Layer 375 . . . China, Obama, Cameron, Bush, Poverty, Defence, Gove, Education and the Washington consensus

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Heard on the radio this week:
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"In America gun sales are going through the roof. There's a lot of anger out there . . . "

"In Brazil the newly elected president has said her first priority is lifting 20 million Brazillians out of poverty . . ."

David Cameron has told China's leaders that "they cannot shut down debate about democracy, urging them instead to recognise that political freedom, the rule of law and a free press represent the best path to stability and prosperity." Which is complete bollocks. If it's stability you want, then you look to China and not Britain and America. The type of stability we have here is between two competing versions of capitalism. So what? As for "prosperity" - I do believe it was Britain and America who were mainly responsible for crashing the world's economy and ruining millions of lives. It was only good old socialist nationalisation of those bad banks that prevented an even bigger disaster - an overwhelming disaster.

And it's China's economy that's been growing continuously and rapidly - lifting millions of their people out of poverty, just as millions in Britain and America are sinking back into poverty, homelessness and hopelessness.

Meanwhile, President Obama, touring Indonesia, said, "It takes open society and active citizens to reject inequality and injustice." Oh dear, oh dear. Has America rejected inequality and injustice? Does America really give a shit about inequality and injustice? Good try, Barack baby. Good try. Keep saying those words often enough and hope some of your folks start to embrace these tricky concepts.

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Talking of Presidents, Jonathan Freedland had a good column in the paper today -

This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destruction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/09/bush-left-a-trail-of-destruction

For Tony Blair it was sex with Cherie. For George W Bush, it's a turd from his pet dog Barney. In this season of memoirs the two leaders who so dominated the first decade of the century have been engaged in similar efforts to secure absolution by autobiography, to seek our understanding, even our forgiveness, by telling within two months of each other their story, their way.

Above all is the Blair-style insistence that, while some of the practicalities might have gone awry, his principles were sound and just.

For Bush, as for Blair, whether the actions of a leader were actually right or wrong is always secondary to the purity of his convictions. That he thought he was right is enough.

What this adds up to is a challenge for those on the centre-left in both countries and beyond.

So, with a loud voice, they have to stop this incipient attempt to rehabilitate Bush in its tracks. They need to remind the public of a record whose litany of failures is so inarguable, much of it can be evoked by names alone: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Lehman Brothers.

They need to recall an administration that cherry-picked intelligence, that misled a nation to war on false pretences, that ignored expert advice that it didn't want to hear, that invaded a country with barely a modicum of planning, then declared Mission Accomplished.

They need to remind the world of an economic policy that gave billions to the very richest in tax cuts and turned a healthy surplus into a ballooning deficit, that allowed a deregulated Wall Street to run riot and to crash the global economy.

So yes, it's charming to read about Barney out for his morning stroll, leaving a mess on the neighbour's lawn. But that's as nothing next to the mess his master left for the world – and we should let no one forget it.

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Mehdi Hassan wrote this:

Low pay keeps even more in poverty than the jobless

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/low-paid-work-never-route-poverty

Hardworking teaching assistants, dinner ladies, security guards and street cleaners are not scroungers. They are poor because they are poorly paid: theirs is not, to borrow an insidious phrase from the chancellor, a "lifestyle choice". The issue of low pay – or "poverty pay" in the words of the TUC – should, therefore, be at the heart of the debate over welfare reform. Does the coalition have a coherent plan to tackle in-work poverty; to reduce the growing number of "working poor"; to boost wages at the bottom end?

Eighteen of the 29 members of the coalition cabinet are millionaires; few have had to eke out a living on low wages.

Meanwhile, research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests the gap between the minimum wage and the income needed to pay for a very basic household budget has widened. An adult working a 40-hour week on the minimum wage will earn £1,027 a month, which translates annually to £12,334 in pre-tax income. According to the foundation, however, a single person now needs to earn at least £14,400 a year to reach a "minimum income standard" and afford a socially acceptable standard of living.

Ministers are keen to discuss welfare and worklessness but have little to say about the chief cause of poverty: low pay. In opposition, Tory sources suggested the minimum wage would be allowed to "wither on the vine". The coalition's attitude towards supporting, and raising, the minimum wage, as well as improving the working conditions of the low-paid, will thus reveal whether or not we have a genuinely progressive government committed to helping the poor. These welfare reforms, on the other hand, are a distraction.

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Only Britain can beg for scraps from China and tell them how to behave

David Cameron says he will drum up trade in China, and tackle human rights. It is an exercise in bluff concealing hypocrisy

by Simon Jenkins

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/britain-beg-china-bluff-hypocrisy

How do you beg the Chinese for money and yet hold your nose and tell them how awful they are?

The British empire may be dead, but a nagging desire to rule the world, or at least tell it how to behave, is embedded in the genes of every British politician.

Cameron seems overwhelmed these days by the evils and injustices of other peoples.

Such grandstanding diplomacy may give Cameron a statesman-like buzz . . . but it makes no difference to the plight of the persecuted Chinese, except possibly to exacerbate their persecution. Meanwhile, it risks undermining whatever benefit to trade might come from the visit.

One day perhaps China will have enough of this posturing and send a return delegation to London. Before discussing British lingerie exports, the Chinese will profess a "deep concern" at Britain's prison overcrowding, control orders, housing benefit reform and [lifting the] cap on student fees. They will "raise awareness" of Abu Hamza's detention, the persecution of asylum-seeking children and house flipping by MPs.

Perhaps Cameron could lend Beijing his admirable Mr Gove, to advise on the dictatorial centralisation of the Tibetan education service.

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Simon Jenkins wrote this brilliant piece a few days ago -

Does Britain really need the military?

Our armed forces were made to fight in conventional wars and cannot meet the real threats to modern Britain. So why must we pay £45bn for something that's so obsolete?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/05/does-britain-need-the-military-army-navy-raf

Six months ago I proposed in the Guardian that if Britain was short of money it should cut defence. I did not mean reduce defence, or trim defence. I meant cut it altogether. We are desperately short of money and absolutely no one is threatening to attack us now or in the foreseeable, indeed conceivable, future. Besides, as we have seen this past week, other ways of ensuring security make more pressing claims on us. We just do not need an army, navy or air force. So why are we paying £45bn for them?

