Now we know for sure – Britain is a turnip republic

This week we discovered that Rupert Murdoch and his son James knew nothing about the criminal activities that took place in News International, the company they controlled, even though their chief protégé Rebekah Brooks had admitted to a parliamentary select committee as long ago as 2003 that the News of the World (NotW) had paid money to police officers. In fact, in a day of questioning by MPs for the Murdochs, and for ex-senior figures from the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and John Yates, we learnt that not one of the people who appeared before the select committees was to blame for the failure to deal with the NotW phone hacking scandal – so that’s all right then.

But it isn’t all right. What we really learnt on Tuesday, including from David Cameron’s flapping speech in Nigeria, is that Britain is run by a collusive class of chums who are well paid to run things but don’t really appear to know what is going on - or is it rather that they choose not to know about certain goings on? Of course, not knowing about wrongdoing may be a defence against criminality but it isn’t a defence against incompetence, complacency, negligence and poor management.

These are the same people, the media moguls who have a corrupting influence on our democracy, the policemen who have lost their moral compass, and the spineless politicians, the very same people who meet at parties in Oxfordshire and posh restaurants in London. The hearings at the parliamentary select committees served to confirm what we already suspected, that Britain is a corrupt society, a turnip republic where people are on the make, driven by power and profit, a society dominated by banks and other capitalist corporations.

But hang on, that’s how it supposed to be isn’t it? This is UK Plc after all, go getting, ‘free’ market Britain, where private gain is good, the market is to be worshiped  and public welfare is old fashioned nonsense. A place where you are meant to trample over others to get to the top, where paying your fair share of taxes makes you some kind of sucker. This neoliberal enslavement of our society to the market, which is  being driven by our ruling capitalist class, and their tame politicians in the mainstream parties, is leading to inevitable economic decline. In other words -  the very people who tell us they can make us all richer are really making us all poorer. And, as we continue to become poorer our society will become more brutal, repressive, corrupt and unequal. As I said in a recent post about Thatcherism and the Arab Spring – as Egypt struggles to become more like us, we are becoming daily more like Egypt’

If we want to live a fair and more equal society we have to tame the market and make everyone pay their fair contribution to our common welfare. We can do this by re-asserting democracy and putting our people at the heart of our economy. To do the latter we need a strong public sector, and a mixed economy where capitalism has largely been replaced by a sustainable social market. The alternative is decline; morally, socially and economically. We have reached a moment in history which is akin to the time when the Roman Empire declined and collapsed. Then, as now, almost no one believed that the collapse was possible but the warning signs were there for all to see.

SS Titanic-Capitalism is still heading straight for the rocks

Perhaps I should have entitled this post the 'comedy of errors'? The problem with that title that I have, is that the current crisis of capitalism, which is manifesting itself in the sovereign debt crisis, is being so cack-handedly managed by our leading politicians that it is really a human tragedy, rather than a comedy.

In the UK, the NoW phone hacking scandal is moving so quickly that people are forgetting about the main event - the slow motion collapse of the world economy, and the feeble attempts of politicians in Europe to deal with it - see this. The reason for the failure of politicians in Europe to sort out the economic crisis is obvious; they are completely blinkered; they are so conditioned to neoliberal 'free' market fanaticism and looking after themselves and the rich, that they, like the Captain of the Titanic, are going down with the ship.

Its just a pity that there are many many hundreds of thousands of Europeans, and other millions of peoples around the world who are going to suffer in the process. They don't deserve to suffer - the politicians do.

Loony right trumpet the benefits of slavery

I just had to do a post on this. I have been wondering how long it would be before someone from the right in the USA started to bang on about the benefits of slavery. Well why not? Since the financial collapse caused by neoliberal 'economic' policies, which started in 2007, the capitalist class have been trying to make ordinary people pay the bill through a succession of bailouts. Look what has happened to workers in the USA. In places like Wisconsin workers pay, pensions and bargaining rights have come under attack. How long would it be before workers were expected to work for nothing? Why hang around? Why not just bring back slavery? It would be so much simpler, after all.

