Layer 110 Return to Ofsted, Gilbert, Gaza, Gazza, Blears and Bankers.

.
What’s occurring?

The funniest line I’ve heard on television so far this year was spoken in a repeat of the very first episode of Gavin & Stacey. Nessa is preventing Gavin from entering Stacey’s house, and Uncle Bryn, the priceless Rob Brydon, seeing the altercation taking place, comes across the road, presuming that Gavin is a Jehova’s Witness doorstepper.

He says to little Gavin, with Nessa still looming menacingly over him, “Don’t go picking on ‘er, just ‘cos she looks like easy prey”.

---------------------------------------------------

I don’t want to look like I’m picking on Nessa Gilbert, boss of Ofsted, but I can’t NOT take issue with her latest comments, as reported on the front page of the Guardian yesterday.

The headline above Polly Curtis’s report said, “Ofsted’s new mission - to get rid of boring teachers”. So that’s most schools closing down then. And why are teachers so boring? Because the majority of them have never received any training or encouragement to make learning interesting and relevant. And why is that? Because it’s not been seen as important these past two decades, since the introduction of the National Curriculum, SATs, etc. ‘Standards’ and attainment have been the only goal. Teachers have been trained, in both initial training and in-service, to ‘deliver’ ‘standards’.

Teachers have been micro-managed to implement National Strategies, teaching minute by minute according to the ‘rules’, guidelines and formulas set out in those strategies. The league tables and ‘value added’ scores have been the sole criteria by which schools and teachers have been judged, so is it any wonder that teaching has been reduced to cramming for tests, regardless of the actual needs or interests of pupils? Regardless of whether all that cramming is utterly boring and soul-destroying.

Ms Gilbert has been a major player in the ‘movement’ to ‘drive up standards’, by any means deemed necessary. Her career has been built on her apparent success in doing so, in her various posts in the education bureaucracy. I don’t think she’s built much of a reputation for having a commitment to making schools more meaningful, motivational and fulfilling for their pupils.

Ms Gilbert has a lot of gall. I’m not saying that teachers can’t be expected to work out for themselves what they should be doing in the classroom to make learning interesting and motivating, but it’s downright immoral and unethical to talk about getting rid of teachers unless and until there’s been an all-out systemic effort to re-train the current generation of teachers who’ve been bullied and battered and terrorised into ‘delivering’ ‘three part lessons’, into offering fragmented cramming instead of holistic learning, and drilling children through endless practicing for tests.

Why not start by getting rid of people like Ms Gilbert who have been the ones who are fundamentally to blame for the appalling state of much of our education system and the near-abuse of children and teachers for political and personal ends?

Here’s what it says in the Guardian:

Ofsted is to launch a crackdown on "boring" teaching in response to concerns that children's behaviour is deteriorating because they are not being stimulated enough in class . . .

[Christine Gilbert] told the Guardian the changes in the inspections would amount to a "crackdown" on boring teaching. "I think that it should do that. When I was a [local authority] director of education I wanted to know if there was a link between boredom and achievement. We did a piece of work on it and there was strong evidence that a lot of it was boredom."

The inspectorate's latest annual report, published in November, warned of "pedestrian" teaching in primary schools, and said pupils in secondary schools were too often set tasks that are not demanding enough of them. "The result is their loss of interest, their slow progress and, often, deteriorating behaviour," it said. Some teachers fail to inspire pupils by relying on textbooks and endlessly preparing for tests, the document warns.

Gilbert said: "People divorce teaching from behaviour. I think they are really, really linked and I think students behave much better if the teaching is good, they are engaged in what they are doing and it's appropriate to them.

There's what I would describe as low-level disruption where children are bored and not motivated, so they start to use their abilities for other ends. That then can lead to other children being distracted in lessons and so on."

She said that a focus on improving schools through the introduction of better and stronger management and head teachers "isn't enough" to make every lesson good - schools should be improving the quality of teaching too. She said reforms to the inspection process would make a difference
.
"One of the things that we've been concerned to do in the new inspection framework is to really emphasise the importance of teaching and learning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/05/ofsted-boring-teachers

So the new inspection framework “emphasises the importance of teaching and learning”. Fucking hell! What a good idea! Let’s all consider the importance of teaching and learning! Maybe that’s what schools should be doing?

This woman has in fact presided over an Ofsted inspection regime that’s generally not given a shit about what goes on in the classroom in recent years, apart from cursory visits by inspectors to a sample of classrooms so they can say they’ve checked to see whether their pre-inspection ‘hypothesis’ about the school being either good or bad on the basis of their ‘data’ bears any resemblance to what’s going on in the classrooms.

As for children’s day to day experience of school having some bearing on their attitude, behaviour and achievement - Ms Gilbert needed to ‘do a piece of work’ on it! Or rather she paid someone, probably quite a lot of money, to come back and tell her that there was ‘strong evidence’ that ‘it was boredom’ causing the problems and the underachievement. What does that tell us about Ms Gilbert’s understanding of children and learning? How the hell could boredom NOT affect children’s behaviour and attitude, Nessa?