Britain as a sovereign state is less "under threat" today than ever in my life, indeed less than ever in its existence. That is to the credit of recent generations of British governments. But this means we do not need a defence that has been successfully rendered obsolete.

The chief threat to me today, if at all, is from crime. Yet we are appalling at combating it. Obsessed with punishment, we neglect crime prevention. To guard me from unreal foreign attack the government spends £45bn, but to guard my home and hearth from crime it spends just £6.4bn, and badly. I am defended against crime, including terrorist attack, not by an army, navy or air force, but by vigilant acquaintances of the criminals, by an alert school and mosque, by the police and by the apparatus of intelligence, espionage and diplomacy.

The truth of the matter is that our defence spending is misdirected and extravagantly out of date. We are deploying cold-war weapons against occasional outrages by fanatics with no capacity to cause the state harm.

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Reported in the Evening Standard:

Michael Gove is bullying us into becoming an academy, says head

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23895366-michael-gove-is-bullying-us-into-becoming-an-academy-says-head.do

Brian Lloyd, head of Kelsey Park sports college in Bromley, said his school was the subject of a hostile takeover supported by the Government.

Hundreds of parents are campaigning for the all-boys school to be taken out of local authority control and turned into an academy run by the Harris Federation.

The move is supported by Education Secretary Michael Gove but the Tory-run council does not want to give up control of the school and neither does Mr Lloyd.

He said his school has been denigrated during the campaign, which he said is designed to be a “quick win” for Mr Gove. Mr Lloyd said: “The way in which this is being dealt with is very hostile. I would like parents to trust me and give me a chance. I have 1,000 boys in my school and nobody has complained to me about the way it is being run.”

He added: “We are a happy, successful, good school and every year we get some outstanding grades. But we are getting to the stage where we feel we are being pushed into a corner because Gove wants us to be an academy.”

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It's time to reject the Washington consensus

In Seoul, the G20 summit has a chance to ditch the dogma which has held back the developing world

by Ha-Joon Chang

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/time-to-reject-washington-seoul-g20

The G20 summit takes place this week in my home town of Seoul.

Now the initial crisis response is over, the G20 is looking for a mission. My fellow Koreans want that to be development, especially of the world's poorest countries. But before welcoming this agenda, we need to ask what kind of development the G20 should promote.

An obvious place to look for inspiration is the recent history of the host country. In my lifetime Korea has lived through one of the greatest development miracles – half a century ago, its annual per capita income was around £50, less than half that of Ghana at the time. Today, it stands at £12,000, putting it on a par with Portugal and Slovenia. How was this possible?

Korea of course did things that most people agree are important for economic development, such as investment in infrastructure, health and education. But on top of that, it also practised many policies that are now supposed to be bad for economic development: extensive use of selective industrial policy, combining protectionism with export subsidies; tough regulations on foreign direct investment; active, if not particularly extensive, use of state-owned enterprises; lax protection of patents and other intellectual property rights; heavy regulation of both domestic and international finance.

The G7 was always remarkably reluctant to recommend these "heterodox" policies and insisted that the "Washington consensus" package of opening up, deregulation and privatisation was the right recipe for everyone.

Korea today wants the G20 to focus on a lengthy shopping list of development issues: infrastructure; private investment and job creation; education; greater access to rich country markets by poor countries; more inclusive finance; building resilience to financial or weather shocks; food security; governance.

The Korean experience shows that sustainable export success over a long period of time, for which the country is justly famous, requires protection and nurturing of "infant industries" through selective industrial policy, rather than free trade and deregulation. And there is no mention of land reform and other measures for asset redistribution, which created social cohesion that made development in Korea sustainable.

If these gaps can be addressed, the Seoul meeting could mark a watershed – the start of a new, realistic and historically literate approach to development, after decades of misguided market fundamentalism.

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Layer 192 A New World Order, Economics, Defeatism, and the Future Tory Distopia.

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Right now there is nothing more important on this planet than making sure there's a swift transition to a new economic and political order. The Guardian has launched a campaign called 10:10 which is aimed at getting people to take climate change seriously, and to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels and their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. However, there's no chance at all that attitudes to consumption and climate change will shift dramatically unless there's a preceding shift in the way we do politics and economics.

Can it happen? It seems pretty much in the balance, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that capitalism as we've known it, and globalisation, are busted flushes. Why might it not happen? Because America is pretty much impossible to shift in its ideology, in spite of having some very intelligent and astute people now in charge of the country, much to everyone's amazement. And because in Britain we still have New Labour, with the New Conservatives waiting in the wings to take over, and a lingering mentality that greed is good, and equality and social justice are bad or unachievable.

We also have enormous amounts of ignorance about the way in which economics and finance operate, and a tendency to switch off when these subjects come up, hoping that the clever bastards that got us into this mess will also get us out. Some hope.

Thus we have a situation whereby, having been pre-eminent in the world's financial 'markets' in the period leading up to the meltdown of 2008, America and Britain (not you and me – the people who run these things) are dancing around the issues and the need to take action because they want to ensure that whatever action is taken is not going to disturb their pre-eminence. Woe betide us if other countries, as a result of greater regulation, become more important in terms of currency markets, investment funds, insurance markets, etc.

In 2009 we have a similar situation to 1979 in that Britain's economy is fucked up, as a result of the inequities of capitalism and the stupidities of politicians, people are blaming the Labour party, and there's a Conservative party waiting to take over with a lot of right-wing radical policies they can't wait to implement in order to reduce government spending, cut back on public services and privatise everything in sight, including education and health. As in 1979 the Tories deny they'll do any such thing, or do anything that could shift wealth from the less well-off to the already wealthy and downright rich.

In a sense none of this matters, insofar as New Labour has never been nor will ever be a party of  of socialism or even social democracy. Does anyone seriously see them as anything other than Tory Lite? But it matters very much if we aspire to being a better and a fairer society, and if we aspire to creating a more enlightened and more cohesive, more sustainable planet.

So as Naomi Klein says, we have to get out there and force the politicians to do what's right. We also have to do it in ways that model a non-violent, non-coercive, intelligent, moral and enlightened approach to doing things in the public and well as the private realm. I for one have no interest in working with people whose attitudes are violently aggressive and likely to remain so if they ever achievedany measure of power and influence.