In the past few years, the loony rightists of the Tea Party have plumbed new depths for extreme 'free' market bullshit. So it comes as no surprise that Michelle Bachmann, their current darling, should have signed up to a pledge which said that children in the USA who were born to black slaves were better cared for than the modern day offspring of black Americans. Huh? The opening statement of the pledge actually read:

"Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President"

This is the kind of racist extremist ignorance and prejudice that the lunatics of the Tea Party embody. Pledging in itself is just the kind of saddo activity which right-wing Americans love to indulge in. Of course, Bachmann has distanced herself from the statement, claiming she didn't read it, despite the fact she signed it - and, doh! - it was on the front page. The problem here is that Bachmann wants to be president of the USA. Ordinarily, we would look on people like Michelle Bachmann as a bunch of relatively harmless backwoods knuckle-draggers, but we should be more wary, because if let loose, the Michelle Bachmanns of this world pose a genuine threat to any decent society. As far as we know, unlike other female Tea Party nine day wonders,  she's not a witch, though being a witch would obviously be an improvement on being what she is.

We can win the economic argument - so lets do it!

"Its the economy stupid!" - it sure is. The economy is just about all we hear about these days, and its no wonder, because we are going through the biggest economic crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. But the problem we have is that the neoliberal right are in the ascendancy, they have the power. This means that the response to the economic crisis is the same as it was during the Great Depression. Does this mean we have learnt nothing in the past 80 years? To some extent yes, but the real problem is that the same kind of people are in control now as were in control in the late 1920s - capitalist corporations and the politicians who support them. The Great Depression lead to immense hardship and deprivation for people around the world. In America, the slump, despite the uplift given by Roosevelt with the New Deal, lasted over a decade until the end of World War II. It was the massive US spending during the war economy that lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression. Without that lift the world economy would probably  have remained stagnant for many more years, possibly decades.

In the mid 1930s  the economist John Maynard Keynes explained that in a economic slump governments needed to take counter-cyclical measures to revive the economy. In other words, you don't cut spending in a recession - you increase it. But Keynes's ideas were ignored then - just as they are being ignored now. Then as now, for reasons of class, politicians preferred to cuts jobs and welfare rather than increase spending or increase taxes on the rich - who could have afforded to pay more. Belt tightening was, as usual, forced on the poorest in society.

So where does that leave us? The sovereign debt crisis which is now engulfing Europe and the USA is a direct result of the banking crisis known in the UK as the 'credit crunch'.  This crisis would have brought down the world economy, if it had not been for the fact that the state intervention, both here and abroad, propped up the faltering world private banking system. The resulting losses (costs) were nationalised and the gains (profits) remained in private hands. The people who caused the crisis got away free whilst ordinary people picked up the tab, bailing out the banks, and paying by losing their jobs, homes and pensions.

But that was only round one. The debt form the economic crisis didn't just  disappear - it became the sovereign debt which is crippling Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal, and which now threatens the USA itself with debt default. So, the people are  being made to pay for the crisis a second time around. The name of the game now is austerity. Yet more cuts in welfare and more jobs losses - all to protect the same people  - the private sector, the banks and bondholders - financial capitalism. But as Keynes showed more cuts and austerity won't fix the problem - it will make it worse. That means the best we can hope for in the UK and Europe is economic stagnation, continuing high unemployment, and increasing hardship and poverty. The result is that your children will inevitably be poorer than you are and your grandchildren will be poorer still, in a society blighted by homelessness and inequality.

In the UK we have our own austerity crisis. The Chancellor of the Exchequer,  George Osborne, has taken a reckless ideological and political gamble with our economy by instituting savage austerity cuts of £81 billion. His aim is to use the debt crisis as cover to slash the welfare state - which is something the right have always hated. He is hoping that the economy will recover enough so that he can announce tax cuts before the next election. he believes this will win the next election for the Tories. That is why the Tories wanted a fixed term five year parliament - because they need at least 5 years for this ideological economic gamble to have a chance to work.

So, if the economic policies being followed by the EU, in Greek debt crisis for example, and in the UK government aren't working, why are they being followed? The answer is simple - neoliberal ideology. This is class war politics. The lesson of the past thirty years is that the capitalist class and their politicians have allowed a world economic crisis to develop by following neoliberal 'free' market dogma, by deregulating financial capitalism (the banking and shadow banking system). Now they are exploiting the outcome of that crisis, and using it to roll back all the democratic gains made by working people in the last century. 

So what does the left do about this? Well, we have to win the economic argument. That is essential. We have to explain to people how the failed 'economic' policies of the neoliberalism got us here. We have to explain how the crisis has been exploited to benefit the people who caused it. We have to debunk the myths about the benefits of the unregulated 'free' market. But most of all, we have to show that we have an alternative which can create jobs and prosperity. That is what the Green Party did in its 2010 election manifesto. We showed that  by investing in creating one million green jobs, and by building housing, by improving public transport, by controlling the banks, and by growing our economy in a sustainable way, we could lift the UK out of the economic crisis it is in.

