After the debacle ....the whitewash begins

Well, what a momentous week! It started with the 'invincible' Lehman Brothers going bust and moved on through AIG and HBOS, not to mention Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs - both of which are still reputed to be in trouble.

But it gets even better because after the $200 billion bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac we now have the US government planning to buy up all those toxic mortgages to the tune of $700 billion dollars! How they have managed to come up with that figure I don't know, but it may be more, just as Lloyds TSB's takeover of HBOS my yet run into difficulties. That makes George W Bush just about the biggest socialist in history. Of course American citizens are right to be worried about where all this is going to lead. We are not out of the woods yet.

In the UK, Robert Peston the BBC's Business Editor said - "The UK's unsustainable economic dependence on the City and financial services is coming home to roost." But who has been Chancellor for most of that period? None other than Prime Minister Gordon himself. And Gordon has been hamming it up this week trying to absolve himself of any blame. In fact, he is trying to take the credit for the buy out of HBOS by Lloyds TSB, something which may well yet rebound on him. But lets look at what Gordon has done since the collapse of Northern Rock a whole year ago .... er ... exactly zip, zilch, zer0 ... er ..... one big fat NOTHING. Only now, after the wheels have finally come off, has Gordon, on the eve of a Labour Party conference, said he will do what it takes to sort out the mess. Oh, well, that's alright then.

You can bet Bush, Blair. Brown, Bernanke, McCain, Greenspan et al will all be doing their level best in the coming months to airbrush their role in this debacle out of history. But if the panelists of BBC Radio Four's Any Questions have their way it will be a very easy task. When Friday's panel was asked whose fault the meltdown of the financial system was - Bridget Roswell, who, apparently, is an economist, said that it was the "fault of all of us". Well thank you Bridget, now we know. It was our fault that thousands of dodgy mortgages were sold in the USA (and UK), it was our fault that governments did the bankers bidding and deregulated the financial system , and it was our fault that regulators did nothing. Now I guess it is 'our fault' that we are having to stump up billions of taxpayers money to prop up the fat cats. Of course non of the other panelists, including Menzies Campbell, had either the guts or gumption to challenge Bridget's erroneous view. No Bridget, it wasn't 'our' fault it was the fault of the aforementioned individuals, the fat cats of Capitalism and their flunkeys.

I tell you what - it is our fault, though. It is our fault that we have tolerated the politicians and financiers that have lead us into this mess. Its time for change. Join the Green Party and help make that change happen.

New Labour's free market economic disaster

At the weekend we had Lehman Brothers going bust , then AIG having a $85 billion handout from the US Government and today HBOS merging with Lloyds TSB. In the latter case the government has been bending over backwards to avoid having to pay out for another Northern Rock, even to the extent of breaking competition rules. So the new British banking behemoth will have 28% of the mortgage market - good for customers eh?

But lets not forget that although much of the credit crunch originated in the USA, New Labour has a lot to answer for. And who was Chancellor while the conditions for the crunch were being created? - none other than Gordon Brown. Mr 'prudence', who claimed to have eliminated boom and bust, has now lead us into the biggest bust since 1929. The 'sound' economy he created over here was based on a housing boom and ballooning credit. That is economic mismanagement. Notice that the biggest casualties in all this are the USA and UK - the cheerleaders for free market deregulation and privatisation. Do you hear of a housing collapse in Germany or France - no - they follow the European Social model much despised by Gordon Brown.

Blair and Brown encouraged the City-lead deregulatory financial model that got us into this mess in the first place and turned the UK into a tax haven for non doms and other tax dodgers. Well now the chickens have come home to roost. If Brown had any integrity he'd resign and if his party had any guts they'd sack him. Sadly, neither is likely to happen.

We do not need GM technology to feed the world

A recent report has highlighted the fact that while enough food is being produced to feed the world's population 800 million people are still going hungry. The report, based on the findings of 400 scientists from around the world, and chaired by professor Robert Watson, the government's Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, also concluded that GM technology was not the answer to feeding the world's population.