The new movement has to be about all of us working together and acting together, and not about a clique or a cabal of pushy, egocentric would-be leaders. It has to be about linking arms and minds and going forward as a non-violent mass movement, not manning barricades and using weapons on the instructions of those who can shout loudest or exude the most charisma.

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This is going to be a short blog because I'd rather readers use their time to read a couple of excellent columns which have appeared in the papers in the past few days, and if necessary re-read them in order to fully appreciate and internalise what these authors have written about so well.

These pieces are so well written, so well argued, and so full of important ideas that I find it hard to extract paragraphs from them as mere summaries. They really do need to be read in full. Having said that, I can't NOT give a flavour of their main points.

First, Will Hutton's page in the Observer:

The G20 has saved us, but it's failing to rein in those who caused the crisis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/06/g20-financial-crisis-banking-bonuses

“It must rank as one of the least fair deals in economic history. Over the last 12 months, western governments have taken unprecedented and extraordinary action to avoid what undoubtedly would have been a global slump. The good news is that they have succeeded. The bad news is that what caused the crisis – the stranglehold of a new financial oligarchy upon public policy – has hardly been touched. And not only is this grossly unfair, but unless there is change, a second and more serious crisis potentially awaits.

What to do about the banking system and its bonuses, the excesses that created the credit crunch and division among the great nations? Banks are exploiting this vacuum to return to business as usual. It is hard to believe that only 12 months ago their recklessly overstretched balance sheets threatened an implosion of the western banking system.

Governments have got to reform the entire structure of western finance –bonuses, credit rating agencies, capital adequacy requirements, banks that are too big to fail, the use of offshore tax havens, the role of derivatives – from top to bottom.

Yesterday's communique was disappointingly minimalist – a lowest common denominator between Europe and the US, with Britain sitting unhappily in the middle. Too little is happening and what is being done is so slow that it is imperceptible.

The whole debate is extraordinary. Right-of-centre European politicians – President Sarkozy and his finance minister, Christine Lagarde, supported by the right-of-centre Swedish prime minister, who is currently president of the EU, and German Christian Democrats – believe that western governments should challenge the bank bonus culture head on. It is offensive, they think, that a banking system that owes its continued existence to massive government intervention should pay itself extravagant salaries and bonuses that are massively out of line with the top of business, let alone the ordinary taxpayer. They are right. France proposes a mandatory cap and the outlawing of guaranteed bonuses.

In opposition, there is allegedly left-of-centre Britain and the US – liberal politicians defending the indefensible. The bonus culture works on a London/New York axis, with financiers having a sense of entitlement to astonishing earnings that have no economic justification in terms of value creation or relation to profitability.

90% of investment bank profits is not directed to strengthen balance sheets or to shareholders in dividends, nor to customers in lower fees, nor to taxpayers – it goes as bankers' bonuses. Our role is to bail them out when things go wrong.

We know it is a scam . . . If G20 governments demanded limits and made continued liquidity provision dependent upon compliance, no bank could refuse. The threat of an exodus of bankers is nonsense. No bank trading outside the G20 in financial centres such as Dubai, Hong Kong or Dublin could muster the capital or scale to pay mega bonuses. The issue would be dead.

Obama and Brown are right to press for continuing the aggressive economic stimulation. They should show the same determination in confronting the powerful financial oligarchs who have so rigged the system in their favour – and their rewards. After all, they did very nearly bring the world down and could do so again.”

The comments posted after Will's column are an interesting mixed bag, and largely sane and sensible, though I haven't read them all yet.

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In yesterday's Guardian economics correspondent Ashley Seager wrote a superb column that should be required reading for every adult with the capacity to understand words of three syllables and above.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/07/financial-crisis-happen-again

In the paper it appears under the headline, “Will Brown stop the drift back to the casino?”
On the website the headline is, “Have we learned nothing from the financial crisis?”

“Rescued banks are returning to the 'casino-style' speculation that brought us trouble in the first place”

 Have we learned nothing from the financial crisis of the past two years? Very little, it appears.

The investment bankers are out there making money again, popping the champagne corks and telling themselves how clever they are – after all, they have managed to pass a good proportion of their huge losses on to us, the taxpayers, and are sitting at the roulette table again.

There is a danger that in spite of all the talk among the G20 finance ministers at their weekend summit about the need to do something about bankers' bonuses and banks' capital ratios, the drive to reform could fade as the economic crisis recedes.

Hence the recent call by Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, for some sort of action against the excess profits banks make on some of their casino activities, which he correctly labelled "socially useless".

Later today we will have the launch of the annual trade and development report from the analysts at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). It will put the case for far-reaching reform of the world's financial system and foreign exchange markets so that they serve the people and productive economic investment, rather than the other way around.

"All these rises in markets are said to reflect economic recovery but it is just another bubble," Heiner Flassbeck, Unctad's chief economist, told the Guardian. "These markets are reflecting a recovery that is not there. Wage deflation is a huge danger everywhere and this is not being recognised.

"Banks have been rescued by the taxpayer and are just returning to casino-style speculation that brought us trouble in the first place. We need to focus banking on supporting investment in productive businesses."

Unctad comprehensively rebuts the arguments of parties such as Boris Johnson and the British Bankers' Association that what's good for the Square Mile is good for the country.

"Financial markets in many developed countries have come to resemble giant casinos; which almost always win and when they lose they get bailed out, while everybody else loses.

"A large segment of their activities is entirely detached from real sector activities. The crisis has made it abundantly clear that more finance and more financial products are not always better, and a more sophisticated financial system does not necessarily make a greater contribution to social welfare."

The point is we are all going to pay higher taxes and see cuts to public spending for at least a decade as a result of this mess and many people may never get another job. Therefore we have a right to cut the City down to size if we want to. It's our money, remember.

[Unctad] points out that the financial services industry managed to "capture" policymaking in a number of important countries (certainly Britain) into believing the myth that what was good for the sector was good for the economy.

But Unctad is no less scornful of academic economists who, it argues, should have known better than to believe the argument for free markets.

"In view of the vast literature and rich empirical evidence on financial markets' proneness to excesses and crises, it is surprising that there was so little challenging of the popular belief in the supposedly unchallengeable wisdom of unfettered market forces."