And if you needed to know whether children are bored by what happens to them as they’re processed through schools, why not just ask them? The problem is that too many children are too polite, and don’t like criticising their teachers. Those that are brave enough to tell the truth, though, will tell you how frustrating and tedious, how pointless and dull they find most of what happens.

But what if the researchers had said they couldn’t prove any link between disaffection, boredom and underachievement, would Ms Gilbert have been quite content to let them go on being bored? And how come she’s been keeping quiet about these concerns till now? Does that strike anyone as a reasonable or moral thing to do?

Ms Gilbert’s utterings, as reported this week, are nothing more that useless, platitudinous statements of the bleeding obvious. What use is this woman? Can we please have some people of real wisdom with vision and enlightenment running our major institutions? Please? Soon?

--------------------------------------------------

“The Academics”

Children who behave badly and are disruptive in the classroom were the subject of a Panorama report on BBC1 last night.

According to last night’s edition there are 750,000 Primary school children who regularly disrupt their class. Some of them have deep-seated social and emotional problems, whilst some of them are clearly reacting against teachers who fail to connect and stimulate, and a curriculum that’s for the most part unengaging and downright boring, meaningless and uncreative.

“It’s not all about academics”, said a tearful mother, clearly upset that the school seemed to care only for its academic ‘standards’, and had no time or inclination to meet the social and emotional needs of her child. Actually, for the most part, in most schools, it is indeed all about ‘academics’.

“They become verbally aggressive because they want our help”, explained a special support assistant. Swearing, shouting and kicking, Levi is taken off to the ‘quiet room’ - an empty space that’s basically a cell. “You can make a choice”, they tell him.

But he’s determined not to take part in lessons. Many children come from homes where there’s drug and alcohol abuse taking place virtually all the time, the programme tells us. Last year 18,000 pupils behaved so violently they had to be excluded from school.

Panorama looked at early intervention programmes to address root causes. Good old ‘nurture groups’ were being touted as the answer - giving the children the time and attention they need, away from the mainstream classroom.

They also looked at projects focused on working with parents on styles and skills of parenting. They claimed that academic progress is often better within nurture groups than in the mainstream classroom, because of the additional focused attention that’s provided.

“Emotional and social problems can’t be dealt with in a class of 30”, they said. Actually, they can, but Panorama didn’t want to concern themselves with what good teachers do all the time to help all pupils become socially and emotionally intelligent, should they happen to be in schools where this is seen to be a key part of the role of teachers and mainstream support staff, including pupil mentors.

So what’s the answer? Easy - encouraging the pupils to talk about their problems! Letting them reflect on their own behaviour. Enabling them to build positive relationships. Boosting their self esteem and increasing their motivation to learn.

Well, I think we knew this already. So why don’t schools usually do these things? Apparently only 4% of schools in the UK have a ‘nurture group’. I wonder what percentage have a whole-school policy that stresses the part that every adult needs to play in developing every child’s social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and places as high a priority on these aspects of learning as they do on “the academics”?

-------------------------------------

Speechless About Gaza

There was a major demonstration in London this weekend against what’s taking place in Gaza. We learn from the media that demonstrators were treated roughly, and possibly very harshly indeed, by the police. Thank goodness there are still people, young and old, who are willing to speak out and put themselves on the line to show their anger at what’s happening in Gaza.

What happened to them is absolutely nothing compared with what’s happening in Gaza itself:

“Incessant bombardment, no electricity, no water, and the hospitals are overflowing - how Gaza was torn apart”, says the Guardian headline.

I guess we all knew it would come to this. Israel, with elections looming and Bush going, needed to have one more fling at Hamas, to carry out one more ultra-violent operation in Gaza.

“It has never been like this before. The assault is coming from the sky, the sea and the ground. The explosion of shells, the gunfire from the tanks and the missiles from planes and helicopters are incessant. The sky is laced with smoke, grey here, black there, as the array of weaponry leaves its distinctive trail.

Most Gazans can only cower in terror in whatever shelter they can find and guess at the cost exacted by each explosion as the toll for those on the receiving end rises remorselessly.
As Israeli forces carved up the Gaza Strip yesterday, dividing the territory in two , the UN warned of a "catastrophe unfolding" for a "trapped, traumatised, terrorised" population.

John Ging, the head of the UN relief agency in Gaza, described the situation there as "inhuman".
"We have a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza for the civilian population," he said. "The people of Gaza City and the north now have no water. That comes on top of having no electricity. They're trapped, they're traumatised, they're terrorised by this situation … The inhumanity of this situation, the lack of action to bring this to an end, is bewildering to them."

