Layer 502 . . . Banking Reform, City Whingeing, Britain's Interests, Tax Havens, Tax Avoidance, Neuroscience, Punishment, Values, Virtues and Education

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An interesting column by Vince Cable in the Guardian this week:

Put aside the City's whingeing


The threats posed by banking reform are exaggerated. The country's interests must come first

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/20/phoney-emotions-generated-eu-transaction-tax

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Simon Jenkins' column this week is, as usual, well worth checking out:

The government is so draconian, yet so casual towards dodgy private cash

At times like this we need an equality of misery. Yet public spending is slashed while Revenue & Customs caves in to the wealthy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/20/government-draconian-casual-dodgy-private-cash

In good times such stories merely water the envious eye. In bad times they induce blind rage. Why the hell should people be expected to lose their jobs, their houses, their lifestyles, when the government is a soft touch for the rich and powerful? This is not a matter of left or right, socialist or capitalist. Britons are now embarking on a journey into a dark night of economic gloom. Nothing will make them less inclined to co-operate than the sight of a lucky few rowing to safety in gold-plated lifeboats.

Fairness cuts both ways. Today's report on the tax leniency shown by the Revenue towards big corporations indicates that toughness towards the poor is not replicated by toughness towards the rich. The estimate was of some £25bn in taxes gone missing, the bulk of it concealed by an insistence on "commercial confidentiality", otherwise known as incompetent secrecy.

Goldman Sachs appeared to have paid £20m less than it should on bonuses alone, and was excused with a £10m payment ex gratia and a "handshake" with the boss of the Revenue. Vodaphone paid just £1.25bn towards a tax bill that should have been some £6bn. The reasonable assumption is that these cases were tips of an iceberg. Meanwhile the relevant inspectors were being wined, dined and offered jobs by the grandees of the accountancy firms overseeing the scams.

It may be a corny adage, but it remains glaring that almost no holder of high office in Britain at present has ever met a payroll, run a business or cut a corporate budget. They are children playing with sweets.

Osborne is the scourge of public sector unions and condemns tax avoidance, yet he refuses to end the scandal of crown tax havens, from Jersey to the Caymans, that enjoy the benefits of British citizenship while enabling individuals and corporations to evade British tax. Last week the European Union lectured Britain on financial regulation, while harbouring on its borders such fiscal black holes as Monaco, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The thesis, accepted by governments of all parties, that the rich should be allowed to escape tax for their "wealth-creating potential" has surely been exploded by the credit crunch. It is not the kind of wealth Britain can afford.

Just because lobbyists say bonuses and tax havens are "essential to Britain's recovery" does not mean they are. The government's tolerance of both is more than stupid. It induces cynicism in the public realm and recruits fair-minded people to the cause of St Paul's protesters and public sector strikers. Nothing is more crucial to national wellbeing at a time like this than a sense of equality of misery. 

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There's an interesting piece in the Guardian by Vicki Helyar-Cardwell on the age of criminal responsibility, and sentencing policy:

Sentencing of young adults should take their maturity into account

Our criminal justice system should heed the latest research on neuroscience and the law

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/20/sentencing-young-adults-maturity

"The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making, impulse control and cognitive control, is among the slowest parts of the brain to mature and is not fully developed until around the age of 20".

Eh?

A University of Birmingham report, commissioned by the Transition to Adulthood Alliance, has shown that "Development of those areas of the brain concerned with higher order cognitive processes and executive functions, including control of impulses and regulation and interpretation of emotions, continues into early adulthood; the human brain is not 'mature' until the early to mid-twenties."

While your [Guardian] article focuses largely on the implications of neuroscience for the age of criminal responsibility – undoubtedly far too low at 10 – the findings have equal importance for policy towards young adults, who are by and large treated as fully fledged adults from the moment they wake up on their 18th birthday. This was certainly the case in the sentencing following last summer's riots.

The public support these measures: a recent poll found that 69% think emotional and psychological maturity should be taken into account for those accused of breaking the law.

In Germany this is common practice: courts can choose to try young adults up to the age of 21 under juvenile law if the offender is immature or the circumstances of the offence are more typical of youth crime.

Our organisation [the Criminal Justice Alliance] has long argued that maturity, not just chronological age, should be recognised in the sentencing process. This latest report strengthens that argument.

The problem with all this is that it's crap. This isn't an issue about the "maturity" of the physical brain. It's an issue about intelligence - the personal, social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, to be precise. It's an issue about the failure to develop spiritual and personal intelligence through proper education that allows children to consider and to PRACTICE positive human values and human virtues.

Very young children are usually aware of when something is "right" and when something is "wrong". The issue is whether they grow up in environments and circumstances that allow and encourage them to make positive choices rather than negative choices; places that discourage them from behaving selfishly and egocentrically. They need to develop the language of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence. In good schools and homes this can happen at a very early age.

Just waiting for the physical brain to "mature" is NOT the answer.

What needs to be taken into account when we sentence people for criminal behaviour is whether those people have been given opportunities to develop all of their intelligences - despite their physical brain not being "fully developed" or "mature". Sadly, in far too many cases, such education and such learning has NOT taken place, and young people are simply repressed rather than educated in the theory AND practice of living life virtuously, according to positive human values.

The really hard cases with high academic attainment sometimes go out into the world and get rich on tax evasion and avoidance, and financial scams. They then complain like crazy that young criminals are treated too leniently and aren't punished sufficiently.
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Layer 501 . . . Strictly, Dancing, Singing, Cooking, Reality TV, Brucie, Jamie, Gareth, Gok and Education

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Reality TV

The TV dance show thing is interesting, to say the least. In the first place, what's with the 'Strictly'? Obviously a reference to a crap 90's film called 'Strictly Ballroom' - but who cares? And now the whole silly TV phenomenon is known by practically everyone as "Strictly". It's silly because it manages to turn a very skilled and challenging activity - dancing - into a freak show cum peep show cum comedy show cum camp bitchfest.

Who watches? Every single age group, it seems. My 96 year old aunt thinks it's 'lovely'. For her it represents continuity and a link to the past. She has fond memories of years spent tuning in to the BBC to watch "Come Dancing" - a staple of my own family's viewing back in the monochrome years - when we had only one TV in the house, which we all huddled round in the winter, next to the coal fire. Impossible to escape to the bedroom in those days - too damned cold.

Aunt also has fond memories of our national treasure, the sainted Brucie, hosting popular 'family' shows such as 'Sunday Night at the London Palladium', with his stupid catch phrases and his dancing and his comedic schtick. How wonderful that Brucie is still with us, still doing his stuff. Not.

