Layer 365 . . . Anger, Protests, Solidarity, Debt, Austerity, Economic Illiteracy and the Defence Review

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Les Evenements de 2010

There was an excellent comment on CiF on the article by Mark Weisbrot about the events in France:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/20/france-protest?

jlresq

Message of Solidarity with the workers and students of France from the exploited masses of the United States

We, in the United States, know better than any people in the world that the neo-liberal model is in equal measure: 1. exploitative 2. an abject failure.

Do not be fooled by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times, which for decades have heralded the American economy and free markets as the greatest engine for growth and prosperity. For the wealthiest, perhaps, as their accountants steal all they can - but for the rest it's nothing but a death trap The workers, the poor, and the middle class lead lives of steep decline, unbearable debt loads, isolation. 60 to 80 hour work weeks, wages so low that room and board become a luxury, no health care, no education, starvation by obesity. And no voice for the average man or woman.

And yet we know the score - the bankers and the wealthy broke the rules then stole the wealth - and then you're asked to give them two more years of your life, to cover the costs of their uncontrolled avarice. Two years now, schools for prisons later. Say Never!

Here, we didn't take the streets and were routed - and now the anger of the masses is being directed against themselves - the morbid stench of fascism rising.

The revolt in France, in contrast, represents unified humanity, the hope of a decent world, of prosperity, shared wisdom, true solidarity.

Neo-liberalism cannot tolerate people who demand control over their lives - yet people who do not control their lives are slaves. Do not become pliant and defeated like the American working class, slaving away at Wal Mart for sub-poverty wages. Heed our warning, raising the retirement age is just the beginning. They will take everything they can – your union, pension, education, home, and life.

The streets of France are again the beach-head for humanity's resistance. Here's where we turn the tide against the unrelenting offensive of global capital.

People of France do not give in, you are standing up for 99.9% of the people in the world. We need you to win. Defeat Sarkozy! Defeat Greed!

Please spread the message of solidarity to the workers and students of France from the people of the United States as far and wide as possible!!!

Here's a link to the article:

http://www.indymedia.org/en/2010/10/942460.shtml

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Tariq Ali wrote this in G2:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/19/protest-against-cuts-french

Why can't we protest against cuts like the French?

Many thousands have protested in France against cuts; we have a proud history of dissent in Britain, so why aren't we on the streets?

The French – students and workers, men and women, citizens all – are out on the streets again. A rise in the pension age? Impossible. The barricades are up, oil supplies running out, trains and planes on a skeleton schedule and the protests are still escalating. More than three million people a week ago. Hundreds of thousands out this week and more expected this weekend. And what a joyous sight: school students marching in defence of old people's rights. Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.

What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?

Perhaps. I'm not totally sure. But even these mild attempts to rally support against the austerity measures are too much for dear leader Ed Miliband. He won't be seen at them. The rot of Blairism goes deep in the Labour party. A crushing defeat last year might have produced something a bit better than the shower that constitutes the front bench. Balls the bulldog might have gone for the jugular but he has been neutered. Instead, the new front bench is desperate to prove that it could easily be part of the coalition and not just on Afghanistan.

There is growing bitterness and growing anger in England, too, but not much else so far. It could change. The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought against Thatcher and lost. Her New Labour successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalised.

This is a country without an official opposition. An extra-parliamentary upheaval is not simply necessary to combat the cuts, but also to enhance democracy that at the moment is designed to further corporate interests and little more. Bailouts for bankers and the rich, an obscene level of defence expenditure to fight Washington's wars, and cuts for the less well off and the poor. A topsy-turvy world produces its own priorities. They need to be contested. These islands have a radical past, after all, that is not being taught in the history modules on offer. Given the inability of the official parliament to meet real needs why not the convocation of regional and national assemblies with a social charter that can be fought for and defended just as Shelley advised just under two centuries ago:

Ye who suffer woes untold

Or to feel or to behold

Your lost country bought and sold

With a price of blood and gold.

[. . .]

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you.

Ye are many, they are few.

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Jonathan Freedland writes about the root causes of the national debt, and a more enlightened economic strategy for dealing with it:

Osborne will escape public wrath if Labour lets him win the blame game

The myth needs nailing that Brown, not bankers, caused our economic woes. Then the case against cuts can be made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/19/osborne-public-wrath-labour-blame-game

In France, they are already rioting on the streets. An estimated 3.5 million of them, according to one trade union estimate, from Lyon to Paris to Nanterre, either striking, marching or taking direct action in fury at changes to their pensions. Within hours, they had closed down schools, disrupted the travel network and prompted alarm about the nation's fuel supplies.