The UN has been particularly angered at the contention of the Israeli foreign ­minister, Tzipi Livni, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Ging also accused Israel of a campaign of destroying public buildings vital to the administration and governance of Gaza. "The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed," he said. "Blowing up the parliament ­building. That's the parliament of Palestine. That's not a Hamas building. The president's compound is for the president of Palestine."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/04/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast

The Guardian’s editorial says,

The last time the tanks rolled into Gaza in February and March last year, more than half the Palestinian casualties were civilian, according to Human Rights Watch. That pattern is now set to be repeated. After a week's aerial bombardment, the death toll already stands at nearly 500, of which approximately 70 are children and 27 women, according to independent Palestinian sources. Of the 2,650 Gazans injured, more than 270 are women and 650 children. So much for Israel's claim that their targets are Hamas militants. Even if you stretch the term to include policemen, this is a "surgical" operation in which civilians will die in their hundreds.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/05/gaza-comment-victory

Gary Younge, meanwhile, writes,

Over the last seven years the war on terror has been thoroughly discredited - not only morally, but militarily and strategically. Nobody listens to moderates, let alone to reason, when bombs are falling and people are dying. That is as true for the rockets that have killed a handful of Israelis as it is for the barrage of bombs and now tanks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.
By erasing any prospect of negotiation, the violence did not weaken extremists but emboldened them. Israel may want to boost the moderate Fatah faction which governs the West Bank now. But Hamas's electoral rise was a direct result of the contempt the Israeli's showed them in the past.

Meanwhile, the Iraq war has left Iran - the primary sponsor of both Hezbollah and Hamas - with far more influence in the region than they would have had. On almost every front in almost every part of the world, including in the US, the war on terror is now seen as a colossal mistake. Only Israel did not get the memo. And it is now set to fail for the same reasons that America has.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/05/terrorism-israel-obama

------------------------------------

Nationalise the Banks

There’s was an interesting letter in the Guardian yesterday from Michael Meacher:

The banks are making monkeys out of the government. After hoovering up all this Treasury largesse to prop up their balance sheets, the banks are still - despite the crash they have now visited on the real economy - determined to save themselves rather than the customers they exist to serve.

It is surely now transparent to all that the only certain way to ensure that lending is resumed on the scale desperately required is to take public control of the banks, temporarily at least, to avert the worst crash since the Great Depression. Is it too much to hope, now that New Labour's neoliberal market fundamentalism is wholly discredited, that this is not a taboo too far and that common sense can now prevail?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/05/banking-credit-crunch

----------------------------------
Blah to Blears

There’s also a letter from Professor Peter Latchford re the Blears comments on the ‘concerns’ of the white working classes:

Hazel Blears is to be applauded for drawing attention to the issue of white working-class attitudes to immigration (White working-class fears on immigration exposed in report, 3 January). But we have to be careful how we pick up the debate around this complex and divisive issue . . .

We do know this: that being poor is a better predictor of negative attitudes to other groups - including other races - than is being white (or black, or Asian). We know that people who feel unable to influence things in their area are more likely to feel resentful towards people they see as different from themselves. We know that people who live among, and have friends from, different backgrounds are more likely to feel that society is cohesive.

There may well be an issue with the disempowered, isolated and impoverished white working class and their attitudes to immigration, race and integration. But the facts are clear: the cause of the issue is not whiteness, or even immigration - the real challenge to a cohesive society is disempowerment, isolation and impoverishment, as experienced by any ethnic group.

To describe the issue as "white working class" may be a necessarily emotive media and political device, but it runs the risk of perpetuating one key myth: the myth that breakdowns in cohesion result principally from differences between races.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/05/race-poverty-letter


Gazza Speechless

There was a documentary last night about Paul Gascoigne’s descent into his personal mental, alcohol-fuelled hell, and what his children and ex-wife did to try to help him out of it. Shocking and sad, and somehow inevitable.

Yet another documentary focused on Joe Frazier, who now lives in a rundown home in a rundown part of a rundown city. It seems almost incredible that someone of such sporting stature, known throughout the world in his heyday, could be allowed to slip so far down into such a pitiful state. Though to his credit, the man still has his faculties, and some kind of dignity.

---------------------------------------

Blah to Blair

Listened to a vile interview on R4 this morning with Blair, talking about the situation in Gaza, speaking from ‘a hotel in Jerusalem’. He doesn’t deviate one inch from the line peddled by Israel, Bush and the rest of the Shock Doctors. What’s the use of this pathetic piece of crap? How much is he being paid for spouting this stuff?
.

Layer 109 Welcome to 2009

.
There is a war
Between the rich and poor
A war between the black and white
A war between the odd and the even.

--------------------------------

The poor get poor
The rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen

--------------------------------------

Actually, as I said in a previous blog, everybody knows some of it, but most of us don’t know the half of it. Reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine helps to get up to speed.

We don’t even know a fraction of what we ought to know about the incredible way in which wealth has been systematically looted, defrauded, swindled and transferred from the public realm to the private, and from the poorest to the richest, over the past 35 years, since neo-conservatism, free-marketeering, globalisation and rampant capitalism really took hold of the world, broke the post-war social-democratic consensus, and imposed the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’.

Just as colonialism in the 18th and 19th Centuries expropriated wealth from the poorest parts of the world for the enrichment of the already rich parts, capitalism in the late 20th Century and early 21st has transferred incredible sums of money from the poorest sections of this and other countries into the coffers and offshore bank accounts of those who already were, and are, fabulously wealthy. The Shock Doctrine explains how it was done.