Not surprisingly, these conclusions have not gone down at all well with agribusiness corporations like Monsanto. They don't want to feed the world, they want to make huge profits by controlling the food chain with GM technology which effectively puts the farmers, and the crops they produce, in their pockets. That is why the GM companies have been buying up traditional seed companies - they want to monopolise world markets. If they succeed you will end up with no choice other than to eat GM, unless you can source food locally. But if GM is used here in the UK it is unlikely that non GM agriculture would remain uncontaminated.

GM technology is a pig in poke. We are told it increases yield but there is little concrete evidence to support this. In fact there is evidence that GM reduces yield. GM crops are a vast unregulated gamble. We don't know what the possible long terms effects on the environment or harm to human health could be. There are a number of potential dangers such as harm to human health and damage to biodiversity and environmental systems.

The simple fact is that we don't need GM to feed the world. So why take the gamble - especially when the main beneficiaries are large corporations and their shareholders - not the poor or the hungry.

Brown provides too little too late....again

Many people were disappointed when the government announced a stamp duty holiday for properties costing up to £175,000. It was rightly denounced as too little too late to stimulate the housing market and help first-time buyers.

Now we have the latest gem from Gordon - £910 million for household insulation to tackle fuel poverty. £560 million of which is old money. We also know that the work to insulate all the houses of the 'fuel poor' can't be done before winter. Which means the old and the poor are likely to freeze. Meanwhile the energy companies are making billions in extra profits and laughing all the way to the government bailed out bank. Much of the extra cash that they are making is going where you would expect - straight into the pockets of shareholders. The energy suppliers paid £1.64bn in dividends in 2007 - £257m more than the year before.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader, has called for a windfall tax - she wrote:-

"When the fuel crisis started to bite, a strong leader would have set their sights on achieving energy independence. Instead, our prime minister went running to the profiteers-in-chief to beg for just enough more oil to keep us dependent. Just three of these companies – BP, Centrica, and Shell – together made £1000 profit every second over the first 6 months of this year. Every penny that the oil price inches up, is a new surge of cash from the pockets of working families, students, the elderly and the disabled, directly into the bank accounts of the world's petro-giants."

It's unlikely that Gordon Brown, who is deeply committed to protecting the interests of big business, will be shifted on a windfall tax. But his obstinacy in the face of the overwhelming case for such a tax might just result in him finally being shifted out of office.

What is "progressive"?

Progressive politics is an alternative to conservatism but not as far to the left as socialism. Progressive politics is about social justice and workers rights. Franklin D Roosevelt was a progressive. Of course we have shifted so far to the right nowadays, and the left is so weak and divided, that hardly anyone dares mention socialism (or even social democracy) anymore.

'Progressive' has been co-opted by 'modern' political parties because it sounds good - i.e. forward looking - and, for parties of the 'left', avoids using the dreaded 's' word. But being 'progressive' has to be a pretty vacuous concept if it is being used by New Labour and the Tories. Of course, neither the Tories or New Labour are progressive parties in the true sense of the word - they both espouse reactionary free market policies. The reactionary right are trying to co-opt the term progressive to describe their politics thereby devaluing it as a concept, just as they have stolen to term 'reform' which means 'making things better'. Does this matter? Well yes it does because it confuses people and provides yet another distraction from the issues that we should be talking about.

I think socialism's obituary has been written far too soon. But its interesting to read 'lefties' squabbling on CiF about what left wing politics means nowadays. What they need to understand is that nothing has changed - the same old conflict between Capital and Labour is continuing as it always has. Class is just as important as it ever was, and good old imperialism is going strong too - they just call it globalisation these days. All this has been well understood for well over a century thanks to someone called Marx, and others. Give these 'lefties' a couple of decades and they might manage to come up with some coherent ideas for a way forward and ... er ... call it socialism.

The Green Party elects a new leader

Caroline Lucas has been elected as the first ever leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. I voted for Caroline and I wish her every success in the job. I believe that she has got the ability and integrity to make a good leader for the Party.