The reality is that Osborne's reckless ideological gamble with our economy won't work, and when it fails, we have to be ready to strike. The next UK quarter figures are due soon. All the indicators are that they will be very poor - either very low growth, or no growth at all. That is the time we must put the boot it - and hard. People in the UK are beginning to waver in their support for cuts. In the past year support for the cuts has fallen from 69% to 55%, with 45% now against Osborne's savage cuts. Once the British people realise that Osborne's economic 'policy' isn't working the Tories economic competency will be finished. It is then that the Coalition will be in real danger. The Coalition government is a weak and divided government which has only survived because the British people have been conned into believing that it was acting in the national interest, to tackle the economic crisis. Cameron has already been severely wounded by the phone hacking scandal. Its hard to see how the government could survive similar damage to Osborne.

The reality is this; pensions and the welfare state aren't unaffordable; low taxes only benefit the rich; the state is not inherently a bad thing - governments can and should intervene to create jobs, build houses and protect the vulnerable; we can only have a better health service if it is provided by the public sector; privatisation means that you pay more for less; banks can be nationalised and brought under democratic control; co-operation is much more important than competition.

These are the messages that all those who oppose this government; UK-uncut, the Coalition of Resistance; trade unionists, and all the other anti-cuts groups need to get across, and get across soon. The only way we can slay this neoliberal system and get rid of this government is by winning the economic argument. Until we get on with the task of doing that we won't have the power to change things for the better and we won't be able to stop the deliberate destruction by this government of all the things which make this a society worth living in.

The European project is failing the European people

The Eurozone debacle continues. Now Italy, the third largest economy in the Eurozone, is having to pay much more to finance its debt. Yields, the interest that Italy has to pay on government bonds, have reached over 6% which is unsustainable. So that is Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and now Italy which are already in, or in grave danger of falling into, the sovereign debt crisis.

The people of Europe are being asked by the leaders of Europe to pay for a crisis which is not of their making, whilst the perpetrators of that crisis, the banks and financial capitalists, are being protected. This is not just a betrayal of the people of Europe, by their elected leaders, but of democracy itself. Politicians in Greece have recently sold out Greek sovereignty to the banks, bondholders, and the financial technocrats of the ECB and the IMF by agreeing to a second bailout.

We have been sold the story that the EU is a European creation with the countries of Europe coming together in solidarity after WWII. But the EU is fundamentally an American cold war creation foisted on a weakened Europe after the war, the aim being to create and ensure a capitalist 'free' market ideological and economic hegemony in Europe, at a time when Soviet communism was seen as a real threat. Despite strongish trade unions and a tradition of social democracy, the EU is now a neoliberal state - with neoliberal 'free' market policies enshrined in its constitution. The purpose of the Euro is to pave the way for a European superstate. The aim now of politicians and financial technocrats is to reduce the living standards of workers and the middle classes, in order to create a great big bonanza for western corporations and their capitalist owners. The only thing which distinguishes this capitalist corporatist European project from fascism is the use of suits instead of uniforms and jackboots.

Having created a crisis by building a casino financial capitalism out of democratic control, and nearly bringing down the world economy, politicians and bankers have used the crisis to cut welfare and workers terms and conditions in the USA and  Europe. This is straightforward class war, with ordinary people being made to pay for the failures of 'free' market capitalism. In the current circumstances the EU and its leaders are the enemies of the European people. In his excellent Guardian piece, Mark Weisbrot explains why the Euro deserves to fail. It is beginning to look like its failure may be the only hope for European democracy.

The EU may be a supertanker, but it will have to be turned round if the European people are going to be liberated from neoserfdom (neoliberal serfdom). That means a massive reform of the EU and re-writing of the constitution to remove the neoliberal shackles which bind the EU into this extreme right-wing project.

The phone hacking scandal exposes our sham democracy

I blogged a while ago about our sham democracy, the cosy carve up which means that whoever gets elected, the policies pursued by governments are always the same. The economic crisis caused by the collapse of the banks illustrated this really well, because that crisis lead directly to the sovereign debt crisis, and we have seen that successive governments in countries like Greece and Ireland have toed the party line, and swallowed the neoliberal medicine, to the detriment of the people who elected them. How ironic it is that the electorate in Greece should boot out an incredibly unpopular conservative government, only to replace it with a 'socialist' government which then proves to be even more unpopular, by kow-towing to the IMF and the ECB and introducing yet greater austerity.

