy along with politics. The Savings and Loan scandal and the Keating Five, Enron, Long Term Capital Management, and on and on and on in the US along with their share in the UK with the likes of Barings,BCCI and the parliamentary expense scandal. By 2002, the ideological shift was complete, with Labour MP and current First Secretary of State (basically a deputy Prime Minister) Peter Mandelson famously declaring that "we are all Thatcherites now" and that "No serious challenge on the left exists to third way thinking anywhere in the world"! Today the same man is warning if you "flirt with Nick Clegg and you will end up married to David Cameron".
Oh, and don't get me wrong, while the 'Good' is having another option, in the UK election represented by Nick Clegg's Lib Dems, the 'Bad' is same old Brown and New Labour, the 'Ugly' is definitely Cameron and a return to Conservative rule. His botoxed smoothness may cover his forehead wrinkles but you don't have to look too far under the surface to see the same old Tory hate. While Clegg's 'earned route to citizenship' plan doesn't sound like a panacea to the UK's immigration problem and Brown's Bigot-gate has provided cover for Cameron, the Conservatives will surely speed the draconian slide of the country toward Arizona status. When branded anti-European and called out on his party's European Parliament alliances with fascists in Latvia, gay elephant (and non-elephant) bashers in Poland and ex-Czech Prime Ministers who party with Berlusconi... naked...with 17 year olds, David Cameron defended his alliance at the 35:35 mark of the 2nd debate: "One of our main allies is the party of the Polish president who tragically died in that accident who both of the politicians standing next to me praised as a great patriot and great statesman so I think we can hear no more of that." So, because Brown and Clegg paid their respects to someone who died in a horrible plane crash we're not allowed to question the friends he chooses to keep in Europe. Gotchya. Seems Schopenhauer was right, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
You don't need the TV to be repulsed by Cameron's party's policies, unless you like class war that is. We know the Tories do, for as Warren Buffet put it "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." David's blue-blood (seriously, he's a direct descendant of King William IV while his wife's clan came via King Charles II) his Eton education, and his party's monied membership would like nothing more than to increase their share of the pie all the while trying to convince us that they're just like us. He will give a £1.2 billion inheritance tax cut to the richest 2% in Britain, with the benefits going to the 3,000 wealthiest estates worth more than £2 million (including his wife's). Then he promises to end the 50% top rate of tax, giving another £2.4 billion to the richest 1%. Furthermore, he has pledged to cut taxes on the pensions of the richest, handing another £3.2 billion to the same folks. Adding insult to injury, his marriage tax relief policies will give 13 times more to the rich than the poor. To pay for this, he will slash programmes for the middle and the poor, like the Child Trust Fund, SureStart and state schools.
Paradoxically, Brown, leader of the party who led his nation into its unholy alliance with finance, was favoured to win the final TV debate that was to focus on the economy. Despite being the Chancellor of the Exchequer who was the financial architect of the New Labour party that helped destroy the financial world, he's still trying to convince the voters that he is the man to navigate today's rocky economic waters. Sure, we can blame the banks, after all they did purposely set people's homes on fire by packaging loans in such a way that they'd fail, then sold them to the investing public while taking short positions in order to profit when the securities crashed. They bet against our cities and states instead of performing the socially beneficial role of capital allocation. Today's financial markets rent seeking behavior more often than not leads them to destroy value. The banks insatiable appetite has grown to country-sized proportions, and with the UK's debt rivaling that of Greece, there's no guarantee that having maintained the pound will serve as a defense once the PIGS have been consumed.
Both Clegg and Cameron picked up on the populist anti-bank meme in their final debate, referring to them as casinos, yet, the worst actor of all in this saga has been the governments. The Conservative leader got it right, saying at the 29:48 mark, "if you look at the Labour record over the last 13 years, they did very much hitch the fortunes of the economy to the city of London. And we got in a situation where we ended up with the whole economy having to serve the banks rather than the other way around." Fortunately, Clegg reminded the viewers at 30:51 that "both Conservative and Labour governments now for ages have been far too close to the City, basically preferring the interests of one square mile of the city of London rather than 100,000 square miles of the United Kingdom." No matter how much the Conservativespin doctorstry to hide it, Cameron and his team are the broken system. A system that has been rigged by the people in charge, it's not regulation that's bad, it's the neoliberal policy of global capitalism through government/military interventionism to protect the interests of multinational corporations.
Regulatory capture was invented by the railroads but perfected by the financial industry. A financial world of capitalism without capital was enabled by Wall Street's friendly takeover of the US Treasury; Regan came from Merrill Lynch to be followed by the likes of Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson and little Timmy Geithner, men who have made immense fortunes thanks to the rules they helped create. Brown's Labour promises to maintain the status quo and Cameron's Conservative plan to further enrich the banks don't address the problem. When RBS failed in 2008, it had a balance sheet worth roughly 1.5 times the UK economy, do we really want to see what happens when even bigger banks fail? Yet even today, the plutocrats are aware that we still have the power to change the system. Smaller states have to fall in line or face regime change, but for the first time in a long time, the British electorate have the opportunity to attain change through the ballot box. First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us. Then we win.
All this makes the UK's May 6th election actually matter. Not in the fake American lackey kinda way in order to "punch above its weight" on the international stage, but in the real change the world kind. With a mid-term election coming up in the US, perhaps a UK upset result could somehow manage to get a bit of press coverage, doubtful I know, but I can dream. Without some kind of wake up call, the world will continue to be subjected to a system that it has lost confidence in, slaving away to maintain your bank credit rating while paying taxes to support their socialized system of profit and loss. Here in Poland, the voter is basically given the same no choice, a fundamentalist PiS or corporatist PO. In Hungary we've just seen a dramatic gain in parliamentary elections for the neo-fascist Jobbik party while Greece has forced the world to chip in to maintain their debt payments to those banks. What the UK and world need is not more of the same; a new way of seeing things is needed to tackle the growing threats of climate change, terrorism, oil dependency, overpopulation, resource depletion, access to clean water and TBTF banks with their global reach and implications. Choice disappeared when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton entered 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue respectively, it's time to break loose from the straight jacket. Who knows how it'll all turn out, who even knows if Clegg will even bring any change, but it's worth finding out, there's still time. After all the UK still isn't in quite the state of the States, but they certainly have been trying their best.
Part-time recluse, part-time rockstar,full-time ranter. Paying the bills teaching English in the wild west of capitalism.
Hope you like what you read, or that you learned something new. Don't forget to leave a comment if you agree, disagree or just want to discuss further! Oh yeah, subscribe above or burn the feed down below to make sure you don't miss anything else!
and turned it once again into what Teddy Roosevelt called America's "
. This is the book that Margaret Thatcher famously banged down on the table at a meeting with her staff in 1975, saying, “
) to try to soften the picture. Despite this, the official rate of unemployment in the United Kingdom increased to 9.1% in the years 1979-89 after it had been 3.4% between 1973–79 and 1.9% between 1960-73. Another good way to lower the roll call of the eligible workforce is to put them behind bars. Prison populations have exploded due in part to market incentives driving prison providers to influence (read: bribe) judges to incarcerate more and more people. All the while prisons are being built by private contractors and filling them with bodies sent to them by their judges. The 
Posts