But she is going to have to be tough. When it was suggested (this time around) that the GP elect a leader I thought twice about it. Why? Because I know that the media agenda will be to neutralise the GP's radical programme of reform by making the GP conform to the neoliberal agenda that every other mainstream party has adopted.

That means that our leader will come under great pressure to act and behave as every other leader does, and that isn't what the GP is about. They will also shine a spotlight into her private life in an attempt to rake up anything they can use to discredit her. They are probably sifting through her (recycled) rubbish as I write this.

The Party agreed, if I recall correctly, that we would have an elected leader for a two year term. There will obviously be pressure to increase this into a 'permanent' leadership position - so that the GP leader will become an elected dictator. The media like such 'strong' leaders because once they are 'onside' there is little the rest of the party can do to change anything - remember Tony? We have to make sure we resist these pressures. If we don't the GP will become like all the other parties - and then it won't be worth voting for.

What I like about Sarah Palin

I have been meaning to comment on the Presidential contest in the USA, particularly on Barak Obama. I haven't done so, so far, for two reasons; firstly I keep getting distracted by events and issues elsewhere; and secondly I can't really find much to say about Barak except I hope he wins. I'd have liked to comment on his policies, but I don't know what they are. He does represent hope against the darkness of another Republican presidency. But that's about it - as far as I know.

So what about the opposition? McCain was on the left of the Republican Party and surely it would have been better if he had beaten Bush to the nomination eight years ago. But now he is in the serious business of getting elected he has, inevitably, been moving ever rightwards since his campaign started. He one described the religious right in the US as 'agents of intolerance' but that sort of rhetoric has long been dropped.

Now he comes up with his trump card - Sarah Palin. Why is she so useful? Well obviously she will attract support from the religious right who are suspicious of McCain. But most importantly she will help to polarise the election and deflect the debate from things that matter.

Since the late sixties Capitalists have been successfully dividing America along 'lifestyle' lines. Jonathan Freedland recently called it the 'Culture Wars' in the Guardian. It goes like this - you kick up an almighty big fuss about things which divide and distract the nation from the important issues of the day. In America the Capitalist controlled media makes a big deal out of abortion, gay marriage, and 'family values'. Palin's role is to polarise the debate, and deflect it away from the really important issues such as Iraq, the new cold war, controlling Wall Street, taxing the rich, climate change, healthcare and employment.

The more time the electorate spend squabbling about abortion, gay marriage, and family values, the less time they'll spend on the big issues, and that plays right into the hands of the Capitalists. It'll be interesting to see how Obama deals with this. He has done fairly well so far but not well enough. To win, he has to bring the big issues back centre stage - in spite of the media. If he can't do that he may well fail.

So how did we get the title of this blog? Well I can't think of anything that Sarah Palin and I could agree on; She is a Christian - I am an Atheist; She is against abortion - I am pro-choice; She is against gay marriage - I am for it; She likes guns - I don't; She likes to kill animals - I don't; She likes to promote ignorance in the form of creationism - I'm a biologist and a qualified teacher and I know that creationism is not science, its a flat earth belief; She likes war in Iraq - and elsewhere - I don't; And finally She is stupid enough to support a political party which defecates on her class - I'm not.

So what do I like about her? - what I like about her is the fact she is prepared to stand up on her hind legs and say what she believes in. And I've had a bellyful of politicians on the left who haven't got the guts to stand up and say what they believe in, or perhaps haven't even got the guts to believe in it anymore.

Culture wars: how we are divided

Rulers have always maintained their power over society by dividing the ruled. Racism, for example, has proved a useful tool for those who dominate society to exploit the people beneath them. Some people think that racism is a 'natural' phenomenon - that its normal to dislike or fear people who are different to themselves. But racism has been deliberately manufactured, and used by imperialists and capitalists.

In the early days of the British Empire in India the leading colonists admired Indian culture and even adopted its dress and practices. Warren Hastings, the first Governor General, was one of these. But Hastings was deemed to be fraternising too much with the Indians. He was recalled to Britain and impeached. After that, racism against the Indian population was fostered by the British. The same racist measures were used during the slave trade. Much easier to enslave people and expropriate the wealth of their countries if you can see them as being inferior.