At the other end of the age spectrum there are teens and sub-teens who get off on the gorgeousness of the professional women dancers, the chance to check out the legs of popular celebs, and the attractiveness of certain of the male dancers. A family show indeed. There are saddoes all down the age range who love to letch at the participants, laugh at the bitchiness or nastiness of the judges, revel in the 'competition' aspect, and groan at Brucie.

And then there are the freaks. Thank you John Sergeant, Anne Widdicombe and others for providing such great entertainment. At least it's not the X Factor. At least they're not serious - they don't really believe they're amazingly talented and possess star quality. They aren't there to demonstrate their prowess as dancers. They do it simply to show that they can. Media whores will appear on anything - just as long as they're on the telly. Being famous and being a celebrity are serious occupations, it seems.

Thank goodness there are a few worthwhile 'reality' shows on TV. Gok Wan, Jamie Oliver and Gareth Malone have done some very interesting and worthwhile things. Jonathan Freedland wrote about them this week:

The success of The Choir's military wives suggests we're losing our taste for malice TV


No pantomime villain judges. And no losers. In the age of austerity we want shows that lift us up, not put us down

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/20/the-choir-military-wives-reality-tv


We've been told endlessly how shallow and materialistic, trivial and celebrity-obsessed, our society has become. It's another source of gloom, along with everything else life has thrown at us this year: earthquakes, war and scandal – all under a darkening sky of economic crisis. But this is the season when we try to focus on . . . causes for optimism, among them some small signs that our culture does not only elevate consumerism, cheap fame and a lust for riches, but other values too. And those signs can be found in the unlikeliest places, including the heart of crassness itself – reality television.


The military wives whose record is selling so fast are themselves a product of reality TV, the BBC series The Choir. The programme could not be more different from The X Factor. It is slow and gentle in style, but that's not the key difference to be celebrated.


Choirmaster Gareth Malone transforms a few dozen women on a Devon military base into a group able to sing together in beautiful harmony.


The months of rehearsal together turned them into something else. They started meeting at each other's houses, having informal rehearsals. They became bound together by the shared pressure to perform, whether at the local town or, eventually, at the homecoming ceremony for their returning men. "We feel like sisters now, helping each other out," reported one. 


Unlike The X Factor or its imitators, The Choir is not a competition: the only prize is a sense of camaraderie and communal connectedness, a prize everybody wins.


The choirmaster never tells anyone they cannot sing. The result is not just a sense of solidarity that was previously missing but a boost to individual self-esteem. One woman after another tells their young instructor that they have found a confidence through singing that they had lacked before – that at last they had done something in which they could take pride.


In an earlier programme, Malone . . . took a gaggle of young men, who previously thought they could do nothing with aplomb except drink, and turned them into a tenor section. There, as on the military base, he took what were fractured groups and turned them into a community – and gave them a voice.


Malone's earnest belief in music and its power to transform, his patience with volunteers who have never sung a note, and their clear, expressed gratitude to him for changing their lives, is impossible to fake.


In among the rough of reality TV and the like, it's good to know there are diamonds like Malone – but he's not the only one. Gok Wan with his how-to-dress shows is in a similar business, taking women who have lost all self-belief and pushing them to see themselves in a new, more generous light. There are no withering one-liners, no pantomime villain judges, no losers – and no prize but an injection of confidence.


The pioneer of this sub-genre of reality TV, aimed at lifting up rather than putting down, may well have been Jamie Oliver. The Jamie's Kitchen series in 2002 followed the chef as he trained 15 disadvantaged young people, with the lure of a job in his new restaurant. He followed it with similar ventures, persuading both school drop-outs and school dinner ladies that they could raise their sights.


It would be cheery to see a trend here, with Malone's chart victory over Cowell presaging an era in which nice prevails over nasty, when the joy of collective solidarity edges out the cult of the narcissistic individual. Such a trend might even be a function of the age of austerity: after all, when there's so much real pain all around, who wants to see fake malice on TV?


But even if it reveals no such wider phenomenon, the military wives – freed at last to express through music the pain and yearning they had long held within – and their success, along with the man who made it possible, are something to celebrate. And in these straitened times, we need all the causes for celebration we can find.

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Real Lives

The problem with all of this is that it's putting sticking plaster on people who are already injured and damaged. How did they get that way in the first place? Why do so many people in our society have such low self esteem? Why have they never before taken part in activities that promote solidarity and collaboration? Why do they have such low expectations, low skill levels, low self-confidence? Why have they never sung, danced, played an instrument in a band, cooked well, dressed with confidence, etc? How did they become so inhibited, so overweight, so withdrawn, so apathetic, so unhappy? Why is our society so bad at raising people who are self-actualised, who fulfil their potential?

The people who take part in Malone's programmes invariably thank him for 'changing their lives'. The point is - why do their lives need changing? Why does our society produce so many people whose lives are unfulfilled, unproductive and uncreative? What's wrong with our ways of bringing up children that produces such people? What's wrong with our system of education?

Check out the previous blog, and Mehdi Hasan's column. Start thinking about how we might educate our young people so that they grow up with a personal voice, the habit of creativity, and the habit of reading for pleasure and learning for its own sake. Start thinking about our need to have a national conversation about personal intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, physical intelligence, instinctual intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Start thinking about our worship of test and exam results and 'the intellect' - and the impact of such worship on underachievement in every other aspect of our lives and our learning.
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Layer 500 . . . Education, Learning, Exams, Creativity, Money, Government, Civilisation, Protestors, Freedom and The Markets

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"I didn't feel Oxford was teaching me how to learn - it was just teaching me a bit of German."

So said Sir Peter Moores on One To One (Radio 4) this morning.

He gave up university. ("A pretty cool thing to do," said the presenter, Lucy Kellaway - who has been asking questions about what having a great deal of money does TO people, rather than FOR them.)

"Instead I enjoyed going round the continent in a little car for two or three years."

He also learned to speak German by hanging out in Vienna and Germany.

Through the Peter Moores Foundation he now gives away money in order "to get nice things to happen." "You put money where it's going to be useful."

He's a great supporter of the arts, artists, performers and creativity.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018cbnz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_Verney_House

http://www.comptonverney.org.uk/

http://www.pmf.org.uk/

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Learning, Schools and Exams

Sometimes you come across a piece of writing that's so perfect you want to pass it on in its entirety. Mehdi Hasan is one of our most important progressive thinkers and writers, and in this one article he manages to sum up quite brilliantly everything Oxzen has been banging on about regarding education and learning throughout the course of the past 499 blogs. In this one piece he hits the nail right on the head as to why this country (ie England) should be ashamed of the changes that have taken place in education during the past three decades, whilst countries like Finland have been evolving educational philosophies and systems that are genuinely fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Our schools exam system is no longer fit for purpose

English pupils are the most tested in the industrialised world. The countries with the best education don't subject their kids to this misery

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/16/schools-exam-system-not-fit

by Mehdi Hasan

It was a sorry sight. On Thursday, the heads of England's four exam boards, as well as three of their examiners, filed into the Thatcher Room of Portcullis House to be quizzed by MPs on the education select committee. The examiners had been secretly filmed by the Daily Telegraph offering teachers advice on how to boost their exam results – from telling them which topics their pupils could expect to be tested on, to advising them on how to "hammer exam technique" – and subsequently suspended by their boards.