What’s more, since Naomi Klein published her book, the process has continued, even though the world’s financial system and its global bubble, its world-wide pyramid swindle, or Ponzi Scheme, if you like, has exploded and created a near-meltdown of the entire capitalist system.

And now those who created the bubble - the financiers and bankers - are being left to get away with it, with the fruits of their looting and robbing intact and safely squirreled away, whilst the millions who have seen their lives made poorer by what’s been going on are now having to hand over even more of our money in order to prop up the banks, their bosses and their shareholders, and the entire financial systems of countries both rich and poor, which suddenly found themselves imploding thanks to the billions of dollars, pounds and Euros that have been appropriated by the greed and ruthless scams of the fat cats and wise guys who ran, and in most cases still run, the capitalist system.

The main reason these fuckers are not being held to account and made to pay for what they’ve done is that for the most part it was all perfectly legal. The ‘Big Bang’, as it was known, the deregulation of our financial system, made it legal for huge financial businesses, banks, hedge funds, etc, to start playing the world’s financial system like it’s a huge casino.

So as for holding these bastards to account - forget it. They were just doing what they were allowed to do. They were allowed to lend seven times salary to people who had no deposit to put down on the property they were convinced they needed to buy in order to ‘get on the housing ladder’. They were allowed to increase rents on crappy flats and houses to extortionate levels. They were allowed to lend huge sums to people who had low incomes, little job security and little hope of keeping up repayments when the downturn came along, as it was surely bound to.

They were allowed to give the impression they knew what they were doing and that there would be no bust at the end of the boom. What the fuck did they care? They were in line for huge bonuses for being employed by the Capitalist Casino, as long as they were reasonably competent and just kept on selling their financial ‘products’, just kept the commissions rolling in. So there was no way they were going to blow the whistle or upset the gravy train. They weren’t doing anything illegal.

Immoral - yes. Sleazy and despicable and completely unethical - of course. They weren’t even exercising due diligence, but then no-one’s going to beat them up for that at this stage of the game. The entire fucking government and state apparatus of this and other countries wasn’t even exercising due diligence. So who are they to get heavy about the way things have panned out? New Labour’s been in bed with the City - and everybody knows it.

-------------------------------------------

We just didn’t know all the things we should have known. I can’t remember which of those neo-con cretins went on about ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’? Was it Cheney or Rumsfeld? Or Greenspan? Well it was true. Many of us sensed there were things happening that shouldn’t have been happening, but there were so many more things that we had no idea, not even any inkling, were happening.

-----------------------------------------

Having read Chapter One (The Torture Lab) of The Shock Doctrine I now realise that the CIA not only funded research in various universities into effective techniques of torture and terror, but they also trained the operatives working for South American fascist military dictatorships in how to apply those techniques after they’d rounded up their opponents - socialists, liberals, anti-capitalists, left-wing radicals, artists, intellectuals, etc.

Those same techniques, again disseminated by people employed by the US government using public funds, are still being used around the world to this day - from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq, and in the various ‘offshore’ prisons and hell-holes where those who have been rounded up by the ‘security forces’ have been taken by ‘extraordinary rendition’.

But who’s now strong enough and determined enough to bring them to book for what they’ve been doing, in the international courts of justice? America considers itself above international law.

And who, for instance, could possible take to task the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which are based in Washington, and which, under the direction of their ‘Chicago School’ economists and managers, ceased to operate for the benefit of the poorest counties, as per the Bretton Woods agreement which created those institutions in the first place following WW2?

Many years ago the WB and the IMF started to impose conditions on those poor nations which desperately needed support and bail-outs thanks to falling commodity prices and unmanageable ‘debt repayments’. Conditions like not getting any money or help unless they agreed to sell off their State-owned assets to overseas fat cats at ludicrous knock-down prices. It was a question of privatise, deregulate, allow foreign takeovers, etc - or fuck off.

-----------------------------------------

Torture and the Shock Doctrine

The CIA became seriously interested in torture during the period of the war in Korea. At that time, and indeed by the time the war in Vietnam took place, there appears to have been no official sanction for assassinating, terrorising and torturing opponents, other than carpet bombing various parts of Vietnam from high-flying B52s, the prospect of which must be regarded as some kind of terror or mental torture if you happened to be living in the war zone.

Interestingly the US government and the CIA became very interested in the subject of torture when various shot-down airmen and captured soldiers began to appear on North Korean TV saying to camera that they did not support their government’s actions, and did not think that US forces should be in Korea. Some of them were filmed denouncing US imperialism and capitalism.

Altman’s excellent film ‘Mash’, and its spin-off TV series, gave a real flavour of what the more thoughtful of the conscripted servicemen and women thought about the Korean war. It’s not exactly surprising that those thoughtful and reflective young people of the USA, very few of whom had actually volunteered to join the army or airforce or wished to fight in Korea, were unhappy about America’s role in the conflict. Nevertheless, the head honchos in the US government and the CIA assumed that anyone who voiced such opinions on Korean TV must have been ‘brainwashed’ and tortured in order to elicit such opinions.