Of course the same could be said of sexism and the fostering of prejudice against the poor. But in the USA since the late sixties capitalists have been manufacturing a new kind of division - culture wars. Why is America so obsessed by gay marriage, abortion and issues like 'family values'? Because the capitalist controlled media push these divisive issues in order to distract people from the real issues.

In this sense McCain's choice of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was a smart move. Not only will it bring in the religious right's support but it threatens more than ever to move the election away from things that really matter such as Iraq, the fostering of a new cold war, controlling Wall Street, the economy and employment.

It will be interesting to see how Obama and the Democrats react to this. He should focus on the economy and real issues. But will he be able to turn the debate away from Palin and on to the real issues. If he fails to do so he may just fail to elected.

Capitalists create poverty then report on it....

A recent report from the World Bank (WB) estimates that 400Million more people are living in poverty than was previously thought. Here is a quote:

"August 26, 2008—New poverty estimates published by the World Bank reveal that 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than US$1.25 a day in 2005, down from 1.9 billion (one in two) in 1981."

Note that they are talking about poverty in the 'developing world' here. No mention of poverty in countries like the USA where about 37 Million live below the official US poverty line. Incredibly 58.5% of Americans will find themselves living in poverty between the ages of 25 and 75 at some stage in their lives .

Of course you might also want to consider the measure of poverty at $1.25 a day. When you look at the number of people who live on less than $2 a day the number doubles to 3 Billion, about half the world's population.

Its interesting that the World Bank should show such concern. Particularly when privatisation, deregulation and expropriation of natural resources by multinational corporations, are policies that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) force on countries in the developing world - its called globalisation. In April protesters demonstrated against these globalisation policies at the World Bank meeting in Georgetown.

Countries like the USA and the UK were able to develop their economies protected from the kind of predatory capitalist measures supported by the WB AND IMF. That is how our economies became developed. The developed west, through the WB and IMF is now denying 'developing countries' that same opportunity to develop by insisting on the form of economic imperialism called globalisation.

What we want is a secular state education system

Who wants faith schools? Lord Adonis apparently. Lord Adonis, in case you didn't know, is Tony Blair's unelected chum, who seems to have control of education policy in the UK. Now what does he know about education? Has he been a teacher or had any experience of schools apart from being a pupil? Not according to Wikipedia. But isn't that just what you would expect from New Labour - don't bother about any kind of useful expertise - just parachute your mates in to run the country. Tony knows best. Anyway, apparently his Lordship likes 'Faith' schools, and because he likes them we all have to have them.

Not only that, but its OK to discriminate against teachers who are not Christians (or Jews or Muslims) by not giving them jobs in faith schools. You can't discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality or race but its now quite legal to say - " We are not going to give you this job because you are an atheist". So are we now going to have that grotesque farce whereby teachers are going to have to pretend to be Christian to get a job - just as parents have to - to get their children into school? All of this is utterly unacceptable and is being foisted on the English people. Its something we just don't want. What the hell are people in the Labour party doing allowing this to happen!

Taxpayers money should not be used to promote religious interests. And that includes faith schools. Its simple we need, and want a secular state school system. Just 2% of people in England a regular churchgoers - this is not a christian society much as the faith brigade would like us all to believe.

We had a Tory government which neglected the state school system because of antipathy and now we have a New labour government forcing faith schools on us dishonestly whilst making false claims that such schools are better.

Fortunately, not all Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths are narrow minded enough to want segregated schools and communities. A group called Accord is working to promote a secular education system bringing people of all faiths and none together. They deserve our support. Lets work together to provide schools for all our children.

What is Socialism?

We live in reactionary times. Times, in which, the political left appears to be unable to respond to the dominance of the political right. Capitalism is everywhere triumphant. The left is in crisis. So what has happened?