So that's how it goes. You have an incredibly unpopular government, you boot it out and elect another government which then goes on to do exactly the same thing. There is only one way to break this cycle - vote for a party which is not neoliberal and has different policies. If that means voting socialist or green - do it!

So what has this all got to do with phone hacking? The essence is that the problems with the banks and Murdoch's media empire are the same - capitalist corporations which have too much power and are out of democratic control. Just as our politicians have ceded power to the banks, they have also ceded it to moguls like Murdoch. News International should never have been allowed to control 40% of the UK press. Sky should never have been allowed to build up a monopoly of satellite TV through exclusive rights to Premier League football. But it was allowed to happen, and in the process our democracy has been undermined and our body politic corrupted. This is what happens when you have unregulated capitalism and 'free' market fanatics in government. The sad reality is that there is no change in sight. Murdoch may have his wings clipped for a while, but the neoliberal juggernaut moves on, crushing decency, democracy and freedom in its path.

I'd just like to finish this post with two pertinent quotes from an article in today's Telegraph (my italics):

"There were those who believed that Murdoch had debased and debauched British public life, and there is indeed great evidence that this was the case. For example, the News of the World was a respectable – if racy – family newspaper before Murdoch brought it under his ownership. As we now know, it converted into a flourishing criminal concern that took an evil pleasure in destroying people’s lives."

"The bitter truth is that no major figure in British public life was prepared to take on and expose the Murdoch newspaper empire. Rival proprietors were silent. Senior public figures did not dare to speak out for fear of exposure and attack in the Murdoch newspapers. This is why, for more than a generation, Rupert Murdoch’s empire has been a spider at the heart of an intricate web that has poisoned British public life. "

Strange it is though that a paper which can see the shortcomings of Cameron and speak with loathing about Rupert Murdoch will be trumpeting the wonders of the 'free' market which is the real engine of inequality, poverty and the corruption it so rightly condemns.

What is the Labour Party for?

A lot of people are wondering what the Labour Party is for. Since Ed Milliband became leader its been hard to to tell. But at least we know what the Labour party is not for; its not for the working class, it abandoned them a long time ago, letting the BNP fill the vacuum; its not for decent public sector pensions; its not much interested in housing; or the poor; or trade unions. It is, we know, in the historic words of Peter Mandelson - "intensely relaxed about the filthy rich" and it seems to be pretty keen on the banks; Oh!, and privatisation of the NHS, education, and well, pretty much anything else that moves.

The Labour Party is a party that has lost its way completely. So much so that it doesn't really know what it is for, except perhaps a vehicle for its leaders to get elected and hold political power, a vehicle for career politicians, the political class that I blogged about in this post. That means that it is the job of party members, who presumably think they are part of a project to change things, merely to have a role of furthering the career aspirations of Milliband, Jowell, Balls, Alexander et al.

I'm sure that Ed would be horrified if he read what I'd just written. He'd protest that he believes in a progressive future and that he, and his colleagues, have been traduced by that statement. If he thinks that I'd like to suggest its his own fault, because I think I think those are perfectly reasonable conclusions for onlookers like me to draw, based on the statements, and behaviour of Ed and other leading Labour politicians.

For example, for him to state that the June 30th strike was wrong, on the basis that negotiations about public sector pensions were ongoing, was laughable. It was obvious to all but the most naive that the government wasn't involved  in meaningful negotiations and had no intention of compromising on terms remotely acceptable to the striking teachers and civil servants. Not only that, but it was clear that the government had been hiding the fact that the Hutton Report showed that public sector pensions were affordable, and this had been exposed on the Today programme.

The Labour party has become a right-wing reactionary neoliberal party and there is little to distinguish it from the other neoliberal parties; the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. The reason for this transformation is not difficult to discern. This transformation has happened to 'left' parties all over the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Social Democracy has been abandoned in favour of 'free' market globalisation, and the domination of democracies by the multinational corporations and the banks. In fact, this is little different to Fascism. It is only a matter of degree, because Fascism is the subjugation of democracy to capitalist corporations -  with some goose-stepping in uniform, and gratuitous violence, thrown in.