However, in the midst of their litany of excuses ("We all make mistakes," whined one examiner; "It was a throwaway figure of speech," wailed another), some revealing remarks were made. Mark Dawe, chief executive of exam board OCR, told MPs there is "an enormous amount of pressure on the system". Suspended examiner Paul Barnes admitted there are "pressures to raise achievements", and that it is a "competitive world".


They have a point. The corruption of the testing regime is only a symptom. The disease is the tyranny of testing itself; a culture of relentless exams, spurious league tables and artificial competition between schools. Our exam system isn't fit for purpose.


English children are now the most tested children in the industrialised world (thanks to devolution, their Scottish and Welsh cousins do not suffer the same burden of examination); the average pupil will be subjected to at least 70 tests during his or her school career.


This preoccupation with testing is bad for schools, teachers and pupils. For schools, the costs have ballooned: spending on exam fees nearly doubled, to over £300m, between 2002 and 2010. Astonishingly, exams now account for the second biggest cost to schools after teachers' pay.


For teachers, it is deeply demoralising and demotivating to have to "teach to the test", as so many of them are forced to do. For many, teaching has become dull, narrow and uninspiring. There is no reward for creativity, only results, results, results.


For pupils, high-stakes tests are a well-documented source of stress and anxiety. According to children's charities, this can physically manifest itself as sleep-loss, bed-wetting or skin disorders.


Critics of the current system abound, and include the education select committee, the Children's Society, the Royal Society and various academics. In 2009, for example, a Cambridge University review of primary education described national testing as "the elephant in the curriculum" and noted that in the final year of primary school "breadth competes with the much narrower scope of what is to be tested".


In his book Education by Numbers: The Tyranny of Testing, Warwick Mansell explains how a strategy of "pursuing results almost as ends in themselves has been forced on schools, in their desperation to fulfil the requirements of hyper-accountability". But, he writes, "this grades race is ultimately self-defeating. It does not guarantee better educated pupils, just better statistics for schools and the government." He documents how primary school pupils spend an average of 150 hours purely in preparation for the Sats tests: "England's education system is now an exams system," he says.


Mansell's book should be required reading for the test-obsessed education secretary, Michael Gove, and his Labour shadow, Stephen Twigg. Politically motivated meddling in the examination system, by both Conservatives and Labour, has done little to boost school standards or pupil performance. Over the past decade, according to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) global survey of 15-year-olds, Britain has slipped from fourth to 16th in science, seventh to 25th in literacy, and eighth to 28th in maths.


The OECD's Economic Survey 2011 points out how, in spite of school spending per pupil rising sharply over the past decade, improvements in educational outcomes have been limited, bolstered only by grade inflation. The OECD notes that "high-stake tests" have proliferated in England, and yet these can often "produce perverse incentives" and "lead to negligence of non-cognitive skill formation".


So what if we took a radically different approach? What if we scrapped all the endless exams, abolished the headline-grabbing school league tables, and freed our teachers to teach kids how to think instead of how to take a test?


Would our schools get better or worse? Finland provides a clue. The country has topped the various Pisa rankings over the last 10 years. But Finland has no league tables, no school inspections, no pupil-by-pupil tests. In fact, the first national test a Finnish child sits is when he or she is about to leave school, at 18. The government does carry out regular assessments of school performance, by testing representative samples of students, but these are only for internal use and the results aren't published.


The Finns prefer to empower their teachers, who tend to be better-qualified and better-paid than our own. But it's not just sandal-wearing Scandinavians. Take Japan. A recent report for the Japanese ministry of education said the country should "avoid school ranking and unhealthy competition". And in Shanghai, China, as Mansell points out, school-by-school exam results tends not to be published – yet this didn't stop Shanghai from taking the top spot in last year's Pisa rankings.


Here in the UK, though, we have fetishised exams and deified league tables; we have prioritised test results – statistics, numbers, scores – over the hearts and, crucially, minds of our children.


And to what purpose? Exams are means, not ends; they do not, of themselves, raise standards or produce better-educated children. Nor do they truly measure the qualities necessary for a well-rounded education – from independent reasoning to creative thinking. Instead, in the words of the US educational psychologist Joseph Renzulli, we have created a new version of the Three Rs: "ram, remember, regurgitate".


For far too long, the debate over exams in this country has revolved around "dumbing down". The issue, however, is not whether exams are easier or harder than they once were but what role they serve. To conflate mere test results with a high-quality education is to do a disservice to our children. The truth is that education by exam isn't an education worthy of the name.

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It's also worth quoting extensively from this excellent piece by Jeffrey Sachs, the author of "The Price of Civilisation".

Western politicians are dire, but we mustn't despise government

Our leaderships, in thrall to big business, are failing in so many places all at the same time. But we can't give up on them

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/16/western-politicians-government-leaderships-failing

The year 2011 will be remembered as the year of failed summits. Governments proved themselves time and again to be failures at addressing the growing crises engulfing the world, whether the eurozone debacle, climate change, or budget politics in the US and Europe.


Why should governance be so poor in so many places at the same time? There are several factors at play. 


In the face of high unemployment, growing inequality and looming budget deficits, most governments are paralysed, in thrall to powerful interests. Wall Street, the City of London, the Frankfurt banks and other corporate lobbies hold politics in their grip, and block effective change. Top income tax rates are kept low; banks remain undercapitalised and under-regulated; and urgently needed public investments for education, job skills and upgraded infrastructure are being slashed in response to budgetary pressures.


The politicians are also in way over their heads. They are typically negotiators and public relations specialists, not experts on the policies needed to resolve the world economy's crises. The special interest groups write the scripts, but these scripts prove impossible to stage. Every European summit in the past two years has not only failed politically, but also technically. The policy prescriptions put forward by Germany's Chancellor Merkel are poorly prepared and designed, and impossible to implement. The euro is being killed not only by politics but also by incompetence.


The actual process of governing has descended to soundbites. In the US the Obama administration has failed to produce a major policy document on any area of key policy concern: the budget, taxation, energy, climate, financial regulation, healthcare or poverty. Policies and legislation are decided in the backrooms dominated by lobbyists and negotiators. Politics is by horse-trading among interest groups – not by reason, expertise and democratic deliberation.


