Layer 484 . . . The Olympic Family, Fuckwits, Gridlock, Protests, St Paul's, Fundamental Change and Putting Down Roots

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The Olympic Family

What an unfortunate expression. What can it possibly mean? At last night's meeting/briefing for 'the Hackney community' (ugh) presenter after presenter kept talking about The Olympic Family. What they actually mean is - all of those entitled to drive or be driven along the "Olympics Only" vehicle lanes leading to and from the various Olympic sites: competitors, officials, bureaucrats, etc. It'll be interesting to see whether people like the Royal Family will become honorary members of The Olympic Family. These road appropriations will be in force from 6.00am to midnight every single day for more than three weeks. And if millions of regular road users can't be persuaded to either a) go away or b) just stay put at home during those weeks, then gridlock is guaranteed. And that's not speculation - that's official.

The highlight of the meeting was a woman in the audience who stood up to make the following contribution:

"A few years ago I was in Australia with my son at the time of the Olympics, and I went to spit on the floor. My son said, 'Don't do that - you'll get a £1,000 fine - and you can also get fined £1,000 for dropping litter'. And now I think this is a REALLY GOOD IDEA and we should DO IT HERE. This could really make the Olympics better for EVERYBODY."

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It turned out there was gridlock in the car park of the community centre where the meeting was taking place. There was a classic moment when it was announced that a car was blocking the entrance to the car park - and a description of the car and its registration number was duly read out. Nobody moved. We all know what happens in this situation - out of sheer embarrassment for being humiliated and for being shown up as a fuckwit you let the meeting move on, and after a decent interval you quietly get up and move your car, or whatever. "Don't worry", said the oragniser, "We'll all look to the front so nobody's going to turn round and look at you!" And then a guy stood up on the front row - and went out to move his car.

Doesn't bode well for the London Olympics.


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Will the anti-capitalist movement have grown stronger by the time the Olympics begin, and if so - with what consequences? Or will the protesters simply get hoovered up from the streets and detained for the duration?

I've just heard an item on the radio saying that the Bishop of London has said it's time for the anti-capitalist protesters camped outside St Paul's Cathedral to leave. In response to this, the Canon of St Paul's, Dr Giles Fraser, has apparently threatened to resign if the protest camp is forcibly closed down. Previously he said this -

"I remain firmly supportive of the right of people peacefully to protest. But given the strong advice that we have received that the camp is making the cathedral and its occupants unsafe then this right has to be balanced against other rights and responsibilities too. The Christian gospel is profoundly committed to the needs of the poor and the dispossessed. Financial justice is a gospel imperative. Those who are claiming the decision to close the cathedral has been made for commercial reasons are talking complete nonsense."

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This is from last Wednesday's Guardian:

The Occupy movement has lit a fire for real change


Establishment praise for the Occupy protests reflects anxiety at public anger – which needs to be turned into political pressure


by Seumas Milne


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/19/occupy-movement-fire-for-change


It's not hard to see why the Occupy Wall Street protests have gone global. What kicked off a month ago in relative obscurity – drawing inspiration from this year's Spanish indignados occupations and the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia – has now spawned protests in more than 900 cities around the world. The only surprise is it didn't happen sooner.


Three years after the banks that brought the west's economies to their knees were bailed out with vast public funds, nothing has fundamentally changed. Profits and bonuses are booming for financial oligarchs and corporate giants, while most people are paying the price of their reckless speculation with falling living standards, cuts in public services and mounting unemployment.


Coming as this crisis has done – at the end of an era of rampant deregulation that has created huge disparities of income and wealth, concentrated in the hands of the top 1% and secured by politicians bought by corporate interests – a backlash against those actually responsible was well overdue.


While the protesters were originally ridiculed as unfocused, or denounced by leading Republicans as "mobs", they are now championed by the media establishment – including the New York Times and Financial Times – on both sides of the Atlantic. Obama has made friendly noises, while his officials say they now plan to "run against Wall Street" in next year's presidential campaign.


In a climate where plutocrats like Warren Buffett are meanwhile begging to pay higher taxes, it's a clear sign of elite anxiety at the extent of popular anger and an attempt to co-opt the movement before demands for more fundamental change get traction.


Something similar seems to be going on in Britain where – against a steady drumbeat of lobbying scandal and escalating unemployment – police and the conservative Daily Mail have so far both given the City occupation outside St Paul's Cathedral a notably easy ride.