The report lays out a prescription of how supervision of markets can be hugely improved and how the foreign exchange markets could be reformed to prevent speculative, damaging swings in exchange rates in many countries that bear no relation to the underlying economic health of a country.

We cannot let the chaos of the past two years happen again. We have to change the current system and make it work for us. Our policymakers seem too tired to do much about it. But failure to do so will leave the clock ticking down towards the next crisis.

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Talking of policymakers being too tired to do anything about the system and the fat cats that run it, Jackie Ashley, also writing in yesterday's paper, said, 

A Tory dystopia looms, yet ministers meekly sit and wait

We're months away from a government the left will hate. But Labour, gripped by defeatism, is just going through the motions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/06/election-conservatives-labour-recession-brown

“Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a very different Britain, one that's perhaps not more than half a year away. It's a country convulsed over its future in the European Union, one in which welfare is being slashed and new prisons are the only public investment still growing. Bodies set up to make life fairer and safer are disappearing in a "bonfire of the quangos".The BBC is being dismantled and a Fox News-style Murdoch broadcasting agenda is ripping ahead. A rightwing Conservative parliamentary party is in power and sees little chance of opposition for a decade. Labour is a shattered shell of a party – nobody cares about who becomes its leader – and the future of opposition politics seems to lie with the Lib Dems.

The country will be seen to have taken a strong and decisive move to the right. David Cameron's period of soft-Blairite reassurance will be a half-forgotten footnote. Look at the most powerful thinking among today's Tories on the alleged iniquity of the EU, or the need to slash the size of the state.

After the failures and disappointments of recent years, many people will be pleased. Democracy requires, from time to time, a major clearout and a fresh start. What is baffling is that the Labour government itself appears to be quietly reconciled to a change that may destroy the party as a major player for 10 or 20 years – perhaps forever.

Jon Cruddas will tell the Compass pressure group tomorrow that the party seems paralysed, afraid and "meekly accepting defeat, unable to show what we believe in".

If so, things are worse for Labour now than they were for John Major's Conservatives before 1997. It should not be this way.

Where has the current government gone? Let's not talk about Brown. Let's talk about the rest of them – David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Andy Burnham, Douglas Alexander, Ben Bradshaw, Yvette Cooper?

It is as if ministers have gone on a collective go-slow . . . Where's the fire? The enthusiasm for the big picture? The aggression? How many of them are fighting to get onto the Today programme or Newsnight to make the case for Labour's record, and to attack the increasingly rightwing Conservative agenda? The effect will be to drive Labour's vote down to somewhere so appalling that there may be no coming back.

Even now, there is an alternative. Labour politicians do have a story to tell. It's the story of underfunded public services being built up again, of health workers being paid decently, of a big expansion in further education, public investment in transport and of success in containing terrorism. It's about the emergence of a more tolerant country. It's about relative peace in Northern Ireland and democracy in Scotland and Wales.

Even if unemployment is bad now, and house prices lower, millions did very well for a long time. It wasn't all an accident. It wasn't all wasted or meaningless just because the thunderclouds rolled back again.

For every positive one can find a negative – failures, mistaken wars, breaches of faith. But it isn't all black. A Tory government will do things people on the centre left will hate. If ministers and other Labour MPs have an ounce of spirit, or even self-interest, it's time to point these things out. They can't prevent defeat. They could halt catastrophe.

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I'm going to have to stop reading Jackie Ashley because she pisses me off so much. She writes quite a lot of sensible things, and then she says things that show she has no real understanding whatsoever.

The reason the bunch of twats and political pillocks she mentions can't and won't do or say anything is because they have no alternative beliefs or vision. They've fully subscribed to everything that the Blair and his Bitch project has ever said and done, everything the City Boys and the Chicago Boys wanted them to say and do, and they know full well they've been finally shown up as fucking arrogant arseholes with no economic literacy, no alternative vision and nothing else to say. They're not about to apologise for wasting huge landslides and mandates for radical change from Thatcherism, from selling off and privatising, from deregulation, from casino banking systems, etc. They're fucked, and they know it.

They can't espouse an alternative political philosophy because they don't know what one might look like. They can't embrace MPs to the left of them, and what they have to say, because they've spent so much time slagging them off and they know they're not welcome, especially as rats leaving a sinking ship and mere opportunists.  They fully deserve to go down.

The big issue for the rest of us, is indeed, as Jackie Ashley says – do we deserve a Conservative government? Well perhaps most people do deserve one – for their failure to protest about what NuLabour has been up to, for their going along with the casino and bonus culture, etc. I'm talking here about the people who read the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun and all the other shit that supports the current political consensus about unfettered capitalism and trickle-down economics. As far as those people are concerned, I say fuck the lot of them.

Unfortunately, under a Tory government, it's the poor, the ignorant, the sick and the young who will continue to suffer, to be exploited and to remain ignorant of the real causes of their suffering. That's true in this country, and it's true globally.Not that the affluent Right aren't also ignorant, in their way. Not that they aren't also poor in many ways - in spirit, in time for enjoying life, in emotional wellbeing, etc.

The world's only hope is going to lie with the likes of Obama, assuming he's able to grow stronger as well as wiser and more experienced, the new progressive government in Japan, the intelligent wing of the EU, especially Scandinavia, some of the South American countries, possibly China, and perhaps the United Nations.

As for Jackie Ashley claiming, “Millions did very well for a long time. It wasn't all an accident. It wasn't all wasted or meaningless . . .” all I can say is that the millions who did very well weren't the poor, who have got poorer, and it wasn't children, whose lives have become increasingly stressful and miserable. And these are the very people that progressive governments are supposed to support, protect and make stronger.

In a sense it was indeed all “an accident”, as Jackie says, in that NuLabour merely channeled more money to public services - they didn't care about where the money came from, or how it was generated, or whether such generation was sustainable. As it turns out it was our money all along - none of it came out of the pockets of the tax avoiders, the tax evaders, and the offshore bankers.

New Labour did nothing to restructure British industry, ensure long-term investment and long-term employment, or regulate the UK's financial system so that it served and met the needs of our people. They deprofessionalised hundreds of thousands of public sector professionals, and they messed up and distorted the quality of health care and education with their culture of targets, payment by results (akin to old-fashioned factory piecework) and league tables.