Contrast that with the scene that played out in London at the same time. Here, a demonstration against the cuts to be announced in full by George Osborne tomorrow brought a few thousand activists to wave their banners and chant their chants in Parliament Square. The closest they got to a threat was when Unison's Dave Prentis warned: "If the government doesn't listen to us today, they won't have heard the last of us." Storming the Bastille, it wasn't.

Why the difference? You could write a learned thesis on the contrasting political traditions of the two countries, how the French take to the streets at the merest tweak to their welfare arrangements. But there is another explanation that goes beyond British habits of passivity. Right now, even those people who fear and loathe the government's cuts don't blame the government.

If Labour's spending was so wildly out of control, why did the Tories promise to match their plans, pound for pound, all the way until November 2008? Why didn't Osborne and Cameron howl in protest at the time?

Could it be because things were not actually that bad? A quick look at the figures confirms that, until the crash hit in September 2008, the levels of red ink were manageably low. The budget of 2007 estimated Britain's structural deficit – that chunk of the debt that won't be mopped up by growth – at 3% of gross domestic product. At the time, the revered Institute for Fiscal Studies accepted that two-thirds of that sum comprised borrowing for investment, leaving a black hole of just 1% of GDP. If the structural deficit today has rocketed close to 8%, all that proves is that most of it was racked up dealing with the banking crisis and subsequent slump . . .

This is why Ed Balls was right to declare in his summer Bloomberg lecture – which remains Labour's most robust effort yet to redirect the finger of blame away from itself – that "it is a question of fact that we entered this financial crisis with low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment and the lowest net debt of any large G7 country".

In other words, the position was relatively sound until the crash struck. The coalition would prefer voters forgot about that event; they mention it only rarely. But in this era of collective short-term memory loss, it is worth reminding people that the financial crisis was not limited to those territories ruled by Gordon Brown: it was global, it was systemic and it was caused by the larcenous greed of bankers.

Some will say that Labour, nevertheless, bore some particular responsibility – if not for the crisis itself then for Britain's exposure to it, not least through Brown's indulgence of the City and light-touch regulation of finance. Some can say that – but not the Tories. The only problem they had with Brown's deregulation is that there wasn't more of it.

The real source of the deficit: the colossal borrowing Labour had to undertake in order to prevent the crash of 2008 engulfing the entire economy. It had to pump money into the economy to prevent a recession turning into a depression, to prevent the spiralling unemployment, house repossessions and bankruptcies that had accompanied previous downturns, to stop the banks collapsing.

It will require great boldness for Labour to make this case. It amounts to rehabilitating the deficit itself, asking voters not to see it as some evil monster that has to be slayed immediately – but rather as the price that had to be paid to prevent unemployment tripling, interest rates galloping and the economy falling off a cliff. Lots of countries, from the US to Japan, have paid it with deficits of their own – or does the coalition think those are all Labour's fault too?

Only once this case is made can Labour go on to make its wider critique of the coalition: arguing that the government's response to the deficit is panicked and hysterical, that the surest way to enlarge, not reduce, the deficit is to cut in the midst of a downturn, that growth and jobs have to come first, that serious spending cuts are wise only once the economy is back to health.

This is the argument Labour has to win.

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Joseph Stiglitz, past recipient of the Nobel prize for economics. wrote this:

To choose austerity is to bet it all on the confidence fairy

The mystical belief is that a smaller deficit will lead to an investment boom. What Britain really needs now is another stimulus

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/19/no-confidence-fairy-for-austerity-britain

The Keynesian policies in the aftermath of the Lehman brothers bankruptcy were a triumph of economic theory. In Europe, the US and Asia, the stimulus packages worked. Those countries that had the largest (relative to the size of their economy) and best-designed packages did best. China, for instance, maintained growth at a rate in excess of 8%, despite a massive decline in exports.