Firstly we need to go back to 1989 the year in which the Soviet Union collapsed. The champagne corks must have been popping in every capitalist boardroom. Why? because as long as the Soviet Union existed it was possible to believe in a viable alternative to capitalism. That gave the left an awful lot of strength. There isn't the time and space here to go into the pro's and cons of the Soviet Union. Was it really a workers state? Was it state capitalism? Was it just a brutal dictatorship? Suffice to say the Soviet Union was not a bad as Western Capitalist propaganda made it seem. People had housing and healthcare and it was a much more equal society than anything we have ever experienced. An awful lot of good people gave their lives trying to create a better world. Their efforts deserve to be acknowledged.

But back to the left. After 1989 it became seized with doubt - trapped like a rabbit in the headlights of the oncoming capitalist juggernaut. But how did things fold so easily? I think there are a number of reasons. One key one is the fact that a lot of the old Marxists and Socialists, people like E P Thompson simply died out. The people who replaced them didn't have the experience of war, conflict and struggle that those those old Socialists did, they were tough cookies. Socialists had gone soft and Socialist politicians in Europe had been sucked into the Eurocracy, expense accounts, and (largely) meaningless debates in Strasbourg.

So where do we go now? What next for the left? Well socialism of course! But hang on isn't that a bit 20th century? Isn't socialism dead as Martin Kettle claimed recently? Well no it isn't. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of socialism; Socialism with a big 'S' and socialism with a small 's'. Socialism with a big 'S' - the Socialism that arose from the work of people like Marx, Engels and Lenin. By the the late 1960s Socialism had become dogmatic, doctrinaire and sterile That does not mean that Marx, for example, was dogmatic, just that Socialism had become riddled with a particularly deadening kind of dogmatism. Socialism had ceased to be empowering and vibrant. Changing economic circumstances and disillusionment with the Soviet Union helped to bring about the decline of this mainstream Socialism.

But socialism with a small 's' is, and always has been, alive and well. Socialist ideas pre-date Marx by a very long time. Wat Tyler was a socialist, so was John Lilliburne. Because socialism with a small 's' is simply the politics of putting people first - of need not greed. You don't need to have read Das Kapital to understand that kind of socialism - anyone can.

Of course Socialism is so unpopular that some people believe the 's' word should never be mentioned. If they can think of a better word to describe the politics of need not greed then I'd like to hear it. 'Progressive' politics just isn't enough. If David Cameron can call himself a progressive - he's not really - then that's a good reason for not using the word. The fact that Cameron would never dream of calling himself a socialist is good enough for me.

To be honest I'm glad that doctrinaire Socialism is dead. Too much focus on theory, rather than practice, too much self indulgence, too many varieties, too many meetings, too much sectarianism - too much baggage by half. We need to learn from the mistakes that Socialists made in the past without underestimating the great value and contribution of socialists like Marx. We need to unite and move forward with the simple politics of social, economic and environmental justice. That's what socialism, at its core, is really about.

Organic food is not only good for you its essential for the future

The looming recession has re-ignited the debate about organic food. We are told that people are turning away from organic food because it is too expensive. This is just not true - it isn't too expensive. The reality is that we are used to stuffing ourselves with cheap food which is bad for our health. Instead of it being - you are what you eat - we have treated food like any other commodity in our consumer capitalist society. Well it isn't just a commodity. How do poor people get to be so obese? Answer they eat cheap processed food which is slowly killing them. What we need to do is eat better and eat less. We would be healthier and happier and our wallets would not be lighter.

What we also need to do is get agribusiness out of farming because its destroying to fertility of our land, causing soil erosion and feeding us stuff that is getting lower and lower in useful vitamins and minerals i.e. the stuff you buy in a supermarket. Not to mention the poor standards of animal husbandry and the fact that the animals we eat are being pumped full of antibiotics and other drugs.

Only organic farming provides a viable way for the future. Unfortunately organic farmers have to deal with the massive agribusiness PR machine plus governments and the well salaried scientists who have a vested interest in supporting it all.

Big business hates organic farming because it doesn't allow them to make megabucks out of all the pesticides. GM technology and other stuff we don't need to grow decent food.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. We have passed peak oil. Try supporting factory farming in the absence of oil - it can't be done.