This is what is happening in Greece. Democracy has been openly replaced, under a 'Socialist' government,  by the control of financial technocrats from the EU and IMF, on behalf of their market masters. Our politicians, including Ed,  are complicit in this free market coup d'etat. There is only one way we can stop this. We must stop voting for these people. We need to vote for parties which can stop the rot. In the UK there is only one party of social justice left - the Green Party.

Cheshire West Against the Cuts: J30

On Thursday June 30th striking public sector workers and their supporters came together for a rally at the Town Hall in Chester. We had a  turnout of about 350 people and some very good speeches from trade unionists and CWAC supporters. All in all a very good day for the fightback against Cameron's class war government's attempt to make us pay for the failures of financial capitalism.



There is a lot more work to do but we are building resistance in an area which is hardly renowned for left or trade union activism. Long may it continue.

We are the economy

One of the things that I find utterly baffling and amusing, in a very darkly comic way, is the BBC's analysis of 'our' economy. I listen to Radio 4 because it is supposed to be a serious news station, with journalists who allegedly offer us a realistic analysis of the world we live in. I mean people like; Robert Peston, Stephanie Flanders and Nick Robinson. The problem I have with these people is that their analysis is fairly useless if you really want to understand the world we live in.

What we get offered is an 'orthodox' economic analysis. Just think -  "Middle Ages" and "Catholic Church" . Because that is really what it is like. If you think further you might even get to "Spanish Inquisition". Keep listening  to this stuff and you hear things like - blah IMF, blah blah, default, blah Euro, blah blah Mervyn King, blah blah the markets, etc etc - remember Bart Simpson and his teacher Ms Krabappel? That is what happens to me when I listen to this stuff. Is it because I am thick - or is it because I am hearing total bollox?

I'd like to argue it is the latter, and I'd like to argue that the BBC is little more than a propaganda station for the UK government, and the market. In fact, I'd like to argue that I know more about economics than Stephanie Flanders and  Robert Peston. Is that because I am a bighead? No, its because I am a worker. Remember them? Well, you probably are one if you are reading this.

All you need to know about economics is that all the wealth in the world is created by working people. By wealth I don't mean suitcases full of cash. What I mean is houses, cars, and iPods. I also mean services like teaching, passports, probation, and emptying the bins. This is stuff that we do. Without us, none of these things would happen. We are the world economy. Fuck the markets, they are irrelevant. We don't need them, but they need us, because they prey upon our labour like parasites. They contribute nothing that is socially or economically useful.

Tomorrow, public sector workers will go on strike. Without them there is no economy. Without teachers, our children won't be taught, without civil servants, you won't get a passport.  Whether private or public sector workers - without workers, as Marx explained, we have nothing, no wealth and no prosperity. We don't need bankers, or hedge fund mangers. We don't need the free market. These people and their gambling casino are irrelevant. This is our economy and its about time we took control of it. Support the public sectors workers pensions strike tomorrow, and make that the beginning of a peaceful revolution to bring us to a position where our economy really does belong to us.

Britain's new ruling class

I grew up in Britain in the 1960s. A that time, people used to talk about the ruling class. Nobody thought there was anything odd about that - such talk was common currency, on the bus, in the pub and in the workplace. This was because people wanted change, they wanted the ruling clique bust wide open. I have already referred to this in more detail in a recent post - about how things improved, and how people thought that power had become more accessible to all, largely through the opening up of our higher education system. How things have changed! Now you never hear anyone talk about the ruling class. There is a kind of tacit assumption that we all have equal access to the corridors of power - but I beg to differ. I think that the ruling class  is back, and with a vengeance.

There is no doubt that over the past 20 years or so we have seen the development of a political class of career politicians. Peter Oborne, the right wing polemicist wrote about this in his book, The Triumph of the Political Class, in 2007. In a nutshell, his argument was that a new self-serving political class had grown up, and become dominant in the UK. I have to say that, on the whole, I agree with him. Prior to the emergence of this class, politicians had often lived and worked in the real world before entering parliament. They had to work their way up the ladder. There were working class MPs. But this has changed. Many of the most important and influential of our politicians have jumped straight from higher education into parliament. Worst still, many are the appointees of our leaders, people who were chums of Tony Blair or are pals of Dave and George. These people are parachuted into safe seats knowing that they will be elected, and they owe their allegiance to the people who 'appointed' them.