All of this, plus Iraq and Afghanistan and support for Bushism, is a  shameful blot on Labour Party history that will be impossible to expunge. With any luck the little tosspots and carpet-baggers that supported “the project” will now quietly disappear and get on with making loadsamoney on the gravy train they tolerated and encouraged. Fuck all of them.

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Here's an interesting selection of readers' responses to what Will Hutton wrote about the BBC and the Murdoch empire.

The big issue | Murdoch and the media

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/sep/06/big-issue-james-murdoch
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Layer 191 Michael Moore, Taming the Monster II, Enlightenment, the Beeb, Saffire and Yet More Blues.

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Bowling for Columbine, Cheering for Michael?

Having mentioned the Columbine killings yesterday I decided to dip into a book my good friend K had given me recently, called Moore & Us, by Jesse Larner.

I've wondered for some time what the case is against Michael Moore (if any) from a progressive point of view.

This book was written just after the re-election of George W, and begins,

“It wasn't supposed to be like this. Another four years of faith-based foreign policy, carried out by amateurs with no interest in facts or the lessons of history. Another four years of sadistic attacks on the poor, of privatisation of social goods, of gifts to the rich. Another four years of creeping theocracy and contempt for the Constitution. Another four years of complacency about an oil-based economy. Another four years in which to nurture a rogue sense of national sovereignty. On 2 November 2004, those Americans who saw through the Bush agenda found themselves contemplating a very dark future indeed.”

So far so good. I'll report back when I've read some more about Moore. Meanwhile, have a look at this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/02/michael-moore-capitalism-documentary?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:d9718804-5ca9-48bf-a83a-8b7f5674479b

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Beatlephobia

Beatles Night on BBC2 reminded us of the power and the fury of the religious right in the USA – the way in which sections of the so-called Christian community responded to the news that Lennon had appeared to malign Christianity. Death threats.

Er – what was it Jesus said about love and forgiveness?

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Taming the Monster II

The crux of Epicurus' philosophy is that if we have lots of money, but no real friends, no real freedom and very little time to live 'an analysed life', we will never be truly happy. And if we have those things, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.

I mention this because I was talking the other day to someone who makes a living from giving financial advice to people, and according to her, as soon as wealthy people in Britain have to start paying 50% income tax on whatever they earn above £150,000 per year they're all going to leave Britain and live elsewhere.

I said I was genuinely surprised to hear her say that, since it wouldn't worry me if I had to pay a mere 10% more on earnings above £150,000 – and I'd be pretty happy to be paying only 40% on everything up to the fairly princely sum of £150,000. 1.5K seems like a pretty hefty amount to me. Obviously I'm not in the real world. Although I do happen to know that £30,000 is the median salary in this country, and only 10% of our population have incomes above £70,000.

She was adamant. They're all going to go! It seems she knows a lot of these people, and many of them have already left for greener pastures. I can't say I've noticed. Maybe their work's being done by their deputies.

All I could say was, those people obviously care more about coining the absolute maximum amount of money than they do about their quality of life. Or maybe they think they can just keep on popping back into Britain in order to keep in contact with and enjoy the company of their children, grandchildren, elderly parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, lifelong friends, and of course our landscapes and our culture. If so, good luck to them.

It's not like they're going to live elsewhere for positive reasons – like because they positively love the people and culture and lifestyle of places like France, for instance, like my friends M & S. The tax-avoiders and evaders are seemingly doing it, or will be doing it, for entirely negative reasons – to get away from something, like a progressive income tax.

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It's interesting, and ironic, that the City of London, through its greed and its idiocy - through causing the financial crisis - was responsible for finally showing the economically illiterate people of this country that very tight regulation of 'financial services' and the banking sector is absolutely necessary.

Whereas the bloody Labour party and its leadership not only abysmally failed in that task – they didn't even set out to do it!! Not a single one of them made it their job to argue the case for tighter regulation. Our Prime Minister in fact caved in to the City's demands for looser regulation – in order to make Britain, or to be exact, the City of London, the “financial capital” of the world. How bloody stupid was that?

And now Brown and Darling are trying to “work with” the finance ministers of the G20 countries to try to impose financial regulations. They're all in London for a few days for a crisis summit. Or summin.

France is supposed to be run by conservatives these days, but the French government sound like radical progressives compared to our lot. I really like the sound of their finance minister, who has given several interviews on the need to regulate salaries and bonuses. But Darling, dear Darling, batting for Britain, isn't having any of it. No sir-rreee.

“Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister warned [her] country would take unilateral action if its proposals to prevent bonuses from luring bankers into the kind of excessive risk-taking which caused the global economic crisis were rejected.” I really like her style. She speaks English fluently too. Who says economics can't be sexy?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/g20-summit/6141958/Gordon-Brown-warns-G20-countries-against-reining-in-spending.html

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Talking of Darling, there was a 25th anniversary celebration of Blackadder on TV on Friday night, and right funny it was too. They admitted they didn't know what they were doing in the first series, were very lucky to blag their way into doing a second series, and from then on had a right good time. Good interviews with all the gang. Rowan's looking strangely normal these days, Steven Fry avuncular and jolly, and Hugh Laurie strangely good-looking and leading-mannish – very Hollywood. But Baldrick still rules! As they said, Tony the Great, with his cunning plans and all, represents all of us!

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Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was, without doubt, a key period in European and world history, and we're presumably still in it. Ha!

Zen enlightenment is NOT the same as European so-called enlightenment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Buddhist_Enlightenment

Here's what Wikipedia says about the European Age of Enlightenment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_enlightenment

A couple of weeks ago the Guardian did a report on “Edinburgh's big new art show that takes the Enlightenment as its theme”.

“Newspapers were born in the 18th century, in that age of enthusiastic modernity known as the Enlightenment; Edinburgh, along with Paris, was arguably the capital of this rationalist revolution, home to the - philosopher David Hume and the economist Adam Smith. This year, Edinburgh's international festival is hosting an art exhibition for the first time, taking the city's golden age as its theme: the Enlightenments puts 21st-century artists in dialogue with 18th-century ideas.