There's no doubt that these occupations echo both the spirit and organisation of the anti-corporate movement that erupted in Seattle in 1999. The tactic of occupying a symbolic public space (as opposed to strikes, sit-ins and marches) can be traced back to Greenham Common in the 1980s through a string of often dubious "colour revolutions" over the past decade.


But it's this year's drama in Tahrir Square (acknowledged with an Egyptian flag at the London camp) that has given it such evocative power. And while the 1990s anti-capitalist globalisation protests took place at a time of boom and speculative frenzy, today's occupations are targeting a global capitalism in the deepest crisis.


Which is why they have such a clear sense of reflecting the common sense of the age. What both movements now and then also share is an intense commitment to direct democracy and the influence of an "autonomist" opposition to engagement with mainstream politics – seen as a central part of the problem, rather than any solution.


In that, of course, they're in tune with millions. But when it gets to the point of resisting making direct political demands at all – an issue of controversy this week among US protesters, with some arguing "the process is the message" – that would surely limit the protests' impact.


The Occupy movement has already changed the political climate in the US. Some commentators argue that's enough – and it's up to politicians and wonks to turn the theme of economic justice into policy. But that would be to hand the initiative to the very system the protesters reject – and limit the scope for making common cause with others resisting austerity and corporate greed.


Not only that, but any demands need to be a good deal more radical than "independent regulation" if they're to make sense of the call for fundamental change and action to tackle the crisis: democratic ownership and control of banks and utilities, say, and wealth and transactions taxes for a start.


And as Naomi Klein argued to protesters in New York, the movement will also need democratic structures and institutions if it's to put down roots rather than fizzle and burn out. 


The form and focus of these protests already varies widely from country to country: in Chile, they originally concentrated on free education, but now the target has expanded to include banks and GM crops. Across Latin America, where the revolt against neoliberalism first began more than a decade ago, it has been alliances of social movements and political organisations that have proved most successful in turning protest into economic and social change.


But there is of course no automatic link between large-scale protest and any radical political breakthrough: Spain has been convulsed with occupations and strikes – and is expected to elect a rightwing neoliberal government in reaction to the socialist government's austerity. The populist right can take advantage of mass disaffection as well as the left.


But in just a few weeks the Occupy movement has helped bust open the political class veto on the scale of change demanded by the crisis – and now that opportunity needs to be seized.

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Major meetings are taking place today concerning the Euro crisis.

Seumas Milne wrote this excellent piece a couple of weeks ago:

The class interests at the heart of David Cameron's plan


The Conservative party is effectively the political wing of the City of London. No wonder it can't lead Britain out of this crisis


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/05/david-cameron-conservative-party-city-of-london


"Our plan will work", was all the prime minister offered by way of reassurance yesterday. But that judgment already looks flaky. And most people in Britain aren't reassured. Nor are Cameron and Osborne's old friends at the IMF, which yesterday called on countries able to borrow at low interest rates, such as Britain and Germany, to "consider delaying" their cuts programmes.


The IMF has argued Britain could afford to raise its debt by 50% of GDP without triggering a crisis. But the Tory leaders show no signs of budging. Osborne's "credit-easing" plan to boost bank lending to businesses simply reflects the failure of his Project Merlin to achieve the same thing.


Not even its most enthusiastic advocates imagine such an intervention will turn round the collapse in investment or demand. But still the government shrinks from using its control of two of the biggest banks to boost investment and lending directly.


Osborne instead came up with a new growth plan: make it easier to sack workers, while requiring them to pay £1,000 for an unfair dismissal hearing in an employment tribunal – refundable only if they win the case. There's no serious evidence that extending the qualifying period to claim unfair dismissal from one to two years will create jobs. 


Signed off by Vince Cable, it also reveals the limits of Liberal Democrat restraints on Thatcherite recidivism. But more than that, it casts some light on the class interests at the heart of this government's response to the crisis.


Cameron and Osborne's refusal to change course is partly driven by ideology, of course, and a determination not to weaken in any way the private grip on the major levers of economic life. But there's something else, more quintessentially Tory, about it.


"If this party is anything, it's the party of small business and enterprise", Osborne told the Conservative faithful in Manchester this week. But that's not the whole picture. As the figures published at the weekend by the Guardian underline, the Tories are first and foremost the party of the City of London and financial engineering. More than half the party's £12m donations in the last year came from the City and banking. Its most lavish donors were hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms: the very interests which drove the financial sector over a cliff in 2007-8.