They therefore set about investigating how to brainwash young people, using what we now recognise as the classic techniques of interrogation and torture. Certain academics in certain universities were eager and willing to take the CIA’s money in order to pursue enquiries into how to wipe minds ‘clean’ and fill them with whatever you want them to believe. They seemed to believe that if you understood how to carry out ‘brainwashing’, then you could teach those serving in the military how to resist it. At least that’s how they justified the millions of dollars invested in this ‘research’.

Naomi Klein:

The United States Central Intelligence Agency funded a Montreal doctor to perform bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients, keeping them asleep or in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock as well as experimental drug cocktails including the psychedelic LSD and the hallucinogen PCP. The experiments - which reduced patients to preverbal, infantile states - had been performed at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute under the supervision of its director, Dr Ewen Cameron.

Patients had gone to Cameron seeking relief from minor psychiatric ailments - postpartum depression, anxiety, etc - and had been used, without their knowledge or permission, as human guinea pigs to satisfy the CIA’s thirst for information about how to control the human mind.

Not only did Cameron play a central role in developing contemporary US torture techniques, but his experiments also offer a unique insight into the underlying logic of disaster capitalism. Like the free-market economists who are convinced that only a large-scale disaster - a great unmaking - can prepare the ground for their ‘reforms’, Cameron believed that by inflicting an array of shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate.

In the mid-fifties, several researchers at the CIA became interested in Cameron’s methods. It was the start of Cold War hysteria, and the agency had just launched a covert program devoted to researching “special interrogation techniques”. (Including psychological harassment and ‘total isolation’, as well as ‘the use of drugs and chemicals’.) Project MKUltra spent $25 million on research in a quest to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents. Eighty institutions were involved in the program, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals.

Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA until 1961, and for many years it wasn’t clear what, if anything, the US did with his research. When proof of the CIA’s funding for the experiments finally came out in Senate hearings and then in the patient’s groundbreaking class-action lawsuit against the agency, journalists and legislators tended to accept the CIA’s version of events - that it was conducting research into brainwashing techniques in order to protect captured US soldiers. The CIA and Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good reason - the research appeared useless: everyone knew by then that brainwashing was a Cold War myth.

In the exposes of MKUltra from the eighties . . . the experiments are consistently described as “mind control” and “brainwashing”. The word “torture” is almost never used.

In 1988, The New York Times ran a groundbreaking investigation into US involvement in torture and assassinations in Honduras. Florencio Caballero, an interrogator with Honduras’s notoriously brutal Battalion 3-16, told the Times that he and twenty-four of his colleagues were taken to Texas and trained by the CIA. “They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” There was one technique he failed to mention: electroshock.

[Torture victim] Ines Murillo said, “I smelled smoke and realised I was burning from the singes of the shocks. They said they would torture me until I went mad. I didn’t believe them. But then they spread my legs and stuck the wires on my genitals.” Murillo also said that there was someone else in the room: an American passing questions to her interrogators whom the others called “Mr. Mike”.

The revelations led to hearings of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, where the CIA’s deputy director, Richard Stolz, confirmed that “Caballero did indeed attend a CIA human resources exploitation or interrogation course”. The methods taught ranged from sensory deprivation to stress positions, from hooding to pain.

Wherever the Kubark [CIA] method has been taught, certain clear patterns - all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock - have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatamala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshock is ubiquitous.

Though sanctioned by successive administrations in Washington, the US role in these dirty wars had to be covert, for obvious reasons. Torture, whether physical or psychological, clearly violates the Geneva Conventions’ blanket ban on “any form of torture or cruelty”, as well as the US Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring “cruelty” and “oppression” of prisoners.

[After September 11, 2001] what had previously been performed by proxy, with enough distance to deny knowledge, would now be performed directly and openly defended.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush administration’s real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being tortured by US citizens in US-run prisons or directly transported, through “extraordinary rendition”, to third countries on US planes. That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution - a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

According to the new rules, the US government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability - only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

Human rights groups point out that Guantanamo, horrifying as it is, is actually the best of the US-run offshore interrogation operations, since it is open to limited monitoring by the Red Cross and lawyers. Unknown numbers of prisoners have disappeared into the network of so-called black sites around the world or been shipped by US agents to foreign-run jails through extraordinary rendition. Prisoners who have emerged from these nightmares testify to having faced the full arsenal of Cameron-style shock tactics.

The problem was the premise on which his entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients, he would eventually arrive at the pristine blank slate. But no matter how doggedly he shocked, drugged and disoriented, he never got there. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. Their minds weren’t “clean”; rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.

Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing. Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock, the architects of the American-British invasion imagined that their use of force would be so stunning, so overwhelming, that Iraqis would go into a kind of suspended animation, much like the one described in the Kubark manual. In that window of opportunity, Iraq’s invaders would slip in another set of shocks - these ones economic - which would create a model of free-market democracy on the blank slate that was post-invasion Iraq.

But there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people - who, when they resisted, were blasted with more shocks . . .