The European Union processes are now equally bizarre. The entire union of 27 countries awaits the word of one member, Germany, whose policy logic in turn reflects a mix of post-traumatic stress, coalition politics, powerful yet crippled banks, and amateur politicians. The European commission seems to play little or no role.


A few countries, notably the northern European social democracies, are keeping their heads above water, at least for now. They are stable because income inequality and poverty are kept low by active government policies. Transfer payments to the poor and the social safety net are robust. Tax collections are ample and budgets are in balance or surplus. Even these countries flirted with financial deregulation in the 1990s, paid a heavy price and then got their banking sectors back under control. Tough financial regulation has served them well during the past decade.


So what can we learn from the few success stories? First, societies function properly only when they are judged by their citizens to be reasonably fair. Northern Europe has built its policies on a framework of equality and inclusion. In the US, the idea of fairness has been almost absent from political vocabulary for three decades. The Occupy Wall Street movement, thankfully, has brought it back to life. Most of Europe is somewhere between the fairness of northern Europe's social democracies and the glaring inequities of the US. Yet in much of western Europe there has been a clear shift away from solidarity, towards harsher policies that shield the rich from their responsibilities to the rest of society.


Second, economic success requires increased public investments in education, infrastructure, energy, job skills and more. Simplistic budget cutting will destroy governments rather than fix them. Higher taxes on top incomes and wealth must be part of any sound fiscal strategy. Yet till today, Washington politicians of both parties have been recklessly and thoughtlessly squandering American prosperity by prioritising tax breaks for the rich.


Third, more expert policymaking is needed. The eurozone crisis, for example, requires urgent attention to Europe's decapitalised banks. Yet German politicians, driven by ideology and local politics, have been fixated on fiscal problems while allowing the banking crisis to fester and worsen. The US crisis is fundamentally about the under-taxation of the rich, yet the policy focus remains on budget cutting. In both Europe and the US, political debates consistently miss the mark by short-changing serious diagnostics and policy design.


Our temptation in the face of rampant government failures is to despise government, and even to cheer its demise. How can we avoid that feeling when we watch politicians preening on the TV screen? Yet we desperately need to make the US and European governments work again – not for the politicians' sake, but for ours. Unless we restore skill, fairness, and vibrancy to our democratic institutions, the unrest on the streets is bound to grow.

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Both of the above pieces appeared in last Saturday's Guardian, as did this one by Nina Power:

The meaning of Time magazine's celebration of The Protester

The praise is welcome, but behind Time's sanitised image of the protester lie real people beaten and killed by police and armies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/16/meaning-time-magazine-celebration-protester

Time magazine's person of the year 2011 isn't a celebrity, an artist, an entrepreneur or a politician. The "person" is the anonymous marker of a global movement: The Protester.

As Time's editor, Rick Stengel, argues, to celebrate the protester is to defend the idea "that individual action can bring collective, colossal change". This collectivity has spread like wildfire in the last year or so – each protest, revolution and occupation triggering new uprisings against state oppression, class inequality and police brutality. "From the Arab spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow" declares the Time cover, with Stengel pointing out "the word protest has appeared in newspapers and online exponentially more this past year than at any other time in history".

But how to represent this collective subject, to give a face to this global anger?

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The other serious, radical, progressive thinker and writer I want to feature in this 500th blog is George Monbiot:

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression

It's the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/bastardised-libertarianism-makes-freedom-oppression

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?


In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.


Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers' Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.


So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.


Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.


Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.


As Berlin noted: "No man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So, he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.


Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. "If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral." It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people's freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.


But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.


Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/bastardised-libertarianism-makes-freedom-oppression

http://www.monbiot.com/

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The Masters of the Universe

One final serious thought for now. Thanks to the financial crisis, we now fully understand who really decides what goes on on this planet. Or what. "The Markets". Not the United Nations. Not the USA. Not the EU. They all operate in fear of "the markets", and in terror of the markets' Provisional wing - the credit rating agencies. The 1% who control the vast majority of the wealth on this planet also control what individual governments believe they can do in terms of aims and policies. Sensible governments in places like Scandinavia and China make damned sure they protect themselves (and their people) from being too beholden to "the markets". The rest do not. This is the end result of "globalisation", which is just what the Chicago Boys, the Friedmanites and the designers of the Washington Concensus intended it to be. Money rules.

Extreme capitalism/neo-conservatism lies one end of a continuum which should possibly be called the axis of evil, which runs from Washington through Wall Street and the City of London all the way to places like Pyongyang.

Give someone you know and like a copy of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for Christmas.
Have a Happy New Year.

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Kim Jong-Dead

The Kim is dead. Long live The Kim.

I'm just saying.
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Layer 499 . . . The Protestor, The Bank of Ideas, Occupy, Secrets, The European Union and Dave

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The first real frost of the season last night - a perfect winter's day today: blue sky, bright sunshine and no wind.

Where does time go? Christmas is only a week away, yet autumn's hardly over. So what's been occurin'?

It seems Time magazine has chosen "The Protestor" as its "Person of the Year" -

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102134_2102355,00.html


http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132,00.html

Once upon a time . . . protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History . . . globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

Prelude to the Revolutions

It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw.

The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

In Egypt and Tunisia, I talked with revolutionaries who were M.B.A.s, physicians and filmmakers as well as the young daughters of a provincial olive picker and a supergeeky 29-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member carrying a Tigger notebook. 

The Occupy movement in the U.S. was set in motion by a couple of magazine editors — a 69-year-old Canadian, a 29-year-old African American — and a 50-year-old anthropologist, but airline pilots and grandmas and shop clerks and dishwashers have been part of the throngs.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373,00.html

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It's been interesting spending some time in and around the camp at St Paul's and also the occupied Bank of Ideas.

http://www.bankofideas.org.uk/welcome/

The Bank of Ideas is situated on Sun Street, Hackney in an abandoned office block purchased several years ago by the bank UBS. It is an enormous space complete with a 500-seater lecture hall. We’re open to visitors and guests from 12 noon to 11 pm from Tuesday to Friday an from 10 am to 11 pm on Saturday and Sunday.

It has been opened to the public for the non-monetary trade of ideas to help solve the pressing economic, social and environmental problems of our time.

There is also room for community groups and other public services that have lost their space due to Government spending cuts to come and adopt a space for free.

Artists, performers and creatives are welcome to come entertain and to help transform the space. We also encourage games, workshops and skillshares on anything from yoga to yahtzee.
The only prerequisite is that this space is not for financial transactions. Trade in ideas or skills, but no one should need to pay to take part in the Bank’s activities.