There's the problem, right there, with a contemporary art show about the Enlightenment. Who wants to be enlightened? Who believes, now, in the 18th-century cult of reason, of progress and the ascent of humanity? You only have to walk past the Royal Bank of Scotland to be reminded that Adam Smith has not had a good year.

The Enlightenment now functions in contemporary culture more as a whipping boy than a reference point.

Scottish artists – perhaps all artists – like to linger in the dark shadows of the gothic, not the bright light of reason.

Artist Gabrielle de Vietri's singing news performance meditates on the invention of newspapers.

Gordon's art is one long contemplation of the dark side of the Enlightenment, of Mr Hyde and not Dr Jekyll – from his slowed-down 24 Hour Psycho to Zidane, with its disconcerting, anti-climactic ending. Creek's drawing is similarly macabre and despairing of reason.

Tacita Dean's film Presentation Sisters towers above everything else here. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot argued that truly worthwhile art must reject the triviality of theatre – of conscious performance – and instead depict characters whose absorption in their activities makes us in turn forget ourselves. This was an Enlightenment definition of serious art . . .

Dean's film . . . fulfils it. Presentation Sisters homes in on mundane daily activities and finds infinite beauty in them: doing the laundry, preparing breakfast, making a cup of tea."

Chopping wood, carrying water – classic Zen.

"What then makes the show so likable? I think because it creates a quietness, a pensiveness. The news singers at the Dean Gallery seem to slow down the speed at which we assimilate information. Why don't we take time to digest the news? Even at its slightest, the art here is about stopping for a moment, and looking inwards.

Art can be truly thoughtful, we discover, by being richly physical. Hesse's art seems made without any final goal in view; it has nothing to "say". It reminds me of another 60s cultural figure, Bob Dylan. In filmed interviews of that period he was always being asked to explain what his songs "said": cue a lot of evasive wisecracks. Hesse, too, seems in these works to have no intention of saying anything. This is art as play, though in play you can discover things the cold mind never will."

But then the writer of this piece Jonathan Jones, then goes and fucks it all up by concluding -

"The joy and freedom of Hesse's art is staggering. Any young artist could get an education just by coming to this show a few times. It tells, in stuff, the same truth David Hume put into words in 18th-century Edinburgh: that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions."

Doh! Bloody Western dualism at it's very worst – stupid! So he's saying that if reason isn't the solution to all human dilemmas, and it isn't going to be pre-eminent and the sole directing force in our lives, then passion and unreason must rule! No, Jonathan, they mustn't.

Head, hands and heart. Reason, instinct and passion. Intuition, empathy and sensory experience. They all have their importance, their survival value, their potential to enrich and inform our lives. They all need to operate in balance and harmony, like an internal gyroscope spinning round an axis, and allow us to remain steady whilst living spontaneously and intelligently.

And my point is this. What a load of crap is generally talked in our culture about enlightenment, and thank goodness for the odd artist in our culture who can shed some light on true enlightenment. What a pity so many of our cultural commentators haven't a clue, particularly about enlightenment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/10/art-edinburgh-enlightenment-eva-hesse

And if you really want to read some total crap about enlightenment, some real reactionary crap, then try this essay by John Montgomery of Urban Cultures Ltd - “A New Enlightenment”.

http://www.thersa.org/about-us/matthews-blog-archive/archives/july-2008

http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/83077/A-New-Enlightenment.pdf

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The Beeb

In the aftermath of James Murdoch's anti-BBC speech last weekend, the debate continues. Have a look at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/04/bbc-icm-poll-james-murdoch

and especially enjoy Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/05/charlie-brooker-on-james-murdoch

which includes:
“As a news source, Fox [News] is about as plausible and useful as an episode of Thundercats. Still, at least by hiring [Glenn] Beck, they've genuinely challenged the stuffy consensus notion that people should only really be given their own show on a major news channel if they're sane.”

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Music

Music's back on YouTube! Hallelujah!

This week I is mostly checkin out stuff on the Hammond organ.

This is a classic featuring Booker T, with Steve Cropper on guitar -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yy2_HbKPdM&feature=related
Turn it up loud so you can really hear Duck Dunn on the bass.

Greatest Hammond solos – part 1 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jejadhR_m9w&feature=fvw
Lots of hairy rock rubbish – but with Jimmy Smith and Booker T showing how the instrument should be played. The kind of stuff by the hairy guys that killed rock music in the 70's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xVU_BLow5M&feature=fvw - a guy called Tony Monaco talking about Jimmy Smith, and playing the Hammond in a very jazzy blues style.

The advice Jimmy Smith gave him, over the phone on his 16th birthday, was, “Don't worry about playing all them notes – learn how to play the right chords.”

There's a shedload of stuff around Booker T and Green Onions on YouTube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._&_the_M.G.%27s

Though I have to say, for me Roy Buchanan's version of Green Onions is really the most dynamic and thrilling. Catch it on Spotify. VERY LOUD! Loads of versions on YouTube, but not as good.

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

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Oxzen's Song of the Week – Middle Aged Blues Boogie – by Saffire the Uppity Blues Women

I've been looking for this for some time – Spotify don't have it.

http://www.getalyric.com/mp3/lyrics/songs/saffire_the_uppity_blues_women-14324/middle_age_blues-36294/middle_age_blues_boogie-180548/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBr8bXJyWSw

The lyrics - http://www.lyricsdownload.com/saffire-middle-aged-blues-boogie-lyrics.html

Listen out for an excellent piano blues solo. Shame there's some confusion about the lyrics in the middle of this performance -

“I'm throwing away my dustmop,
Got a brand new vacuum cleaner...
I'm no longer taken for granted
You ought to hear me when I holler
'Eureka, eureka'”

The version I have, on an old audio tape, goes -

“Well, I don’t need no reefer, I don’t need no cocaine
All I need is a young man, to drive me insane
I'm throwing away my dust mop, got a brand new vacuum cleaner
I’m no longer taken for granted, my young man sucks it up sweeter
A young man, to drive away my middle aged blues”

Blimey! – just found it on Spotify! – 3 versions. No ratings as yet, so they must only have been put on there very recently. spotify:track:3V4aUQIl2uUPI1iFnKg5JX Fabulous. Type Saffire in the search box and you get a shedload of their lovely stuff.

http://www.choicesvideo.net/press/Hot%20Flash%20Press%20Kit.pdf

http://www.thedivadigest.com/saffire.htm

“Describing sex with an old man, she once said, "Honey, it's like trying to push a car up a hill... with a rope." -
http://sexlessinhollywood.blogspot.com/

Biog:

http://music.msn.com/music/artist-biography/saffire-the-uppity-blues-women/

Official Website:

http://www.uppityblueswomen.com/
.