------------------------------

This is the legacy that Obama’s team now have to sort out. As I say, it’s going to be interesting.

His team of the best and the brightest will be welcomed with open arms by the international community, after the years of having to deal with the voodoo henchmen (and women) of the Bush junta.

They can immediately save billions of dollars by cutting back drastically on the global reach of their armed forces and spy networks, their plans to put missiles into eastern Europe, their Star Wars bullshit, etc. They don’t even have to make an ideological case for it - the country simply cannot afford such useless luxuries. It’s the shock doctrine turned to good purpose.

They can then start to redress the unbelievable inequalities that exist through the USA, through a modern-day New Deal - building decent housing for the poor, and decent schools for the nation’s children. They can also put funds into proper health care for those who need it, and decent hospitals and clinics for every section of the population.

No wonder the poorest sections of society feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This can really happen. As Obama bravely said - what’s wrong with spreading the wealth around a little?

----------------------------------

More on Bankers

Meanwhile, what’s likely to happen in little Britain in 2009? Simon Jenkins, as usual, told it like it is in the Guardian this week:

If there is one sentiment that should have died in 2008 it is faith in the collective intelligence of Whitehall. The economic forecasters league table for 2008 was published last week and, of the 42 pundits listed, no public authority was in the top half. The Treasury came in at 37th and the IMF was bottom.

This is the mob that brought us City deregulation and the house-price bubble. Yet I doubt if a single one has been upbraided, let alone sacked. The entire Bank of England monetary policy committee is still in office - except for the only one who called the recession correctly, David Blanchflower, who has mysteriously been stood down.

This is not some City luncheon parlour game. As a result of the arrogance of these economic managers, a million people will lose their jobs next year and tens of thousands their houses. Yet all they think to do, egged on by politicians, is take more money from spenders and give it to savers, to their beloved City banks.

Banking is a profession that excels at making money for itself. For 10 years it mesmerised Blair and Brown, who showered it with tax loopholes, offshore profits, PFI contracts and vacuous government consultancies. Ministers and bankers enjoyed a revolving Whitehall door.

Frustrated ministers are still expecting the City to rescue the economy in 2009, continuing to trust it with the public's money to an extent that they will not trust the public. They seem unaware that bankers do not rescue economies. They rescue banks.

---------------------------------------------

Abandoned and Betrayed

Radio 4 news yesterday had a lead item on a new survey which highlights the fact that the English white working class feels abandoned, resentful and betrayed. As well they might. They also complain about unfairness, lack of decent housing, and unequal resource allocation, which seems to be a coded way of saying ‘policies that favour non-whites’, especially in housing.

What’s so stupid and divisive about this is the fact that the non-indiginous communities in this country are equally entitled to those sorts of feelings. This is a class issue, and in fact nobody who voted Labour in any of the last three general elections was voting for policies that amount to Thatcherism-lite. Absolutely everyone whose income is around or below the national mean or median is entitled to feel resentful, betrayed, etc.

But then again, so does virtually everybody. Even the middle classes have a sense that New Labour has sucked up to the City and Big Finance to the detriment of everyone who’s not pretty damn wealthy. Nobody voted for more outsourcing, more deregulation and more privatisation. Nobody voted for New Labour in order to have more inequality, or for the rich to get even richer. Nobody voted for the boss class to jack up its salaries by about 20% per year whilst everyone else got rises around the rate of inflation, i.e. no increase at all.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote a strange column in the Guardian this week, supposedly about the future of capitalism, and posing questions such as, how much more money and things do we need? “Is enough as good as a feast? Could we manage with less? What really matters to you? What contributes most to your individual happiness?”

Well, Tim, old pal, my individual happiness would be greatly affected by feeling the rich were being put under some restraint, that tax havens were about to be abolished, that the rich were going to pay their fair share of taxes, and that disaster capitalism was no longer going to rule the roost. I’d feel a lot happier if I thought that the poorest sections of society were becoming a lot less poor. What really matters to me is that child poverty is totally eradicated. I’d also like to see full employment, decent housing for all, and an education system that cared about the all-round well-being and development of children and not just preparing them for employment.

We could have had these things years ago if this government had done its job properly and not squandered huge landslide victories and a massive mandate for change.

What the majority of this country’s population needs to face up to sooner or later is that successive governments by adhering to Friedmanite monetarist orthodoxy, by running the economy for the benefit of disaster capitalists, was bound to make them feel abandoned and betrayed, because that’s exactly what this political and economic creed is supposed to do. It’s often been called ‘trickle down’ economics, but in practice nothing really even trickles down. It all gets sucked up.

The Chairman of Citigroup, Sir Win Bischoff, a man who goes to 2 or 3 black tie dinners per week, was interviewed on the radio this week, and even he admitted that the root cause of our current financial and economic crisis is “enormous amounts of liquidity seeking ever higher returns”.

That’s code for “huge amounts of surplus money in the hands of fat cats who will go to any lengths to keep it and deposit it wherever they can generate even more money”.