Room 101 at the Bank of Ideas contains just three tents. And within those three tents . . .

Meanwhile down stairs in the main meeting room Caroline Lucas MP addressed an audience that eventually grew to about 60 mainly young people who sat together on the carpet. Like all good politicians she's impressively confident and articulate . . . And like all bad politicians she underestimates her audience, who nevertheless sit and listen patiently & politely to the usual stuff - standard critiques of the government and its policies.

What's odd is that there's no mention in her 20 minute spiel specifically about banks, bankers and financiers. Yet there we all were - sitting and squatting in an abandoned building owned by UBS bank, for the specific purpose of discussing ideas about the financial crisis brought about by reckless and irresponsible banks. Caroline's answer to a question about the role of banks was so bland and uninspiring I can't even remember what she said. So much for fhe Bank of Ideas. Caroline may be the leader of the Green Party but I don't see her leading this movement for a counterculture and a better way of running societies.

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Occupy movement plays it smart


The London protesters' wholesome, inclusive approach is sensible because it leaves little room for ranters – who are waiting in the wings on both left and right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/nov/21/occupy-movement-plays-it-smart

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Secret Shopping and Profit Sharing

Tell no-one. Keep this to yourself. There's now a way to shop with ease in London. No hassle and no queueing to get in . . . and no queueing to get out. As long as not too many people know about it.

We all need to shop occasionally - even those of us who hate the whole business. The commute to a major shopping centre is usually a nightmare on its own. What happens when you get there is often even worse.

So now . . . you simply drive to Car Park B at Westfield Stratford. You park for free for two hours. You leave your car right next to the entrance to John Lewis. You buy stuff and you go home. Excellent!

http://uk.westfield.com/stratfordcity/

Other shops are available, obviously. But I really like the whole operating principle of the John Lewis Partnership.

The John Lewis Partnership's 76,500 Partners own the leading UK retail businesses - John Lewis and Waitrose. Our founder's vision of a successful business powered by its people and its principles defines our unique company today. The profits and benefits created by our success are shared by all our Partners.

What's more, they sell good stuff.

http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership

The business was founded in 1864 when John Lewis set up a draper's shop in Oxford Street, London, which developed into a department store. In 1905 he bought the Peter Jones store in Sloane Square. In 1920 his son, John Spedan Lewis, expanded earlier power-sharing policies by sharing the profits the business made among the employees. The democratic nature and profit-sharing basis of the business were developed into a formal partnership structure and Spedan Lewis bequeathed the company to his employees. As of 2011, there are 76,500 partners – the majority full-time – working for the John Lewis Partnership.

Warning - do not go to Westfield East when groups of noisy teenagers are on the loose. Do not go at weekends or on school holidays. Otherwise - it's very good. Lots of natural light, wide walkways, decent toilets, 300 shops and plenty of places to hang out for coffee and free wi-fi.

For a brilliant view of the Olympics site go to the 2012 shop in John Lewis and walk through to the special observation room. Sunset is a good time to go, as the room faces west.

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Secret Cinema

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10362662

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2011/dec/08/secret-cinema

http://www.timeout.com/london/alternative-nightlife/event/16498/1135328/secret-cinema

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jun/23/secret-cinema-review


This is a very interesting phenomenon. More to follow.


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The European Union

It's showtime! Finally . . . . positions are clear, and our Conservative-led government is exposed. The Europeans want to regulate the financial sector, and the Cameroons don't. Ergo - we're not really European and the rest of the EU will move forward on that basis. Europeans (including right-wingers like Sarkozy and Merkel) want to introduce better regulation of capitalism, plus a Tobin tax, and Cameron doesn't. Probably, in due course, the USA will want to introduce better regulation of capitalism. Probably the rest of the entire sane world will want to introduce better regulation of capitalism. If they have any sense they'll then treat the UK like the stinking, putrid bankers' toerags that we appear to be. That will be interesting. Well done Dave. What a true statesman our forty-something PM is turning out to be, now that he's showing his true colours, and the true colours of his entire government, including the toerags' toerags - the LibDems.

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Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

http://entertainment.time.com/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-rip/
"A pugnacious, eloquent, brilliant asshole."

And still unforgiven for his support for Bush and the invasion of Iraq, as far as Oxzen is concerned.

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Layer 498 . . . No Fixed Identities, The Unity of Opposites, Heraclitus, Taoism, Education and Exams . . . . . . . . And Comedy

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"In Our Time" on Radio 4 this week considered Heraclitus and his philosophy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017x3p4

"It's wise to agree that all things are one", said Heraclitus.

He also believed in 'The Unity of Opposites', and said that the road up is also the road down.

There are many different perspectives, but there is a greater unity to everything.

"It's difficult for humans to have a full grasp of underlying unity."

We learned from the programme that we need an open, fresh, childlike attitude in order to get closer to 'God'.
The problem is that even children these days, in our society, aren't allowed to be open, fresh and childlike.

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"This is like training rats to run through a maze!"

So said Jim Naughtie on the Radio 4 'Today'  programme, describing the preparation of teachers and pupils alike for teaching to tests and exams. The Telegraph has suddenly discovered that exam boards coach teachers in how to coach children in how to do better in exams - even letting slip which subjects are likely to appear on exam papers. Wow! Fancy telling teachers how to help their children to do better in tests and exams!

Heraclitus rejected learning by rote. He advocated looking within in order to know yourself properly.

2000 plus years later, and what have we done to implement the insights of Heraclitus? Absolutely nothing.

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The bizarre thing about the In Our Time programme is that there wasn't a single mention by either the blessed Melvyn Bragg or the three academics that Heraclitus's philosophy has much in common with both Buddhist and Taoist thinking. Heraclitus spoke of life being like a river or a stream - constantly changing and moving. Taoism is often called The Watercourse Way.

http://chippit.tripod.com/watercourse_way.html

Lao-tzu likens Tao to water:

 The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right,
 It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. 

For as he comments elsewhere, water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor, because we are always trying to play games of one-upmanship, and be on top of each other. But Lao-tzu explains that the top position is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the tree, but then if they do the tree will collapse. That is the fallacy of American society. 

The watercourse way is the way of Tao. Now, that seems to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, lazy, spineless, and altogether passive. I am always being asked when I talk about things, "If people did what you suggest wouldn't they become terribly passive?" Well, from a superficial point of view I would suggest that a certain amount of passivity would be an excellent corrective for our kind of culture because we are always creating trouble by doing good to other people. We wage wars for other peoples benefit, and attempt to help those living in "underdeveloped" countries, not realizing that in the process we may destroy their way of life. Economies and cultures that have coexisted in ecological balance for thousands of years have been disrupted all around the world, with often disastrous results. 