Layer 142 Cherry Blossoms, The Iron & Steel Coast, the Concrete Coast, the G20 and the Soul of a Nation.

Oxzen - The Movie. The Video Diaries. The Cherry Blossom Journal.

Monday 30th March and Tuesday March 31st., etc.

This is the soundtrack for Act One. The commentary. Cue speech track, immediately after music track fades to low volume, having faded in and up initially while the point of view of the camera was still a mile up in the sky.

And . . . Action!

“I’m back in time-warp and jet-lag territory - mentally, physically and spiritually.

On Tuesday I awoke at 3.30am local time, feeling part-refreshed and semi-human again, after a blissful 3 hours sleep in a proper bed, in a proper flat. This is consciousness turned upside down; consciousness bent and reconfigured, fast-forwarded and truncated through the planet’s darkness zone, having reduced the zone’s dark duration by several hours of jet-streamed travel.

With darkness still outside the curtains and blinds, I set about settling into this most excellent apartment, allocated to me by the owner of the property, the university. The only thing it lacks is a really decent bed and a decent duvet. I unpack.

I ask myself, when was the last time I slept under blankets? No doubt the first of many odd experiences I’ll have this cherry-blossom season.

I reviewed the video I shot yesterday from the window seats in the aeroplane and in the airport coach, and I like it. I think Ike’s going to be pleased with it when we get down to reviewing and editing. He’d mentioned specifically he wanted footage of the plane landing in Japan, when he handed over the camcorder. Well he’s certainly getting plenty of it.

I felt even better when I discovered a Jean-Michel Jarre CD on the Zen music player, one from Brother B’s collection that I’ve never got round to listening to, and one that’s going to make an excellent soundtrack for the edited film. I’ll post the name of it in due course.

I need to get serious now with Yoko and Kayo about making a film about them, as well as a film about the broader picture of Japan in the cherry blossom time.”

Cut!

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The name I propose to give to this part of central Honshu, one that no doubt others have already given it, doesn’t exactly sound wealthy or exclusive like the Ivory Coast or the Gold Coast, let alone evocative of warmth and beauty like the Costa Tropicale, or the Costa del Sol.

But Iron and Steel is the reality of the part of the coastal strip of modern Honshu that lies between Kansai airport and Osaka City, which constitutes Japan’s second metropolis, second only to imperial Tokyo/Yokahama - Honshu’s mega-metropolis that sprawls in full view of Mount Fuji . . . the mighty Fuji-san, which looks down on it, and gazes upon it Zen-like - inscrutably and without comment.

No comment necessary. This is the final outcome of Big Business and Big Finance, the final tangible and physical outcome, that is, because banks and hedge funds and tax havens don’t really need a physical existence. They are as much virtual as they are real nowadays, and they reside mainly in the circuits of computers - zillions of dollars, euros and yen no longer need to physically exist or to physically change hands.

This coastline is an unbroken stretch of heavy metal and heavy industry for mile after mile - factories, refineries, warehouses, docks, ships, cranes and chimneys. It’s the mighty workshop of the nation, and these days, along with similar and even grimmer and dirtier places in China, it’s also the workshop of the planet.

This is the birthplace of modern digital industry, and it’s to the planet’s 20th Century what the coalfields and steel mills of Britain were to the 18th and 19th Centuries. In its turn the 20th Century provided the seed corn money for, and gave birth to, the fledgling organisation, or conspiracy, that became the busted casino of the 21st Century. The G20. The capitalist club. The conspiracy against human kind.

Here in Honshu, where the iron and the steel and the industry peters out, and the urban sprawl takes over, then you can also call it the Concrete Coast, which, let’s face it, is little, if any, improvement on Iron and Steel, depending on your taste and point of view.

Gliding past it and through it in the near-silence of the airport-to-city coach, the ‘Limousine’ - on the way to Nishinomiya, the view through the front and side windows looked incredible against a backdrop of a sky changing from blue to orange and purple in the dying embers of a late evening of a sunny and warm day in the cherry blossom season of these powerful and strangely spiritual islands, these birthplaces of Zen.

Electric lights gradually and imperceptibly came on everywhere to give added interest - studding the stark steel shapes of this technological and industrial hell-hole with pinpoints and glares of bright light. Steam and smoke completed a picture of what is by any standards an overkill of industrial crassness.

You have no real sense of all this industrial sprawl from a vantage point in an aircraft descending in the light of a red setting sun towards the Land of the Rising Sun, down through blueness towards Japan’s second international airport, Kansai, laid out on its own artificial island in a deep blue sea, created by intrepid engineers, architects, and an army of construction workers, in the beautiful and so-called Inland Sea.

As it happens the airport terminal’s architects were British, but they’re not really nation-specific people any more . . . . any more than money and glitz and technology and heavy metals are nation-specific any more . . .

It’s time for some more of Jarre’s glorious techno-reggae . . .

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

I’m desperate for some news of the G20 - this week’s meeting of the leaders of, quote, “The Group of the world’s most powerful industrial nations”. It used to be the G7 or G8. Changing times. Along came Russia, and then China . . .

Ah, yes, indeed . . . . China. The crouching tiger. The hidden dragon. The incubator and mother of Buddhism, whose father was India, which begat Zen in Japan, etc.

So who else is in this exclusive, though somewhat enlarged, club? (Insert here. DIY. By the end of this week we should all have the names of all 20 of this Rich List on the tips of our tongues.)

Why care so much about these bastards? On one level, we shouldn’t. At the personal level, they ARE an irrelevance. Life’s too short, and we have much more important, much more fundamental things to do with out time.

We have our individual well-being and enlightenment to take care of. We have the needs of our families and our friends to take care of. And so little time every day. So little time. With each new time-saving electronic device, each new time-compressing technological miracle, we have less time. We’re time-poor, we all say. It’s ALL about time . . .