The people who own and control this money have no loyalty to any one country and aren’t in the least bit interested in investing in productive industry and receiving a moderate rate of return over long periods of time. They want big bucks, "ever higher returns", and they want it now. Creating a property bubble was the fastest way to lever up their profits.

Will Hutton described all this extremely well in The State We’re In. Just read it.

Incidentally, the failed boss of Citibank received a ‘retirement’ kiss-off of £38 million.

Franklin Roosevelt spoke about the Depression being caused by selfish and callous wrongdoing by financiers and bankers. How come our Prime Minister can’t bring himself to use similar language?

-------------------------------------------

Blathering Blears

Hazel fucking Blears was on World At One yesterday, blathering on about the survey showing white working class disaffection. The housing issue! What a vile creature she is. All she kept going on about is what she assumes is ignorance on the part of those who complain about the allocation of council houses and flats. “They need to understand that the majority of people who arrive in this country live in privately-rented accommodation, not council property.”

So fucking what, you idiot!? She can’t even see, or admit, that the key issue for most people is the points system, and the fact that no consideration is given for length of residence in this country, and the fact that people want to live near family and friends and not some godforsaken estate on the outskirts of nowhere - as well they might. What’s so unreasonable or racist about that?

I know of at least one couple who live in a two bedroom council flat on an estate they don’t want to live on, and would love to move into one of the newer flats in a more desirable part of the district. However, they stand NO chance, on account of the fact that they already have a flat! So we then have a situation where new arrivals are allocated the newest and best houses and flats, whilst long-time residents stay put in their sink estates. Who wouldn’t be resentful?

Blears then tries to shift the blame to the local authorities on the basis that they make their own rules. So how come the government hasn’t tried to influence or persuade them towards more enlightened policies? Isn’t that what government is supposed to do? This government’s done no such thing because they prefer to cop out, and don’t even properly understand the issues, the causes of the resentment, anyway.

Stupid bloody Blears then said that the real problem is the shortage of houses and flats. So who’s fucking fault is that? John Major? Margaret Thatcher? Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? How come this government has built fewer units of social housing than the Tories? The woman is shameless, as well as stupid. She can’t even bullshit convincingly.

Ken Livingstone, on his LBC programme this morning, is talking about Labour making a ‘catastrophic mistake’ in not immediately funding vastly more council housing. But he’s still focused on the lack of properties, and isn’t addressing the issue of who gets to live in which of the stock that’s available.

When there’s a shortage of resources like housing the government has a responsibility to share them out fairly, unless they want to foment resentment and disaffection. NO fair-minded individual who’s without a home resents moving into the poorest of a council’s accommodation, providing they get a chance to live in the better places later on.

And those who have lived in an area the longest, and have paid taxes the longest, surely deserve a chance to live in the best of the council’s housing before they die.

------------------------------------

There is a war
Between the rich and poor
A war between those who say there’s a war
And those who say that there isn’t.

Leonard Cohen
There Is A War
.

Layer 108 Three Wise Men, The End of an Era, and Moving On

.
Three Wise Men

I think I have to take issue with at least one of Jackie Ashley’s conclusions in the Guardian yesterday. Her column was headed, “In terms of spreading values, Mitchell mattered most”.

This may be true insofar as Adrian Mitchell was not only far more prolific than his more famous contemporaries who also died recently - Pinter and Crick - and in terms of a creative output that was seen, heard and enjoyed by the masses, so to speak, but he was also a performer who loved connecting directly with audiences and giving his words and poetry the oomph that can only come from hearing its author declaim it aloud.

Mitchell was on the college and pub circuit back in the sixties, and I heard him many times, along with people like Paul Foot who could also bring laughter to any audience by speaking satirically and wittily about politics and current affairs. I loved these guys, who could both write and speak brilliantly, and do it with passion and humour. They had voices that told it like they really meant it, and indeed they did. As Ms Ashley says, we shan’t see their like again.

I loved the cleverness of these guys - the sense that they saw the big picture and could articulate what the rest of us saw and felt, and then some, and do it in a way that gave wings to our rage and our passion for change, for reshaping and ordering the world differently.

Jackie Ashley says we’ve had plenty of cleverness, but I’m not so sure. You can never have too much of real intelligence, real wisdom, real enlightenment. I don’t think we’ve had nearly enough of it. Cleverness in this sense should be a term of approbation. When Ian Dury said, “There ain’t half been some clever bastards”, he wasn’t being ironic - he appreciated genuine genius.

I know what she means, though. There are plenty of conservatives, for example, who have done well academically and can appear well-informed, on top of their subject and brilliantly analytical. But their world view is just plain wrong because it’s built on false premises. And they’re usually not capable of an original or creative thought.

I don’t know much about Bernard Crick, though I do have a copy of his biography of George Orwell. I’ve already admitted to not having read or seen enough of Pinter’s output. Even so, it’s clear that these guys were libertarians, humanitarians and socialists, even if they were in some ways remote and austere as far as the (wo)man in the street’s concerned, assuming (s)he’s even aware of them. It’s probably not fair to imply they were lacking in ‘heart’.