Now, the Tories' intimate links to banking are hardly new – even if the funding grip has tightened. But a government in the hands of what is effectively the political wing of the City of London takes on a more dangerous significance when bankers and financiers are almost universally recognised to have both played the central role in creating this crisis – and in perpetuating it.


It's not just slashing the rate of corporation tax for banks, or delaying the milk-and-water Vickers bank ringfencing proposals till 2019, or refusing to clamp down on bank bonuses in the teeth of public hostility or vetoing a financial transactions Tobin tax. It's the refusal to intervene directly in banking and finance to drive recovery that most starkly reveals whose interests the government puts first.


None of this, of course, has stopped Cameron talking earnestly about being "completely dissatisfied with the banking industry's behaviour", or the need to "encourage good business practices", or his determination to "crack down on tax evasion". In fact, despite the Tory leaders' withering dismissal of Ed Miliband's call last week for a new "economic system", it's striking how much they have echoed some of his language.


No doubt they've registered the polling that shows most people agree Britain is dominated by "fast-buck capitalists" and "predators, not producers". The problem for the Tories is that those are also their most enthusiastic supporters and paymasters.


If Miliband really intends to break with the 30-year-old "Thatcher settlement", one Conservative cabinet minister told me this week, it would be a highly significant political shift. "But I don't think that's where the British people are," he added, "they just want us to sort out the mess of the last five years". As the crisis deepens, however, it's becoming ever clearer you can't do one without the other.

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Layer 476 . . . World Markets, States of Emergency, Turmoil, Panic, Infidels and Union Sundown

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"World Markets In Turmoil" screams today's main headline atop the Guardian. And we're not talking here about fruit and veg. No friends, we're talking about the big one here - the next great meltdown of our wonderful globalised capitalist system. Wonder what's going to happen this time to protect the wealthy and the powerful? - what more can the wretched of the earth possibly suffer in order to protect the wealthy and the powerful? Wonder . . . and be afraid. Be very afraid.

Market turmoil carries echoes of August 2007


There was the stench of panic in the air again on Thursday. Are we heading for Meltdown 2?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/04/market-turmoil-august-2007


Someone on Newsnight last night was talking about the inevitable collapse of the Eurozone - but not till after the dollar collapses, which will be any moment now.


Financial markets: State of emergency


In 2007 the world financial system suffered a near death experience. You could have been forgiven for thinking that it was happening all over again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/04/financial-markets-state-of-emergency


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For some reason, today felt like a day to listen to Dylan's "Infidels" album.

"An infidel (literally "one without faith") is one who has no religious beliefs, or who doubts or rejects the central tenets of a particular religion - especially in reference to Christianity or Islam."

How about belief in capitalism? Faith in 'the markets'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infidels -

"Beginning with Infidels, Dylan ceased to preach a specific religion, revealing little about his personal religious beliefs in his lyrics. In 1997, after recovering from a serious heart condition, Dylan said in an interview for Newsweek, "Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else...I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity."

This is a truly great album, containing many great songs - Jokerman, License To Kill, I and I,  Sweetheart Like You, Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight - all of which are fabulously beautiful and inventive musically and melodically, as well as lyrically. There are two tracks that are regular bluesy rockers as far as the music goes - Man of Peace and Neighbourhood Bully - but also have outstanding lyrics.

And then there's Union Sundown -

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore
My flashlight’s from Taiwan
My tablecloth’s from Malaysia
My belt buckle’s from the Amazon
You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines
And the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day


Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way


Well, this silk dress is from Hong Kong
And the pearls are from Japan
Well, the dog collar’s from India
And the flower pot’s from Pakistan
All the furniture, it says “Made in Brazil”
Where a woman, she slaved for sure
Bringin’ home thirty cents a day to a family of twelve
You know, that’s a lot of money to her


Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way


Well, you know, lots of people complainin’ that there is no work
I say, “Why you say that for
When nothin’ you got is U.S.–made?”
They don’t make nothin’ here no more
You know, capitalism is above the law
It say, “It don’t count ’less it sells”
When it costs too much to build it at home
You just build it cheaper someplace else


Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way


Well, the job that you used to have
They gave it to somebody down in El Salvador
The unions are big business, friend
And they’re goin’ out like a dinosaur
They used to grow food in Kansas
Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw
I can see the day coming when even your home garden
Is gonna be against the law


Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way


Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid
From Broadway to the Milky Way
That’s a lot of territory indeed
And a man’s gonna do what he has to do
When he’s got a hungry mouth to feed


Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way


Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music


Nearly 30 years old, and as relevant today as it was back then. Only more so.