We should be clear. Most of the increase is not due to the stimulus but to the downturns and the bank bailouts. Those in the financial market are egging on politicians to ask whether we can afford another stimulus. I argue that Britain, and the world, cannot afford not to have another stimulus. We cannot afford austerity. In a better world, we might rightfully debate the size of the public sector. Even now there should be a debate about how government spends its money. But today cutbacks in spending will weaken Britain, and even worsen its long-term fiscal position relative to well-designed government spending.

Thanks to the IMF, multiple experiments have been conducted – for instance, in east Asia in 1997-98 and a little later in Argentina – and almost all come to the same conclusion: the Keynesian prescription works. Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions. The confidence fairy that the austerity advocates claim will appear never does . . .

Austerity is a gamble which Britain can ill afford.

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Simon Jenkins, as ever, is excellent on excessive defence spending:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/19/raf-target-cybernerds-drones-defence-review

Defence review: So, the RAF is going to target cyber-nerds with drones?

Years of capitulation to the defence industry has led to this absurd review, where 'threats' and solutions do not match

Sit down gently. Read Monday's list of "threats" facing modern Britain, and then read yesterday's list of how the coalition proposes to meet them. Next you should walk to the nearest wall and bang your head against it, hard, until you have counted to £45 billion.

The two lists simply do not match. The first so-called tier one threat is "attacks on cyberspace and cybercrime". The second is "international terrorism". The third is a foreign crisis "drawing in Britain", and the fourth is a natural hazard – "such as severe coastal flooding or an influenza pandemic". None of these constitute a military threat to the security of the realm.

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Layer 326 . . . A Gathering Storm, Voodoo Economics, the Budget, the Banks and Will Hutton

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It feels like the lull before the storm. Summer's here; people are gearing up for their holidays, shopping as usual, having barbeques, watching endless dull matches broadcast in glorious HD live from the World Cup . . . and endless edited 'highlights' of these low-scoring, tedious, defence-dominated affairs. England are crap. Scotland, Wales and the Irelands aren't even there. Wimbledon fortnight starts tomorrow. The weather forecast is good.

Except on the economic front, which most people recognise and experience as the financial and personal wellbeing front. We're talking here about people struggling to stay in jobs and striving to keep up with household expenses. People with no savings; people with large debts. The cold front is approaching, with gale force winds likely throughout Britain, and much of Europe.

The economic storm is going to begin on Tuesday, with the coalition's first 'emergency' budget. You weren't aware there's an emergency? Do try to keep up.

It's an emergency conjured into existence by right wing politicians and their media friends who seem to be winning the battle to convince gullible people that governments can no longer maintain spending on public services at current levels, even though the loss of thousands of public sector jobs will deflate demand in the economy and throw even more people out of jobs in the service sector and what's left of the manufacturing sector. And so on, in a downward spiral. It's the Shock Doctrine, which thrives on 'emergencies'. It's Disaster Capitalism.

It's the same old Thatcherite/Chicago School remedy of slashing public spending on decent public services - all dressed up as "necessity" because of what the "financial markets" might do to us. Voodoo economics still rule, OK?

There was a time, when the financial crash first happened, that Keynesian economics looked likely to regain predominance, but that was before the European Right (including those in Germany now) began to see a way to keep on keeping on, with the banking sector permanently bailed out, guaranteed and subsidised by we, the people, and no-one even demonstrating against it.

In this we begin to look like post-Soviet Russia, with the people only too happy to keep schtum provided there's 'stability' in the country under a recognisable and somewhat 'legitimate' political elite who seem to know what they're talking about. It's a kind of heads in the sand politics, under a Westminster coalition of public schoolboys and Oxbridge graduates doing all the things they've been taught to do by their Chicago School trained professors in their PPE lectures, seminars and tutorials.

Will Hutton continues to shed light on all of this in his Observer columns. Here are some extracts from last week's column, which focuses on banking, posted here in the hope that the reader will hyperlink to Will's column and read it in its entirety:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/13/will-hutton-banks-crash-refuse-reform

The banks have refused to mend their ways. Beware the next crash

After the crisis there were cries of 'never again'. But the glacial pace of reform leaves us all in imminent danger

It was the biggest bank bail out in British history, and it came with scarcely believable costs. A trillion pounds of tax-payer support; a trillion pounds of lost output. After a disaster of this magnitude you might have expected some collective soul-searching by both banks and government. There has been far too little. Instead we risk a repeat – our banking system is as disconnected from real wealth generation as ever.