Ms Ashley is right, though, to point out that what the world needs is more ‘heart’- meaning, as far as I can see, more passion, more of the ability to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve - meaning more courage to speak out openly for one’s values, for one’s core beliefs, to give vent to one’s disgust with the way things are when we see so much injustice, inequality, ignorance, violence and exploitation. We also have to be able to argue for our beliefs, and to do it engagingly, with wit and originality, in language that’s accessible and transparent. Currently our education system doesn’t equip young people to do any of this.

So yes, our Jackie, we do need more people who can spread the word, with passion, conviction and humour, about values and how to make a better world. But first we have to start producing such people, which means completely changing the way schools and colleges are organised, the way that learning takes place, and the way the curriculum is determined.

If we do that then we may not produce any more of those who are truly gifted, but we’ll at least enable more of our children to fulfil their potential to be self-confident, articulate human beings who know how to speak in their own genuine voices, with ideas that are truly their own and not the product of brainwashing that teaches them to accept the status quo through not giving them the language and the ideas to think critically about values, about politics and about life.

Interesting, by the way, that Mitchell, Crick and Pinter were born within three years of one another, 1929 - 31.

------------------------------------------------

The Schlock Doctrine Update

I learnt today from Seamus Milne’s column that Israel’s attack on Gaza, according to the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, was a “stroke of brilliance”. And why was this? Because “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed”.

And the daily Ma’ariv obviously agreed, saying “We left them in shock and awe”.

Milne reminds us that there has been no western denunciation of the slaughter that’s going on because such aerial destruction has been routinely carried out by the US and the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attitude is clearly that Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are themselves responsible for what’s been inflicted on them. Obviously they had it coming to them, on account of the fact that over the past seven years 14 Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza, with, as previously noted, just one of those deaths occurring during the past six months during the ‘ceasefire’.

During this period 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel using “some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world”, according to Milne, who also points out that 45 Palestinians have died this year alone in the West Bank, killed by Israeli firepower in spite of no rockets whatsoever being fired by Palestinians from that area.

Once upon a time American governments would have got hold of the Israeli leadership, sat them down and said, “Listen guys, this bullying and killing is not going to get you anywhere. Either sit down with your enemies and work something out, find a two-state solution that you can settle for, even if it means giving back the West Bank land you’ve stolen, or else we’ll stop sending you weapons and shedloads of money and you can just deal with it on your own.”

Unfortunately that kind of aproach doesn't sit well with an American government that's notorious for an approach to international affairs that's based on bullying and killing.

Ever since the neo-conservatives have been in power in Washington - roughly from the onset of the Reagan era - a rational, reasonable and enlightened approach to Israel hasn’t happened for the simple reason that those power-crazed Bible-bashing boys and gals sincerely believe that the US has the right to be the world’s only superpower, and that it’s will can be enforced around the world down the barrel of a gun, if necessary, and that capitalism’s destiny is to erase from the planet all competing ideologies, including religions that are in competition, as it were, with the approved Judeo-Christian varieties that are dominant in the US. Any beliefs that are not derived from the Bible, in other words, have to be ignored, marginalised and bashed, very hard indeed whenever deemed 'fundamentalist'.

It’s suited the US hawks and neo-cons very nicely that similar nutters have been elected in Israel, on the very same ticket - that might is right, that their particular God is almighty, and that one’s will shall be done, thanks to Stealth aircraft, unmanned drones, satellite imaging, cruise missiles, Apache gunships, computer-guided weaponry, etc. Such people need a state of perpetual war to achieve their political ends, and also because perpetual war makes for very big profits for the manufacturers of arms, and indeed for the Haliburtons and Blackwaters and their shareholders, who service and support the war machine.

Obama has the somewhat difficult task, therefore, of sweeping aside the Shock Doctrine, and replacing it with more civilised approaches to problem-solving and crisis resolution. Hilary, bless her, whose husband managed to do fuck all to ditch the Shock Doctrine or curb the excesses of voracious disaster capitalism, will be the one doing the globetrotting on Obama’s behalf. It’s going to be interesting.

-----------------------------------

White Cat Update

The cat is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s an ex-cat. It’s gone to meet its maker.

It passed away peacefully in its sleep. When I came down in the morning it was still in its basket by the radiator, still in the position it had been in for the previous 24 hours, but no longer breathing.

It’s the first time I’ve watched any warm-blooded creature dying. In truth, it was a good death. It happened exactly the same way my ex-wife described what had happened to our favourite cat, dear Booda, all those years ago. Loss of interest in eating, sleeping virtually all day and night, followed by drinking less and less, and then complete inability to move around, even to get up to go to the litter tray.

Today my daughter came round to see the cat one last time, took a photo of her motionless pure-white form, and shed some tears. She was no doubt thinking about all the times they’d played together, and slept together.

She was the only one who really had positive feelings for the pathetic, fearful, irritating little overbred brainless wretch. But that’s my daughter in a nutshell - tough as nails on the outside, and with a heart of gold and immense caring and concern for all creatures great and small, especially the weak and the helpless.
.