This process means that more and more of the people who sit in parliament are hand-picked by a small ruling clique. No one else can get a look in. Its as if the House of Commons is set up like the House of Lords. Sure, you can vote for people, but only people chosen by Dave, or Nick, or Ed. Put like that, its a chilling thought, and what does it say about our democracy? I'm not suggesting this is the whole story because I don't believe that these politicians rule on their own. The new ruling class is an alliance of these leading politicians and big business leaders (capitalists, increasingly from the financial sector). What matters is that we are talking about a cabal of people who have things sewn up, and act in their interests - not the interests of the people in the UK. The resulting irony is that Britain is becoming more like Egypt, with a rotten self-perpetuating elite and a fraudulent democracy, just as Egypt struggles to become, more like how Britain is supposed to be.

What suits this ruling group is a narrow neo-liberal right wing ideology dressed up as economic necessity i.e. the usual suspects - privatisation, de-regulation, ending welfare and pensions etc. - which amounts to a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the elite - the rich and the big corporations. No wonder we are being told to tighten our belts, we are facing the biggest heist in history. 

Its not just the fact that our democracy has been subverted by this new ruling alliance that we should be concerned about. Its the fact that some of these 'chums' are unfit to be in positions of power, and never would have been, if they'd had to go through a normal selection process. One topical example that springs to mind is Michael Gove, Minister for Education, and chum of David Cameron, who was parachuted into parliament because Dave thought he was a good egg. But Gove is a deluded right-wing crank who draws his inspiration from Tom Brown's Schooldays. His latest potty idea, that parents should break the teachers strike on June 30th by taking over schools, shows exactly what sort of extremist he now is. Take a look at this priceless photo, which shows just what sort of 'extremist' he used to be.

We can end this  situation, but only by re-asserting control over our political parties and our democracy. By using our votes wisely and judiciously at election time and fighting for change. Its going to be a long hard struggle, and we need to get started now!

J30: STRIKE!

Support the strike action by public sector workers on June 30th! You can visit this website to find out more about the actions planned next Thursday - http://www.j30strike.org

Everyone who is not capitalist class, unlike Cameron and Osborne, should support the public sector worker's strike action on Thursday June 30th. This isn't just an attack on pensions its part of a wider attack on the living standards of all of us - except the very wealthiest in our society. That means an attack on you!

You should support this strike action in any way you can because:

1. Decent public and private sector pensions are NOT unaffordable - see here.
For far too long the right have got away with using the demographic argument. The reality is that final salary pensions can be funded if there is the political will there to do it. 3.5 million public sector workers are in the Local Government Pension Scheme, which is well funded. A sustainable settlement for this scheme was agreed by the previous government in 2006.

2. The savage £81 billion worth of cuts are not designed to help our economy. They are ideologically driven, with the intention of destroying the welfare state and privatising public services, to the detriment of all except the very richest in our society. Under cover of the shock of the financial crisis, which they caused, capitalists are attempting to undo a century of progress for ordinary people.

3. Public and private sector workers must reject the attempts by this class war neo-liberal government and its supporters to divide them.There has been a concerted and effective campaign by the political right and its cheerleaders in the media to implement austerity by dividing public and private sector workers. If you are a private sector worker you should be supporting decent pensions for all - not expecting public sector workers to have their pensions destroyed as well.

4. This is a weak government with a weak argument for cutting pension benefits. Cameron and co. really do fear that the strikes could get up a momentum and majority public support. If this happens they are deep trouble.

I hope to see you at one of the protests next week. Not sure where I'll be yet but I'll probably be in Chester, solidarity!

The Greeks MUST default on 'their' debt

I came across this post by Mark Hudson yesterday on a blog called Naked Capitalism. It's an excellent description of how the failures of financial capitalism, which culminated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and threatened to bring down the world economy, are being used by the capitalist class to roll back all the democratic gains made in the past century by ordinary people. This is, as Naomi Klein has described, an economic shock doctrine - use a crisis to impose cuts in living standards on the mass of the people which they would ordinarily never accept.

Its worth a brief recap of how we got here. Financial deregulation since the 1970's, combined with an aggressive free market doctrine known as neo-liberalism, which originated in the Chicago School, have lead to banks and financial institutions such as hedge funds becoming out of democratic control in Western countries. At the same time the standard of living of all except the wealthiest has come under attack. The lack of controls on financial capitalism has lead to a series of economic crashes since the 1980s, each one worst than the last. These include; the Asian crisis, the dotcom boom, and the latest and greatest crisis since the crash of the Great Depression, which began in the USA with the collapse of subprime mortgages in 2006.