- Alan Watts
Excerpt from: "Tao: The Watercourse Way" (1975)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tao-Watercourse-Alan-W-Watts/dp/0394733118

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

Critic Erik Davis notes the freshness, longevity, and continuing relevance of Watts's work today, observing that his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."

Lots of good stuff by Alan Watts on YouTube, including Fear of Enlightenment -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUXodFgbDfQ

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On a lighter note, I'm posting this whilst listening to this week's Have I Got News For You. Sheer brilliance. Haven't laughed so much in a very long time. 42 series and still going strong.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mkw3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0184vbw

Totally love Reginald D Hunter, especially when he's on HIGNFY - my favourite American. Apart from Rich Hall, who's the host tonight on Live At The Apollo. Rich is a real genius. Listen to his stuff on Sarah Palin -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0184vm8

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Layer 497 . . . Multiple Intelligences and the Life of Pi

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Multiple Intelligences and a Novel - 'The Life of Pi', by Yann Martel

I have friends who own Kindle devices who no longer consider buying proper books from bookshops unless they're unavailable for the Kindle. Personally I love having proper books around me, and I continue to find so many good books at bargain prices. I've been meaning to buy and read this prize-winning novel, The Life of Pi, for the past decade, and recently came across it in the books section of my local MIND charity shop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_Martel

In his author's note, Yann Martel says this:

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

This sentence has several key words - citizens, artists, sacrifice, reality, belief, worth, dreams and imagination.

These are all important words. As far as 'imagination' is concerned, Albert Einstein once made the observation that imagination is more important than knowledge.

Whilst an artist apprehends life through direct observation, analysis, reflection, deduction, inference, intuition and empathy, it requires an effort of the imagination by writers and artists to translate and shape ideas into a form that gives them the power to communicate with others.

The Life of Pi is a book created by a true artist. The only real complaint that one could have with it is the claim it's a story which will make its readers believe in God. Maybe it works with those who would quite like to believe in God, but it didn't do that for me. What it does do is provide, within the context of a gripping narrative, some very interesting thoughts on nature, consciousness, and different kinds of intelligence.

Quotes from the book:

"Father was a natural. [?] He made up for a lack of formal training [education] with an intuitive gift and a keen eye. He had a knack of looking at an animal and guessing what was on its mind. "

[Leaving aside the fact that animals don't have reflective minds, we can understand this means 'guessing' the animal's concerns and intentions. However, we might want to query the author's use of the word 'intuitive', and we might wish to substitute 'empathetic', which is a very different kind of intelligence. Even so, Pi's father could also have had quick flashes of intuition.]

"I have no conscious memory of my first go-around in a temple, but some smell of incense, some play of light and shadow, some flame, some burst of colour, something of the sultriness and mystery of the place must have stayed with me. A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed, was sown in me and left to germinate. It has never stopped growing to this day."

[The rest of the description of the sights and sounds and smells of a temple is brilliant, and well worth reading, on page 47. However, we might have to query the use of the term religious exaltation. Why religious? Why not 'spiritual'? After all, the temple could as well have been Buddhist. Buddhism is a philosophy and not a religion. It has no use for a God, or gods. Its essence is spiritual intelligence, which is a quality we can all possess, to a greater or lesser extent. The highest form of spiritual intelligence is the ability to experience exaltation, awe and wonder. Buddhists, atheists, agnostics and humanists can all, through their spiritual intelligence, experience transcendental exaltation, awe and wonder.]

On page 63 is a description of someone experiencing exaltation in a Christian context:

"I saw the Virgin Mary . . . When I say I saw her, I don't quite mean it literally, though she did have body and colour. I felt I saw her, a vision beyond vision. I stopped and squinted. She looked beautiful and supremely regal. She was smiling at me with loving kindness . . . My heart beat with fear and joy."

[Of course, lovingkindness is a key concept in Zen and Buddhism.]

Page 193

"Nature draws the grandest of pictures, and I felt the feelings of wonder and smallness that we all feel, and I got a clear sense of direction from the spectacle, most definitely, but I mean that in a spiritual sense, not in a geographic one." 

P 195, on instinctual intelligence:

"With time and experience I became a better hunter. I grew bolder and more agile. I developed an instinct, a feel, for what to do."

[Don't we all. Or maybe we're born with it, and often lose it along the Way.]

Page 232

""Look . . . a bolt of lightning!" I saw how he felt about it. He was flat on the floor . . . limbs splayed and visibly trembling. The effect on me was completely the opposite. It was something to pull me out of my limited mortal ways and thrust me into a state of exalted wonder."

[Many of us have times when we're keen to transcend our 'limited mortal ways' and reach for more spiritual dimensions of consciousness - states of exalted wonder.]

Page 233

""Stop your trembling! This is a miracle. This is . . . this is . . . " I could not find what it was, this thing so vast and fantastic. I was breathless and wordless . . . But I was smiling . . . one of the few times during my ordeal when I felt genuine happiness." 

"At moments of wonder it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far."

[This raises questions about how often in our schools, colleges, universities and workplaces we transcend 'small thinking', and entertain thoughts that span the universe, both the near and the far, the interior and the exterior.

Do we not owe it to our young people, at least, to enable them in various ways, through various means, to recognise, understand and appreciate the spiritual and the transcendental? Why would we not want them to see the difference between the spiritual and the merely religious? Why would we want them to leave their spiritual intelligence completely unrecognised, untapped and undeveloped?]

Page 297

"Don't bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

"We're just being reasonable."

"So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater."

Page 311

"He was  such an evil man. Worse still, he met evil in me - selfishness, anger, ruthlessness. I must live with that."

[Spiritual intelligence requires a spirit of lovingkindness - the opposite of 'evil' - which can be a word to describe the destructive unleashing of destructive emotions. Even decent people, and certainly young people who have yet to acquire the skills required to exercise emotional intelligence and to combat destructive tendencies, sometimes display behaviour they are not proud of and must afterwards live with. Emotional intelligence is the harmonious working together of the six intelligences in three dimensions to combat destructive emotions and their potential consequences.]

As for valuing and supporting our artists - shouldn't we should be even more concerned about how we produce artists, and creative people generally? Shouldn't all of us have a right to an education that develops intelligent artistic perception, expression and skills - in all of us and not just potential professional artists?

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Layer 496 . . . Thunder, Euphoria, Spiritual Transcendence, Connectedness, Rev, Ecstacy, Adam, Colin, The War On Drugs and Tackling The Causes

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Maybe everybody should get blissfully stoned at least a few times in their life - if only to have some sort of benchmark against which to assess other states of bliss, or ecstacy.

