I’m glad I managed to nip into Italy this year to visit Venice whist Berlusconi was out of power, as it’s looking likely that he’ll be back as president quite soon. Maybe everyone in Europe and elsewhere who regard themselves as progressive, liberal or left-wing should boycott Italy whenever it elects a raving neo-fascist to be its leader. That’s the least we could do by way of protest and to show solidarity with those in Italy who oppose the old bastard.
It seems he recently told a woman who was heckling him about poverty that she should have married a millionaire. He’s also on record as saying that women on the left are all ugly.
There’s an interesting line of enquiry here about good-looking women, and whether they do indeed tend support the rich and famous and fascistic. And an even more interesting issue about why the poor, the downtrodden, the sick and the unemployed often vote for people like Berlusconi, Thatcher, Major, Bush, etc.
It’s often thought that they vote for conservatives, neo-fascists and fat cats out of ignorance and stupidity, but such voters are not all ignorant and stupid. They are, however, victims of the power of a national media and a hegemony that blindly accepts that neo-conservative and right-wing political and economic theories are demonstrably correct, and that the world’s economy ought to be run for the benefit of short-term profit, capitalists, bankers and shareholders.
The poor who vote for parties of the right may well do so because they’re merely brainwashed and convinced that capitalism and its adherents are more likely to run the national and world economy better than the Left, and as such they’re more likely to do better themselves from ‘trickle-down’ - the crumbs that fall from the tables of the wealthy.
Is this not the way it works in the shires and the rural areas which are traditionally Tory: farm workers vote for conservatives because the interests of the farmers and agribusiness are deemed to be their own interests?
Where this falls down, of course, is the supposition that progressive governments are unwilling or unable to manage the economy, including the rural economy, as well as the Right; that they inevitably tax the rich and damage profitability. There’s also the fallacy that poor people do better by doffing the cap to their wealthy masters than they do from progressive tax and welfare policies, and higher investment in well-run public services such as health, housing and education.
The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs was back on Thought For Today this morning talking about how our economy’s pursuit of short-term profit is destroying economic stability and damaging our long-term interests. This is indeed a spiritual issue. I really like this CR. He’s always struck me as a very wise and spiritual leader. I remember him years ago on TFT quoting the old adage that education, more than wealth or power, is the key to human dignity.
The neo-conservative economic model that’s ruled and raped the world economy for so many years has now hit the buffers and everyone’s crapping themselves that the ‘credit-crunch’ is the beginning of a world economic crash. Even the fattest of the fat cats is yowling for government interference and bail out. Everybody fears banks falling like dominos. It’s easy enough to say ‘well fuck them’ but it’s actually the less than fat cats that will be hit the hardest by economic chaos and instability.
There’s good sense in government interference, and there always was. The problem has been that governments in the UK and the USA haven’t interfered enough - that they’ve given the City and Wall Street and the money markets free-reign and largely left unregulated their short-term greed and financial stupidity.
Germany and France by contrast have very sensibly maintained a properly balanced and regulated system and seem to still have a social-democratic concern for making capitalism responsible and effective and operating in their national interests - in the interests of their countries as a whole.
Professor Ulrich Beck had an excellent article in the Guardian yesterday, in which he says, “Even advocates of a global free market now detect that, after the collapse of communism, only one opponent of the free market remains, namely the unbridled free market itself. The market has shrugged off any responsibility for democracy and society in the pursuit of short-term profit maximisation”.
In this context ‘the market’ means the super rich and the financial elite, who clearly have no intention of regulating and restraining themselves and behaving responsibly towards the rest of us. They take the view that fools and their money are easily parted. As are the ignorant and ill-informed.
They have no intention of making themselves responsible in any degree for the well-being of the rest of the nation that supports them and provides them with a base for their activities. They don’t regard themselves as members of any nation. They are simply part of the world elite. They laugh at the idea of a social contract. They don’t need a base. They bank their profits ‘offshore’, and control their financial empires remotely, electronically, digitally.
This is why factories and production and call-centres are relocated to China and India. This is why oil prices are spiralling. This is why we’re seeing the beginning of food riots in many countries, and why fish sellers in places like Naples can’t afford to eat the fish they sell. Who gives a damn about the poor and the wretched of the earth? And will the poor re-elect Berlusconi tomorrow? Will the poor re-elect a Republican president in the USA later this year? Will the poor vote for Cameron and the Tories?
No-one could ever accuse any American president of being a social democrat - even the Democrats have always been on the Right of the political spectrum as we know it. Even the Kennedy’s and Roosevelts. No-one ever accused Harold MacMillan of being a closet left-winger. And yet politicians back in the post-war years all recognised the need for government controls over the economy and government investment in public services.
That was when Keynes was king and Keynesianism was the dominant economic ideology. I remember well the war taking place in universities and in government back in the Sixties and Seventies between the dominant Keynesians and the upwardly-mobile Monetarists led by Milton Friedman. Well, the monetarists won, at least in Britain and the USA, thanks to people like Thatcher and Reagan, thanks to the stupid tendency. And here we are - completely fucked. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Postscript
A guy on the radio has just described Italy’s political class as the most degenerate in Europe. Come on you Brits - we can do better than that!
Ulrich Beck: This Free-Market Farce Shows How Badly We Need The State :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/10/creditcrunch.economics
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Jack Mapange
I was delighted yesterday when I found out from listening to Front Row on Radio 4 that there’s a Malawian poet, Jack Mapange, who teaches poetry at Newcastle University. He teaches a course called Literatures of Incarceration, and he was probably banged up in prison as a radical or a dissident when I was working as a volunteer in Malawi, supposedly helping the country to ‘develop’, under the leadership of its dictatorial Life President, Hastings (Kamuzu) Banda.
At last I see a way, through Jack Mapange, of re-establishing my links with the family of my dear deceased friend John Mwale, and with Malawi. Like my friend John it seems Jack Mapange came to Britain as a political refugee. John was just an amazing human being, and all these years after his death (during a wisdom tooth removal) I still miss him badly.
Time to get on with writing my Malawi memoires.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/natpoetday/jack_mapange.shtml
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=5495
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