How capitalism creates poverty

In response to an earlier comment on my blog, I said I was in the process of writing a paper on how I believe Capitalism creates poverty rather than wealth. I've been working on that for several years now and progress is slow because I'm doing a lot of other things as well, but I intend to try and finish it within the next six months or so.

Of course, in a sense it is obvious that Capitalism creates poverty - you only need to look around the world to see that! We have a small number of very rich people and a very large number of poor people.

For those who want to know more, here is a brief explanation. Firstly, its important to understand that when I talk about capitalists I don't mean the man (or woman) who runs the corner shop, the local restaurateur or farmer, or any one of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. I mean Capitalism with a big C. That is the multinational corporations, the banks and financiers, the speculators and people who have inherited large amounts of wealth. In the earlier to mid-part of the 20th Century, after the great crash of 1929, these Capitalists were subjected to democratic controls and regulation through Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the USA, and also by the post-war settlement in the UK. Those controls were matched by an increase in public provision, nationalisation, and welfare, notably the National Health Service in the UK.

The result of this change brought about a more equal society and led to the development of what we call Middle Britain in the UK today. Millions of people were given opportunities - such as a University education - they would never have had if things had been as they were before all this happened. This, combined with relatively strong trade unions lead to a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor, and a much wider distribution of wealth.

Ever since it happened, the Capitalists have been trying to roll back the gains that your parents and grandparents made through these changes. They want to get ever richer, and to do this they need to make all of us poorer. For a while, the Soviet Union acted as a brake on the ambitions of capitalists. The Capitalists were terrified that communism might spread and were content to allow us in the 'West' to get better off (it was all right for them to continue to screw people in Asia, South America and Africa). Capitalist materialism had to be contrasted with the misery of life under the communists. The Soviet Union may not have been good for Russians, Ukrainians and Georgians, but it was good for people in the West.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties gave Capitalists the green light to begin the process of screwing the rest of us. This process had already started in the UK in the 1970s with the removal of the controls imposed on the movement of money (exchange controls) and the hobbling of the trade unions in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the retreat of the political left, which failed to respond to these changes, meant that big business was able to capture the EU just as it had gained control (once more) of the USA under Ronald Reagan.

Now that Capitalists make the rules, they are making sure that we will soon be working as cheap labour for them. How do they do it? Well through governments such as New Labour, through the European Union and most especially through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). These bodies enforce the globalisation of the world economy. They do it through a set of rules which force countries to open up their economies to big corporations through privatisation and deregulation. Health, education, pensions and welfare programmes are slashed, the natural resources of these countries are expropriated by the big corporations. The result is increasing poverty for the people and increasing wealth for the Capitalists. This is not business, or trade or commerce nor is it even economics - it is economic imperialism, it is the looting of countries on an unimaginable scale, it is the greatest heist in history.

What happens to countries that resist? their governments get overthrown, crises, are engineered and if that doesn't work bombs are dropped. Because make no mistake about it the Capitalists have an army - it is called NATO. Take Yugoslavia for example. Before the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia was relatively prosperous. Now it consists of a handful of small, impoverished states. When NATO troops invaded Kosovo, they forcibly privatised the collective factories. The Iraqis, after the American invasion, are now poorer than they were under Saddam Hussein. Under the new Iraqi government, trade unionists are being suppressed. And so the pattern is repeated.

I guess you probably believe it can't happen here. Er... well yes it can and it is. We have already seen the gap between rich a poor increase massively since New Labour came into power. A programme of privatisation and deregulation is rolling back the gains that our parents benefited so much from. Of course, people in the UK have been conned on a massive scale. These changes have been sold to them as inevitable, as progress, as the bright shiny new private future, as opposed to the bad old days of the dreaded 1970s - when the UK was a much more equal society than it is now.

Firstly, we have the millions of de-unionised low paid workers who work for the pittance of the minimum wage, and the cheap labour imported from the poorer parts of Europe. Privatisation of public services is weakening the remaining Trade Union base. Now they are going for the middle classes. Privatisation of health and legal services means that the once independent doctors and lawyers are going to end up as employees of Tesco and Virgin. We are going to end up as mere customers rather than stakeholders in health and education, and we are going to end up paying more - for less.