I was thinking about this whilst listening to Pink Floyd's Delicate Sound of Thunder live CD - and getting carried away by the sheer genius of the musicianship and the performance. To say nothing of the incredible music itself - and the sublety of the lyrics.

There's no instrument that can do the things an amplified guitar can do, and no musician who can do them better than Dave Gilmour. To be in an audience when his band does its thing is bliss indeed - although listening to a CD through decent speakers or quality headphones can get you there as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicate_Sound_of_Thunder

One of the things I think I've learned in life is that the only worthwhile and sustainable highs are natural highs. Drugs are not only unreliable and potentially dangerous - they can even prevent natural highs occurring, to say nothing of many unpleasant and harmful side effects.

We do all seem to need, however, heightened states of spiritual transcendence, in which we feel intense wellbeing, connectedness and gladness in being alive. Sometimes it might take only a walk in a place of beauty to get you there; sometimes you can feel it sitting in front of a log fire watching flames flickering; sometimes music will take you there.

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In this week's episode of "Rev" (BBC2) the eponymous Rev - Adam Smallbone played by Tom Hollander - inadvertently takes Ecstacy (MDMA), which has been diluted in a whisky and ouzo cocktail and given to him by Adam's fruitcake parishoner, Colin.

Consequently the Rev becomes blissfully stoned - which is a real contrast to his usual state of fretfulness, frustration and anxiety.

MDMA can induce euphoria, a sense of intimacy with others, and diminished anxiety.
- Wikipedia     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA

Adam does indeed float away on a cloud of euphoria, feels enormous closeness and intimacy with everyone, and loses his anxiety.

"I'm off my tits, Lord. This is wonderful. I love you, Lord. I love your world and all the people in it."

Sounds OK, but the problem is he's not able to function in his job, and the comedown isn't too pleasant either. Colin tells him, "You'll be best off drinking through it."

Prior to experiencing the drug-induced high, Adam had tried explaining to Colin what it feels like to experience "God's love" - "I feel a sense of peace, a real sense of connection to others, and an absence of anything bad. There are moments when I feel like I'm surfing on a great wave of hope and love."

"A bit like doing Ecstacy, then?" says Colin.

"No. And most importantly you feel part of a huge loving family . . ."

"So it's exactly like doing Ecstacy then!"

"No! What I'm talking about is a permanent spiritual state that underpins my entire being."

"Have you ever taken an E?"

"No, Colin. Mind-altering substances aren't that big in the Church of England."

"Apart from drink. All vicars drink loads. And you smoke fags."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rev._(TV_series)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/11/rev-bbc-two-comedy.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sz26s

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People like Colin will always take drugs, until they decide not to. Why? See above. They can make you feel good, and can make life feel bearable, and sometimes wonderful. They can also seriously mess up your life, especially through impurity. Proper control and regulation of the trade in drugs would at least deal with the impurity issue. But there are other reasons for adopting a more enlightened approach to the trade in drugs. You can't actually prevent young people, in particular, being curious about drugs, and wanting to experience their effects. Some people have to actually experience the downside of drugs in order to decide to no longer to use them.

The war on drugs is a waste of time


It is not only very expensive and misdirected activity, but counterproductive and harmful..


by Tom Lloyd, former chief constable


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/20/drugs-british-police


Despite all the money and effort poured into the so-called "war on drugs", the inexorable spread of drugs and the accompanying damage is powerful testament to failure. What we are doing is not only very expensive and misdirected activity, but actively counterproductive and harmful.


If your child was found in possession of drugs, would you want them to be arrested, charged and convicted (with all the stigma that entails) or advised, supported and treated if necessary? Every drug user is someone's child and, sadly, often the victim of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.


Drug-taking blocks the pain and yet we ostracise and criminalise rather than understand and support. "Drugs are bad, ban them!" is an easy mantra, but it ignores the history of alcohol prohibition in the US and our own recent experience of spending more than £10bn a year on the criminal justice system and losing more than £15bn to crime that has merely accompanied the rise in the drug trade. The criminals make around £6bn a year. They are the success story.


Nowhere in the country is free from drugs and the associated crime epidemic. Criminals continue to make huge profits, corroding and corrupting public and private lives. They target each new generation of children and create addicts who are ostracised, become diseased and die unnecessarily.


More recently, I have been working abroad and the problems that exist worldwide are recognised at the highest levels, with most acknowledging the harmful unintended consequences of the current approach. A huge criminal market (with enormous financial incentives) has been created using corruption and violence to make its huge profits.


The Swiss people voted by a two-thirds majority last year to ratify their successful heroin prescription programme as official government policy. For 15 years, heroin has been prescribed in special clinics under controlled conditions, resulting in less crime, death and disease and fewer new users. After this "medicalisation" heroin is no longer cool. Importantly, of the previously hopeless individuals many now hold down a job and live normal family lives. All we have managed is three trial runs, obviously successful, involving just over 100 heroin users. This is good news, but we must move more quickly.


As we wring our hands and close our eyes to the lessons from abroad, delay in expanding heroin prescribing will inevitably lead to more people who will die, contract HIV and Hepatitis C, continue to commit crime and prostitute themselves to feed their habits.


Prosecuting users is misguided and counterproductive; prosecuting dealers without tackling demand or their profits does not work. If the money wasted on misinformation, low-level enforcement and condemnation had been spent on tackling the underlying causes, so many blighted lives could have been different. There are other options, but sadly we cannot hold a rational public debate as serving officers or politicians who dare challenge the "war on drugs" orthodoxy justifiably fear being pilloried by our national press.


Politicians will not even conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of the current approach. The drug policy thinktank Transform has calculated savings of up to £14bn a year if drugs were controlled and regulated. It's not as if we could not do with the money.


So, where are we? Law enforcement spending is up, criminal profits are up but drug use is also up. The game's up!


We know that we must change and we also know that police officers like to make things happen. This is the time for police leaders throughout the world to challenge the status quo and focus resources on serious, organised criminals, not blighted users, and to focus on harm reduction not some pie-in-the-sky dream of a drug-free society. Where they lead, politicians will follow.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/20/drugs-british-police


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"Tackling the underlying causes." 

If the underlying causes of drug use are curiosity and a search for alternative ways to experience reality; if they're the seeking of fun and good times; if they're self-medication for feeling physical, mental and emotional pain - then you can forget about "tackling" these causes. There's no way in the world to eradicate them.

If, however, the underlying causes are poverty or feelings of uselessness and worthlessness, then there are lots of things we need to do to tackle such things. Some of the answers are economic and financial; some are related to inadequate education and parenting.