The return to business as usual – bonuses, trading in derivatives, the organising of banking as an exercise in which money is made from money – is breathtaking and depressing. And so, given the recent buoyant profit figures reported by our banks, is the easy money.

Labour delivered the minimum reform it could get away with, subcontracting responsibility to the Financial Services Authority. As the crisis broke in May 2008 it commissioned an inquiry populated entirely by industry insiders, chaired by the now chair of Lloyds, Sir Win Bischoff, to examine how the City could become more internationally competitive. When it reported a year later, it recommended little or no change. The conclusions were tamely accepted by the most risk-averse group of senior politicians in the Labour party's history.

The poverty of action is inexcusable.

Without substantial and far-reaching reform a second crisis is almost inevitable within 10-25 years. And next time we would be overwhelmed as a country.

Most industries that had undergone such a near-death experience – along with such a high probability of a recurrence – would be taking precautions. Not banking. Instead of building up its reserves aggressively, it is carrying on paying salaries at pre-crash levels.

As worrying is the lack of reform to the business model of banking built up over the last 10 or 15 years. Barclays, RBS and HSBC each boasts more than 1,000 subsidiaries – most of which are secret vehicles created to warehouse lending or direct financial flows in artificial ways, whose purpose, as one official told me off the record, is essentially deception – to avoid tax or regulation or whose complexity is designed so that in an emergency all a government can do is write a blank bail-out cheque.

[In other words, the fucking banks have got us over a barrel, and there's nothing we can do about it. The Masters of the Universe have got planet Earth right where they want it.]

The IMF don't say it, but it would just take a market rumour and there would be panic. British banks have £1 trillion wrapped up in derivatives – a business that Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the crash, thinks should be as closely regulated as guns because they are no less dangerous.

But progress on financial reform – nationally and internationally – is glacial. Part of the reason is the fiendish complexity that western governments allowed their banks to create, and part is the jealous defence of alleged national banking interests by governments. But nobody should underestimate the banks' own powerful interest in resisting reform – and their lobbying is powerful and well-financed.

The status quo is bad news not just because of the risk of another crash. British banks shamefully neglect enterprise, entrepreneurship, investment and innovation. Only 3% of cumulative net lending in the decade up to the crash went to manufacturing; three quarters went to commercial real estate and residential mortgages. Lord Adair Turner, chair of the FSA, says that collectively manufacturers borrow no more than they deposit with banks. De facto, it is a sector from which the banks have largely disengaged. The result – devastated industries and sky-high property prices.

Reform has to be multi-pronged. Almost everybody accepts that banks need to carry more capital, except getting international agreement on how much is close to impossible.

Britain needs more banks, transparent banks and safer banks that really contribute to the British economy – and it needs to have the chutzpah to go it alone if necessary. The coalition government, Cable says, is committed to change, and a banking commission to investigate what and how is about to be announced. The question is whether anyone will have the courage to do what needs be done.

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Will's column in today's paper says:

There is no logic to the brutish cuts that George Osborne is proposing

The chancellor constantly cites Sweden and Canada as models, but at least they tried to energise their economies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/20/budget-cuts-george-osborne

This week's budget brings on an awesome economic and political moment. The former Labour government had already committed to a greater and faster reduction in the budget deficit than any British government in modern times. The coalition government wants to do more; to nearly eliminate a structural budget deficit of 8% of national output – some £116bn – in five years. Moreover, it wants spending cuts to take 80% of the load. No country has ever volunteered such austerity. It is as tough a package of retrenchment as the IMF imposed on Greece, a country on the brink of bankruptcy. It is twice as tough as the famously harsh measures Canada took between 1994 and 1997. It is three times tougher than Sweden's measures between 1993 and 1995. In British terms, it is immeasurably tougher than what we did after the IMF crisis in 1976 or after the ERM crisis in 1992.

If we are going to embark on such a course, there has to be a national consensus that it is right. What is proposed, if we are to believe the pre-budget speeches and leaks, is the closest to an economic scorched earth policy we will ever have lived through. If it is to work, we have to be prepared to accept not just enormous economic sacrifice, but to regard it as legitimate. There has to be complete honesty about why the measures are being taken. The reasons have to be unanswerable. The economics must be unimpeachable. The measures themselves have to be extremely skilfully implemented and seen to be fair.