Of course there is still someway to go but the end result of this is that you are going to end up poorer than your parents and your children will be poorer than you are. It's not too late to halt and reverse this process, but we need to start doing something about it and soon. That is why I joined the Green Party. Because it has policies which will reverse what is happening to us now.

I've been doing some reading and research recently, and I'll just leave you with a couple of things that are well worth looking at. The first is a lecture by Dr Michael Parenti. Although I was aware of the issues he discusses in his lecture, I had never heard of him before I came across the video whist surfing the web recently. The lecture, delivered in 2002 before the Iraq war, is one hour long but is an hour well spent. The second is a book I'm reading called The Gods That Failed by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson. Although I've not finished it, yet, it is a book I could warmly recommend to anyone who wants to know more about how and why Capitalism creates poverty. I just want to finish this with part of a quote I found in that book. It was written by Jeremy Seabrook in Unemployment ( Quartet Books, 1982) :

" The persistence of poverty in spite of the enormous material advances shows that the poor are there for reasons that have nothing to do with scarcity of resources (in any way that scarcity could be interpreted by common sense) but everything to do with ideology.

The very idea of sufficiency is one that capitalism cannot acknowledge. The possibility that a society could produce enough to ensure the well-being and comfort of all its people is a terrible blasphemy against the deep purposes of capitalism. The drive for more, for accumulation, for increase, the generation of wealth, imply dearth, wants and loss elsewhere; and the unchanging symbiosis of rich and poor only reflects this simple equation"

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Forty years ago it was Mick Jagger, now it is Pete Doherty. The police's move to ban Babyshambles's performance at the Moonfest would be laughable were it not serious. Police persuaded magistrates to back a ban by using experts who said that Doherty could 'gee up' the crowd into a dangerous frenzy! Well excuse me Mr Plod but 'geeing up' a crowd is what rock music is all about.

Comparisons with the prosecution of Jagger and Richards don't go very far though. The police action then was crude and backed by a 'moral panic' about rock music - but we have er.. moved on since then - generations have been 'geed up' in the meantime. No, this is something more dangerous - the police as arbiters of our conduct and behaviour - that is a police state.

Hats off to Johann Hari

Johann Hari has done us all a service in his latest polemic. If you believe in living in a free society his argument is simple and irrefutable - no religion is above criticism. Its strange how, in the 21st century, that many people still don't seem to get this. Either they are religionists and can't cope with critical comment about their religion, or they are unable to discriminate between say, criticism of Islam and 'islamophobia'. Islamophobia literally means 'fear of Islam' and I can sympathise totally with people who fear the Islamist fanatics who claim to speak for all Muslims, and seek to impose their reactionary, misogynistic, totalitarian theocracy on all of us. But in the context that is is popularly used it means a prejudice against Islam, and Muslims in general. I've no doubt that there are many people including those who support the BNP who are Islamophobes. However, criticism of Islam and Islamophobia are not one and the same thing.

We need to understand that Muslims are trying to stifle dissent and criticism of Islam on a global scale, through the UN. They demand 'respect' which means that they cannot tolerate unfavorable views on Islam, and seek all such views to be censored . After the Danish cartoons debacle, which was deliberately blown out of all proportion by Islamic extremists, death threats were issued not just against the publishers, but anyone else who dared to print the cartoons. Guess what  - not many people did. The 'free' press caved in.

When Osama Bin Laden threatened to kill westerners for political reasons George W Bush and Tony Blair both spoke out in condemnation, and vowed to bring him to justice. But when Islamic extremists threatened to kill westerners over the cartoons i.e. for religious reasons, Bush and Blair were silent. Why?, is it OK to kill for religious reasons? Of course not, but Bush and Blair are religious themselves, hence the silence. These double standards have given Muslim extremists the confidence to think they can silence dissent  with their bullying  threats. That is why it is so important that  all those who believe in free speech should support what Johann Hari has done.