The latest crisis resulted in the virtual collapse of banks worldwide which was only halted by state intervention. What began as a crisis for the financial sector lead directly to the current sovereign debt crisis which we are now in. This sovereign debt crisis, in which taxpayers are being asked, once again, to bail out the financial system is being used as a weapon to impose neoliberalism on people in Europe and the USA. This means an attack on welfare, pensions, wages, workers rights, and environmental regulation, and privatisation of public services and state assets. This is driven not by economics but ideology. The aim is not to find a solution to the crisis but to use the shock of the crisis to destroy the standard of living of the mass of the population in the West. Those who gain from this will be the capitalist class.

Nowhere is this revealed more starkly at the moment than in Greece. The bailout of Greece, imposed last year to the tune of €110 billion, failed. The important point is that this bailout was only ever in tended to protect French and German banks, and other bondholders, and not the Greek people. Also of great importance was the desire to protect the great European single-state project know as the Euro. Of course the Greeks should never have been in the Euro. Without their own currency and the ability to set interest rates they were always going to struggle economically. Of course it can be argued that successive Greek governments mismanaged the economy and that the Greeks were living beyond their means but that misses the essential point. This is really about a coup d'etat, about financial technocrats and finance capitalists taking control. It is a struggle between democracy and capitalism.

The only way forward for the Greeks (and the Irish for that matter) is to default on their debts and leave the Euro. The alternative is the end of Greek democracy and the wholesale privatisation of the country at knock down prices. Greece will become a sovereign state and democracy in name only. As Mark Hudson said in his post; this is the road to financial serfdom;

"This new road to neoserfdom is an asset grab. But to achieve it, the financial sector needs a political grab to replace democracy with financial technocrats. Their job is to pretend that there is no revolution at all, merely an increase in “efficiency,” “creating wealth” by debt-leveraging the economy to the point where the entire surplus is paid out as interest to the financial managers who are emerging as Western civilization’s new central planners".

Back to the future?

One of the golden rules about writing a political blogs like this is that if you want to be taken seriously you should write well argued posts which are fully referenced. Whatever you do, you should avoid having a rant! Now I know I've come very close to breaking this rule on a number of occasions but here is where I blow it wide open:

Did you watch the Royal Wedding? - have you noticed the praise given to Prince Phillip recently on his 90th birthday? These events were marked in the UK media by the kind of sickening sycophancy you would have thought died out many years ago. The Prince is a reactionary dinosaur of the highest degree. Despite the fact that he has managed to avoid making many public gaffes over the years he is still well known for the 'slitty eyed' gaffe he made about the Chinese years ago. What is so worrying about the recent Royal mania is that it seems to replicate the kind of deference that used to exist about sixty years ago - we appear to be heading backwards at an alarming rate.

On the Duke's birthday, Johan Hari said in the Independent:

"Today, you are being encouraged to celebrate a man who merrily visited a genocidal dictator and used the occasion to sneer at British democracy. A man whose political interventions even prompted complaints from the far-right Enoch Powell. A man who, at the height of mass unemployment, mocked the unemployed, while complaining his own family of multi-millionaires was financially deprived. A man who has shot countless examples of endangered species – and then sought praise for his protection of wildlife."

How right he was! But what really disturbs me is this; I grew up in the 1960s; at that time people were sick and tired of the UK being run by a moribund establishment, based on connections and privilege, closed to ordinary people, known as 'the old boys network' and populated by people like Prince Phillip. Thanks to scandals like the 'Profumo Affair', this ruling establishment was regularly mocked on TV by comedians like Peter Cooke, and in programmes like 'That Was the Week That Was'. People wanted change, and they got it through an opening up of opportunities, not perfect, but much better than anything that had gone before. Thousands of young people, many of them working class, were able to go to university for the first time, thanks to free higher education. Social mobility improved dramatically and inequality in the UK fell for the first time ever. Ordinary people were able to achieve things they could never have dreamed of under the old system.

Now this is all being reversed. David Cameron, far from being the 'boy next door' is a millionaire son of the ruling class. He is presiding over a reactionary government which is dragging us backwards to an age of connections, privilege and noblesse oblige - handouts from the rich. Anyone who thinks that increasing tuition fees to £9,000 a year and privatising higher education is a good thing is an idiot. Yet this, in the face of deficit cuts, is being presented as a kind of 'progress', and some people are stupid enough to think it is a good idea. The deficit, created by the bankers and capitalist class, is being used by this government as an excuse to drag us back at least half a century, undoing all the gains that have happened for ordinary people during that time.