This is not the case just now. Of course the structural deficit has to be eliminated. But Britain has time to make the change. Sweden took 15 years to lower some departmental spending by 20%, not the five years the government plans. We are not in the position of Greece. Britain has a diversified economy. Our cumulative national debt is not large by international standards. Uniquely, the term structure of our debt is very long – around 14 years. Most of this year's debt will be sold to British domiciled individuals and companies, so the international sovereign debt crisis has much less impact on us. The level of interest on the national debt in five years' time as a share of national output is more than manageable. These are the truths about the situation; to claim otherwise creates distrust.

I don't think either coalition partner is aware of how high the stakes are being raised, the degree to which they are unnecessarily backing themselves into a corner, and how much the ground has to be prepared before launching the country on the unprecedented path they plan. For example, each of the counter-arguments I have raised needs to be carefully argued against, not shouted down by hysterical remarks about the sovereign debt crisis or references to private lectures from the not infallible governor of the Bank of England.

The lack of necessity over what is planned could knock the Lib Dems back to where the Liberal party was in the 1950s – a party of the margins – and irredeemably rebrand the Conservatives as the nasty party. The revival of liberal conservatism and the hopes raised by this unique experiment in coalition government will collapse.

George Osborne's aggression is hard to understand. The forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility show that the outgoing Labour government's plans were both credible and more than tough enough to arrive at budgetary sustainability. To go beyond them with between £24bn and £50bn of extra spending cuts and tax rises, as is rumoured for Tuesday, is unconscionable and will rightly be challenged. The ground has not been laid; the economics are dubious even for deficit hawks; the support tiny; the implications dire.

It is not too late for a change of course or, at the very least, to reproduce the best of what the Canadians and Swedes did. In neither country was deficit reduction portrayed as a necessity to keep a triple A credit rating on government debt, nor as a vendetta against a "bloated" public sector, as the coalition has suggested. Rather, the measures were sold as a vital period of pain in order to create a platform for much-needed public spending growth in the future.

Osborne is said to have studied the Canadian experience, hence his call for a period of national consultation between Tuesday's budget and the autumn's spending review, copying what was done in Ottawa. The trouble is that the terms of the consultation preclude any genuine consultation; the assumption is that spending is bad, the state needs to be smaller, nothing is more important than a triple A credit rating, and the British way of life has to change.

It is folly. Not every penny of public spending is well spent. There has to be restraint and the deficit must be lowered. Wages, pensions and welfare transfers must take a short-term hit, as they did in Canada and Sweden. But the government should also be investing in our future. It should be raising taxes on those best able to contribute. Every department should share in the pain.

I am surprised at the Liberal Democrats. They have an obligation to their party, their tradition and the coalition to argue more fiercely for a better presented, fairer, more legitimate and more balanced approach to deficit reduction than the one that is promised. And what is proposed is no good for the Tories either. Number 10 and the Treasury believe the worst can be offset by aggressively low interest rates and more quantitative easing. They will work to a degree. But what is proposed still risks everything. Politicians pay the price with lost office. Millions of British will pay a higher price – the needless squandering of their lives.

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Back on the football front, Terry Eagleton wrote this for the Guardian,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/football-socialism-crack-cocaine-people

Football: a dear friend to capitalism

The World Cup is another setback to any radical change. The opium of the people is now football

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse.

If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts.

In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman. The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game's history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht's theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.

Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they're not working?

Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe, while providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings – defiling religious images and mocking their lords and masters – could be a genuinely anarchic affair, a foretaste of a classless society.

With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

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Any diehard readers who have come this far can now enjoy Sabine Rennefanz's column on Merkel's Paralysis:

Germans are awaiting the fate of their hopeless coalition with resignation. The obituaries are in

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/angela-merkels-coalition-paralysis

All the hopes of the German government now rest on Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller. They aren't members of the cabinet, they're the new stars of the national football team. If anybody could, they might turn the destiny of Chancellor Angela Merkel's hopeless coalition.

If they win the World Cup in South Africa, the whole country will party relentlessly and nobody will worry any more about the disastrous government. At least that's a possibility. It has worked before: poor governments have carried on thanks to a wave of football fever. "Drink beer, watch football," said one Christian Democratic Union member of parliament the other day, when he was asked by a journalist how to survive the following weeks.

Germany has a similar coalition to Britain's: an agreement between the conservative CDU and the liberal Free Democratic party.