If the cause is a need to feel a sense of peace, or a real sense of connection to others, to feel closeness and intimacy - then there is plenty we can and should do. Personal,emotional, and social intelligence are within everyone's grasp - give or take a few psychopaths.

If the need is to feel what some Buddhists call 'satori' - spiritual ecstacy or bliss - then we need to offer much better opportunities to understand and to develop spiritual intelligence.
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Layer 495 . . . Ethical Fluff, Destroyers of Wealth, Industrial Psychopaths, Common Treasury, Fighting the Consensus and a Serious Mass Movement

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A somewhat disappointing polemic today from Simon Jenkins - usually one of our most astute commentators (see Oxzen comment on CiF under the article).

He's absolutely right to criticise liberals for not being specific in their demands for changes in policy and legislation, and by doing so, hopefully, needle such liberals into more thoughtful and radical demands. But it's a pity he seems to be mocking some basically decent people in a similar fashion to the mass of right-wing commentators.

Not that Simon's responsible for a pretty crass headline. At least I hope he's not.

The ethical fluff of St Paul's and Rowan Williams is a liberal cop-out

Pythonesque preaching from Church of England top brass is of no practical help in this economic mess

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/08/ethical-fluff-st-pauls-rowan-williams

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George Monbiot is another must-read commentator. Yesterday's column was a classic.

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.


The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. 


So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?


On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of [Broadmoor] patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.


The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.


The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.


What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.


I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds . . . 


Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.


This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.


It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.


A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com/

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Here's a remarkable piece of writing by a 16 year old who's still at school -

Ed Miliband is right to be radical

The Labour leader must stick to his instincts to inspire a generation who are acutely aware of the injustices they face

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/labour-radical-young-people-occupy

by Rory Weal

When politicians stand up for what they believe in and make politics seem capable of changing the terms of play, people sit up and listen. Yet in the haze of cynicism and pessimism that so often shrouds the political establishment the public, and young people in particular, have become disillusioned. There's often no vision of a better state of affairs, no message of hope or optimism.


Writing on Sunday in the Observer, Ed rightly talked about how it would be reckless to ignore the St Paul's protests, going on to explain why Labour needs to be tackling the "take what you can" culture that has emerged over recent decades. It's exactly what Labour needs to be doing – finding answers to the big questions, tackling injustices, and taking on the status quo. He further identified the protests as "reflecting the feeling of millions of people that the economy and country are not working for them" and David Cameron as "looking after the wealthiest 1%".


If politics doesn't have the answers, where do young people turn? The St Paul's protests are a cry of injustice from Britain's youth, as were the tuition fee protests of last year. Seeing financial speculators reap the rewards of their own failures while tuition fees soar to £9,000 a year is a pretty bitter pill to swallow. Party politics needs to empower people, and at the moment, it doesn't. If Labour is to win the support of my peers it must be optimistic and it must be radical. There is to be no room for half measures. Getting into a bidding war over who'll tackle the deficit in a slightly better way will not excite anyone, and young people, more than most, will see straight through it. Ed Miliband needs to stick to his instincts.


I fear the influence of voices in the Labour party who urge Ed to refrain; voices who say don't take on the Murdoch press, don't hold energy companies to account, don't tackle injustices in the financial sector. I urge Ed: don't listen to the doubters. Young people want to be inspired and they want to see our politics, and their country, change for the better.


Ed Miliband has shown he can take on those vested interests, but we shouldn't be afraid to fight the consensus and reshape the centre ground . . .


Young people and the public at large deserve a party that takes on established thinking and uses politics as a means to radically change Britain for the better. Ed has made a great start in laying out the rights and wrongs in society, but we must not lose momentum.


When I look around my classroom at school, I see young people caring passionately about the injustices around them, but not seeing politics as a means to address those injustices. That needs to change.


My generation want to see that optimistic vision. I know Ed does too. And if he remembers his clear message on his election as Labour leader, he has the potential to inspire a generation of young people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/26/labour-boy-rory-weal

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Yet another excellent piece by a young man in the Guardian yesterday, about something that's happening today:

Students are fighting not just for education, but the welfare state

Our protest on Wednesday could mark the start of the resistance that breaks the coalition's cuts and privatising agenda

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/students-fighting-education-welfare-state

by Michael Chessum

Monday's announcement that the Metropolitan police may use baton rounds – similar to rubber bullets – on student demonstrators has reinforced the disenfranchisement of those planning to march: not only is our future being dismantled, but we will be violently repressed when we attempt to defend it. In using a press conference to ramp up the threat of violence, the police are precriminalising protest, making unrest more likely in the process.


The fundamentalism of the policies being pushed by the Tories, and echoed in police tactics, is rooted in desperation of the material collapse of global capitalism – and the scope of reform runs much further than the darkest years of Thatcherism. The coalition's marketisation of education and health; its criminalisation of squatting; its dismantling of youth work – all can be viewed as a completion of the Thatcher-Blair years


It has become clear to ordinary people that the political elite has run out of ideas and its agenda is born of desperation. It is in this context that movements of resistance, including the students', are appearing so dramatically and with such public support.


There are still those who view national mobilisation and local direct action as ineffective or taboo, rejecting it in favour of operational collaboration with institutions and their internal structural reviews. This model of activism looks more and more out of step with the realities of the situation that we face.


Unlike New Labour, which combined betrayal with negotiation, those now in power are wholly committed to the full privatisation of education. It is inconceivable that localised access schemes and outreach programmes, however good and well negotiated, will compensate for the vast structural inequalities of a new marketised system.


Students face an all-out battle in Wednesday's demonstration and its aftermath to derail the higher education white paper. They will have the support of academics, trade unions and, secretly, many vice-chancellors, who understand the folly of market chaos. This will mean confrontations with local university managements, as students take direct action to demand that university heads refuse to implement the white paper.


Nothing could be clearer from the past year of struggle than the ability of clear political demands to mobilise numbers in the streets. If the student movement can spell out and fight for a genuine ideological alternative to fees, debt and marketisation in education, it may well be closer to winning than many presume. In Chile and Germany long-term mass mobilisations have forced the reintroduction of free education; and the Occupy movements around the globe are shifting the discourse of dissent from market economics, a shift they have taken further into the mainstream than ever.


The government's assault on the welfare state, although rooted in class rather than age, constitutes the biggest peacetime generational betrayal in modern British history. 


All that is left to students and young people is to fight against this government – and to link our actions to the struggles of ordinary working people everywhere. The period from 9 November to the TUC day of action on 30 November may yet be remembered as the phase of resistance that began to break the government's agenda. In the process, students must prove that we are a serious mass movement, and not a one-off parade.

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