Of course it's not just those who might have been able to go to university, as I did, who are being affected. Its everyone who is unemployed, disabled or low paid. Thanks to this government and the two previous ones, we have a chronic housing shortage. Low paid people who would have benefited from the council house building programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, and given some security in their lives, are being forced out of their homes by 'social cleansing', leaving ghettos for the rich. The unemployed, the victims of free market failures, are being vilified and treated like criminals. In addition, the incomes of all but the richest are being reduced to pay for the bankers deficit.

Where will this end, and how far does it have to go, before people will eventually wake up, smell the rotten stink of class war and privilege, and realise what is happening is unacceptable in a civilised society? How about bringing back feudalism, or slavery? Why not make the unemployed work for nothing, chained in the slave galleys of the big corporations? How long will it be before children are shoved up chimneys, so that we can 'compete' better with the impoverished and exploited of the Third World?

Perhaps what we need is a new Charles Dickens - someone who can reflect back to us the harsh realities of 21st century-19th century capitalism, or would that person be drowned out in the modern age, by the wall to wall bread and circuses of the new celebrity age?

The Economic Hitmen

This is an excellent video, well worth watching. At just over two minutes long, it sums up how Western capitalism exploits the rest of the world, and it's coming to a country near you very soon. I hope John Perkins, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman doesn't mind me posting a link to this video, especially since I don't agree with his view that this is an aberrant, mutant form of capitalism. If anything I think that the more sharing capitalism we had after the second world war - the 'Golden Age' - was the mutant form of capitalism. That real mutant form existed after the war because of the Cold War, a time in which western workers had to be kept onside because of the supposed threat of the Soviet Union. Now that 'threat' has gone we are seeing capitalism as it truly is. Of course it's not just about the Soviet Union but the boom and bust cycles, and the fact that we are in a crisis because profit is falling.

There are also two other important factors which, in the past, helped to mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism. The kind of capitalism we see now is 19th century capitalism, the worst excesses of which were disguised, at that time, by colonialism. Progress for ordinary people happened then because the more advanced western capitalist nations protected their economies from overseas competition. In addition, ordinary working people, who made up the bulk of the population made democratic gains - pensions, healthcare etc - through political parties like the Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the USA. Those factors no longer exist, protectionism has gone and so have the parties of the working class. That is why workers in the West are now being screwed, rather than just those in the Third World.

Costing the Earth?

Buttermere in the English Lake District

Interesting news last week - to the sound of a fanfare the Coalition government proudly announced a ground-breaking piece of work with the publishing of the National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA). According to the BBC - "Nature is worth billions to the UK" - no kidding? Or as we say in the UK - 'No shit Sherlock!". Its worth noting that there is nothing new in trying to put a cost on nature. The economist David Pearce did it in his book Blueprint for a Green Economy twenty years ago.

In the NEA, a bunch of economists - could these be the same ones who failed to spot the Great Crash that we've just been through? - set out to measure the monetary value of the UK environment. There were some priceless quotes including this one from Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and co-chairman of the NEA:

"Humans rely on the way ecosystems services control our climate - pollution, water quality, pollination - and we're finding out that many of these regulating services are degrading,"

Really? Did you need to stick a price tag on a Beech tree to discover that? It seems to me that the people who did the NEA need to get out more - preferably out their cosy offices and into the environment itself. According to the NEA, the benefit to an individual of living near a green space is £300 per year and bees are worth £430 million or so a year to our economy. What's wrong with this is it's arrant nonsense, and potentially dangerous nonsense at that. Imagine that someone wanted to build a brick factory on the park next to your house and was willing to pay you £300 a year for the privilege, would you accept the money? - of course not. You might be £300 pa better off but you would have lost something far more valuable - your peace and sense of well being. As for bees, if we lost them we would all be screwed.

The simple truth, as we all know, is that bees, for example, are irreplaceable and therefore priceless. There is no way they can be costed. And what about the view of Buttermere Lake and Haystacks from Buttermere (see my photo) - how much is that worth? I guess if the NEA can help prevent developers and money grubbers from destroying our natural environment and wildlife it will have been worth the effort, but somehow I doubt that it will.