There has been constant infighting, disagreement – chaos. Cabinet members refer to each other as "Gurken" (cucumbers) or "Wildsau" (wild boar). Merkel's once ideal partner, the pro-business FDP has turned out to be a nightmare.

While the CDU has become a modern conservative party with a strong interest in social equality, gay rights and environmental protection, the FDP is stuck in the 1980s and is a single-topic party: it wants to cut tax, or at least block tax rises. Under the guidance of its erratic leader, Guido Westerwelle, the foreign secretary, its members happily ignored the pressing problems of the international financial crisis.

And up to now, the coalition has managed to disagree on everything – the budget, health reform, how to help the struggling carmaker Opel.

The most recent low point was last week, when Merkel and Westerwelle presented what they called a "saving package". They want to save E80bn by 2014, mainly by cutting social spending, and support for poor parents and the long-term unemployed. It read like the wish list of the FDP. There was an immediate cry of outrage – and not only from the opposition. CDU members found the package socially imbalanced, they said, claiming that wealthier people do not contribute at all. About 20,000 people demonstrated at the weekend against the proposed cuts in Berlin, and the papers published obituaries of the coalition government. "Aufhören!" ("Stop!") reads the cover headline this week of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, above a picture of a troubled-looking Merkel and Westerwelle.

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Layer 79 Spiders, Government, Doctor John and the Dome.

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Having a shower last Saturday I noticed a medium sized black spider, not the common or garden variety, hanging around where the wall tiles meets the ceiling. I’ve never seen a spider in the bathroom before, and have never seen any flies in their either, for that matter.

Nevertheless, as the shower filled with steamy damp air, the spider became very active and started dropping down on a line all the way to the water control knob, attaching the line, and then climbing back up to where it started, then down again, and so on. It had attached about 4 or 5 lines by the time I’d finished showering, by the time I needed to crank the water knob back round to the off position and destroy all its work.

Unlike Robert The Bruce, who was seemingly inspired by the persistence of a spider, I could only conclude what a futile and desperate business life on earth is, for the most part. The spider dumbly assumed the shower control, and the shower cubicle for that matter, would make a suitable website. Think of all the dumb things we humans think, and do, and waste our time doing.

Wikipedia has some interesting stuff on Robert The So-Called Bruce, who’s never been what I would see as an inspirational figure. Wiki says,

On 21 March 2008, Dr. Bruce Durie, academic manager of genealogical studies at the University of Strathclyde, opined in The Guardian, "that despite his romantic reputation, Robert the Bruce was an absolute scoundrel". "The first thing he did after taking power was destroy Stirling castle and he was a self-serving, vainglorious opportunist who was determined to be king at any cost," Durie added. Sounds like most of the politicians who are striving for power and influence today.

As a non-historian who’s now more able to read history, the first thing I notice when I take time to read about ancient times is how appallingly nasty and violent life was for the majority of people, especially when the so-called leaders and monarchs spent most of their time planning to attack and kill people in order to increase their power and prestige.

Spiders ought to be role models in that they catch insects only in order to stay alive, insects that arguably catch themselves by venturing into sticky webs, and they have no wish to dominate, control and exploit other spiders.

Robert’s ego, of course, let him imagine that the spider was an inspiration to make even greater efforts in his self-serving murderous quest to become the head honcho. From the average peasant’s point of view it doesn’t matter a damn which particular King, ruler or oligarch is in power and using brute force to maintain their ascendancy and exploit the population in general. The struggle for existence goes on regardless.

As is the case today, of course.

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Major news at the weekend was a meeting of head honchos from around the globe, getting together to discuss what’s to be done about the world-wide financial crisis, and the planetary chaos that’s been unleashed now that the tipping point has been crossed.

Bringing order to chaos that’s the inevitable result of worldwide deregulation of finance and capitalism is a pretty tall order. We have a European Parliament, and there are regional forums on every continent - so why not a World Parliament? Is there any other way of ensuring a world order that’s based on human values, justice, peace, love and concern for the weakest? Because that’s not what we have in the world.

First, of course, we’d have to agree on a guiding ideology. Maybe the current situation will be a big enough shock and a spur to do just that. Even our own Chancellor of the Exchequer is now talking about “economic imbalances”, which I take to mean economic injustice and desperate poverty in too many countries. At least these things are under discussion in certain quarters. And there’s more chance of these issues of justice and human values being addressed in the big one, the USA, if Obama wins the presidency.