The sun's taken longer to go down than Bob may have imagined when he wrote this song - thanks to the development of computers and the Internet, thanks to the chicanery of the bankers, thanks to Reaganomics and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the already wealthy, thanks to the growth of China, India, Brazil, etc. But going down - it most certainly is.


It's not dark yet . . .


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZgBhyU4IvQ


http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/not-dark-yet


. . . but it's getting there.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpRKstHl7Y0&NR=1

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Layer 265 . . . The Eurozone, Decisive Shifts, and Long-term Economic Health

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"There is no doubt Europe's economy is in a mess, but we should be concerned, not smug"
 
Larry Elliott, the paper's economics editor, always writes excellent columns in the Guardian. This week he dealt with the crisis and the mess within the Eurozone, and stressed the fact that the EU (and the Euro) can only function in the long run if it's remodelled on the following lines:

* greater fiscal freedom by member states

* a substantially enlarged European budget

* fiscal transfers from rich to poor

* protection for employment

* support for wages

* cross-European investment in sustainable industries

Mr Elliott also gives details of what should happen in countries like Greece (and Britain?), especially where the Euro becomes a straitjacket rather than a support for the economy -

* leave the eurozone and devalue

* cessation of payments and restructuring of debt

* banks would have to be nationalised

* public control extended over utilities, transport, energy and telecommunications

* industrial policy developed, including strategies to improve productivity

*  infrastructure and environmentally sensitive investment to support equitable growth.

As Larry points out, quoting from the SOAS paper* which sets out these proposed measures - "This option requires a decisive shift in the balance of political power in favour of labour."

In conclusion, he says,

Frankly, this solution does not look that likely either, and in the short term orthodoxy will rule. If the past is any guide to the future, Europe will continue to grow slowly, leading to ever more strident calls for structural reform to labour markets (ie wage cuts and benefit reductions) to make the economy more flexible. But there are limits to austerity, and the longer Europe seeks to grind it out, the more likely one of the other two options – radical reform or disintegration – will become.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/15/eurozone-matters-britains-economic-health

* http://www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/


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It's also well worth taking a look at Larry Elliott's piece on the latest unemployment statistics, and his thoughts on whether they're likely to be of benefit to Labour in the coming election:

Britain's flexible labour market has resulted in people taking wage cuts or pay freezes rather than losing their jobs – but this won't do much for the feelgood factor ahead of the election

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/17/unemployment-data-feelgood-factor-election?

Oxzen posted this comment:

There are, and always have been, two Britains that somehow co-exist. In Feelgood Britain people still have jobs, still have careers, and are feeling really quite good about the substantial reductions in their mortgage repayments.

In Non-Feelgood Britain, the part that the Labour party was meant to care for and support, people who, for the most part, are used to living near to or below the poverty line on low wages or no wages, life has become even harder, and in some cases intolerable - due to greater unemployment; reduced working hours, reduced wages and reduced opportunities; inflation, higher rents, etc.

How can this generation of Labour politicians even imagine that they've done a decent job of making life better for the less well-off, and thereby deserve their support in the forthcoming election? Even the minimum wage is way below a proper living wage. The level of the jobseeker's allowance is a disgrace. The failure to re-regulate the City and promote investment in industry was unbelievable, especially when writers like Will Hutton and Larry Elliott had long ago warned of the need to do so.

Who can possibly blame the less well-off for becoming cynical and saying it's not worth supporting any of the major parties, come the election? The continuing fall in the numbers of people voting won't just be down to apathy. Abstention is a valid means of protesting about the current system. I certainly won't turn out to vote for any candidate or party that doesn't stand for greater social justice and equality, and doesn't have a clear track record of doing so. New Labour, with its massive landslides and mandates for change, had its chance and blew it, thanks to its ideological shift, its Blairism, and its lack of political courage.

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Taxi!

Speaking of industrial policy, here's a little story about another 60 jobs being deleted in Coventry due to outsourcing to China the production of body panels and chassis for the "Coventry-based London Taxis International". That's Black Cabs to you and me. Another fine British invention.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/17/black-cab-parts-to-be-made-in-china.

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