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The real power on the planet, however, is wielded by wierdos and werewolves like the super-rich and their henchmen - the oligarchs of every nation, along with the Rothschilds, the Bullingdon cliques, the Mandlesons and so on.

Marina Hyde, whose writing in The Guardian is invariably funny as well as bullshit-revealing, had this to say on Saturday:

Even a Bullingdon baronet can struggle in the rarefied air above democracy.

Osborne's Corfugate error was to break the club rules of the powerful rich who, sweetly, let political types appear important.

Poor George Osborne. He is a sort of anti-Groucho Marx. One cannot help but suspect he has spent his life desperately caring to belong to clubs that don't really want him as a member.

To class Osborne as socially out of his depth in all of this might seem odd: he has led a gilded life, after all. But reading this tale of yachts and billionaires and people who need not trouble themselves with anything so vulgar as democracy, he seems a mere parvenu, whose maladroit grasp of etiquette now threatens to destroy him

George's family are in wallpaper. Trade, I suppose you'd call it for a laugh, and though he wouldn't be required to use the back entrance - his father is the 17th baronet - there is much to suggest he has always been more Charles Ryder than Sebastian Flyte.

At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt."

Whatever goes on in the rarefied air above democracy will always be politicians' dirty little secret. If it wasn't such a dirty big one, that is. The only mystery is why we seem to restrict use of the word oligarch to Russians.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu

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This weekend was New Orleans weekend in London, or some parts of it, at least. American football was in town, with the New Orleans Saints (geddit?) playing the San Diego Pirates at Wembley. I’m not sure why. The game, on Sunday, was televised by the BBC, and was quite entertaining, if you like that kind of thing, but the real entertainment was at the O2 where Festival New Orleans was taking place on Friday and Saturday, with the best and most legendary New Orleans musicians having been flown in to perform free concerts in the concourse areas of the dome throughout those two days.

It was an absolute gift to people like me who’ve been wanting to see Dr John play live for decades. Whilst I’d much rather have seen him in some little club, like Ronnie Scott’s, the temporary Dome stage (not the O2 auditorium itself) with its poor acoustics and cavernous space was just fine, or at least adequate. Dr John’s live album, “Trippin’ Live”, was, incidentally, recorded at Ronnie Scott’s in 1997, and is a brilliant piece of work, as was this concert on Saturday.

The best American blues and jazz musicians just have a quality that’s truly arresting and outstanding. The drumming and bass playing was tight and crisp, languid almost, and yet dynamic. The guitarist was a good soloist. The horn section adds another dimension, especially when the trumpet, sax and trombone can also play fine solos.

And of course there’s Dr John’s piano and Hammond, ranging from good-time upbeat grooves to delicate, edgy, soulful blues. He was in really fine voice too, though not really comfortable in such a strange venue, I suspect. Certainly there was relatively little communication and rapport with the audience going on.

Unlike Alan Toussaint, who preceded him on stage, who spent part of his set joyfully flinging New Orleans memorabilia - Mardi Gras masks, etc, - into the crowd.

A fairly strange crowd it was too. Ranging from same-generation long-time fans who seemed to find a spot and stay there transfixed and enthralled throughout the set, to youngish folks who spent most of their time hyperactively pushing and shoving backward and forward through the throng, annoying the hell out of the people they were jostling, who were actually trying to concentrate on the music.

Which is what happens when you give a free concert and people just turn up because they’ve got nothing better to do on that particular night - people who know nothing about the music to begin with and whose cloth ears can’t appreciate the quality of what’s going down.

The dome complex itself - tacky, gaudy and visually quite nasty; full of over-priced fast food outlets, cafes and ‘bars’ of various ‘international’ persuasions - seems permanently full of grim-looking young people congregating in an effort to ‘have fun’. It’s a kind of out-of-town ‘leisure’ complex where people shove their way through a fairly narrow ‘street’ full of chain outlets, in the hope that something enjoyable will ensue. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to it in the ‘recession’. Probably not much.

Incidentally, I loved the story about Mandleson, Osborn, Rothschild and Deripaska, the King of Russian Aluminium, leaving the ‘yacht’ and going out to eat in a 60 Euro per head taverna on one of the Greek islands. As one commentator said, that’s a bit like paying £50 each in a hamburger joint.
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