And it’s about time . . . for a change.

Today’s the day for people to get together and not so much “protest” . . . as “demonstrate” what we feel, and to say what we want from our governments, and the “G20”. And if you don’t yet know what you want, then PLEASE find out! If WE don’t know what it is we want to change then how the hell can we let our governments know? The past 30 years should have taught is that we can’t rely on our governments to do the right thing.

I say “today” is the day because I’ve just remembered to go into “Control Panel” and change my computer’s time to “Osaka and Tokyo” time, which means that for me it’s suddenly Wednesday April 1st! April Fools. The day of demonstrations.

That’s how controlled we are by computers and abstract ideas. Back ‘home’ it’s still Tuesday 31st March, but where I sit it’s 2.30am on the morning of Wednesday April 1st. Mad. So little time. So much to think about. Time to think about time, and time to act.

It’s 2.30 in the morning and I’m drinking red wine, brought to Japan by unknown persons, all the way from the Herault. I’m drinking wine because I need some more sleep so that I can function when Kayo comes to collect me at 8.30, to take me to the university and to her seminar on the history of education.

The wine’s not bad, and the music’s good. Set to random play, it’s the unsurpassable blues of JJ Cale, and his self-written “The Sensitive Kind”.

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

As I was saying - why care so much about these bastards?

Because that’s part of our Social Intelligence. Because as a species, at best, we’re the sensitive kind.

Because Zen recognises that there’s no such thing as purely individual well-being, and the more connected we become as a planet and as a species, the more we need a highly-developed and evolved Social Intelligence. We need to become empathetic. We need to know that we are our brother’s keeper. And our sister’s. And everybody’s brother and sister. Everybody’s wellbeing and happiness depends on everybody else’s.

Which is a philosophy that stands in some contrast to the bankers’ ethos of individual enrichment and gated ‘communities’ - i.e. fragmentation, and envy, and conflict, and dog eat dog mentality. Which is not what I call enlightenment.

Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is!

It keeps changing. Rearranging. (Thank you Van)

But we know it’s not THAT!

This is not a hippie or even ex-hippie point of view. This is not even a utilitarian point of view. Nor a Utopian point of view. It’s an enlightened point of view.

Maybe if a few of the bankers were now made to seriously suffer - thrown into prison for their greed and their crimes against humanity, for example, MAYBE they might start to consider such things as brotherhood, social intelligence and spiritual intelligence. DUH! they might say to themselves.

So were they criminals, or sociopaths, or both? Did they know what they were doing - i.e. fucking up the planet - but went ahead and did it anyway? Psychopaths - indifferent to the suffering of others. Responsible, indeed, for the suffering of others. Those whom they’d call the sub-primes. The plebs. The masses. The morons. Deserving of ripping-off and exploitation. Within the rules of the game, of course. The rules of the casino.

Rules that were a little lax, maybe, but still - those bankers weren’t responsible for the rules, the poor loves. They just played by the completely inadequate rules, and worked damned hard to make sure they weren’t altered in ways they didn’t like. In my book that makes them culpable. To not speak out about the uselessness of the rules as inhibitors of exploitation made them culpable, to my way of thinking.

And all the while they were making damn sure they stuffed their ill-gotten gains into offshore accounts in tax havens before the music finally stopped, and everything went shit-shaped. Of course they did. Of course they were culpable.

Clever people, in their own nasty, disgusting, stupid way.
.

Layer 141 Springwatch, Zen lessons, Seismic Shifts, the Year of the Ox, the G20 and the Art of Living.

.
This should have been posted yesterday.

Springwatch 7

Devon

Devon is glorious in the Spring. Two months ago the first camellias made an appearance, and some of them are still only now coming into full bloom, with their blazing scarlets and deep reds. I even spotted one with yellow flowers.

Thousands of trees are in blossom, with the first slight appearance of the brilliant white blossoms of flowering cherries this week. Can’t wait to see the cherry blossoms in the gardens of Japan next week.

Meanwhile, in Devon, daffodils and narcissi are everywhere in full bloom, plus the first tulips, and the hyacinths, with their incredible fragrance. There’s also the brilliant yellow of the forsythia and the yellow pom-poms on the shrub whose name I’ve never known.

There’s masses of wallflowers, primroses, and humble white daisies. The first delicate green and red leaves of Japanese maple have started to unfurl. Strange that these fragile-looking acers come into leaf before our more robust native trees, most of which still have their winter bareness. It must be the longer daylight hours that trigger their buds.

There are tiny blue flowers on the rosemary shrubs, and small purple ones on the heather. The gorse is studded with bright yellow. The periwinkle is a mass of purple and dark blue. There are some magnificent magnolias full of creamily exotic flowers, which have always struck me as almost unreal.

By next week there will be the first clematis and a lot more tulips. Still to come are the magnificent blues of the cyanothus trees and the wonderful reds and scarlets of the rhododendrons and azaleas.

Arguably the Spring is even more glorious in this country than the summer, especially if you happen to appreciate blossom on the trees more than green leaves, and if you prefer the varieties of Spring flowers to those of the summer.

This particular Spring has been more glorious than any I can remember. Parts of England have had thirteen consecutive days of bright sunshine and blue skies, as the high pressure system continued to hang around and shield us from the usual cloudy and wet westerly anti-cyclones and the northerly gales.

Zen tells us to pay attention to nature and to learn from nature. Nature, the natural world, has the power to inspire awe and wonder, and through this power to lead us along the Way towards better living, to character development and enlightenment. The mere observation of incredible beauty in both form and colour refreshes and recharges our jaded spirits.

Thanks to the weather and the wonders of Spring it seems to me there’s a change in most people out in the streets, which seem weirdly calm and quiet. And not just in Devon. Last week in Broadway Market in the East End there were masses of people out enjoying the sun, even people picnicking on the grass in London Fields. In March!

Last winter was the best in living memory as well - the coldest overall for a century, but many more bright and sunny days than normal, and the best and deepest snowfalls for decades.

I think it’s more than coincidence that my journeys along 700 miles of motorways and city streets this week, travelling between Devon, London and Hastings, have been as pleasant and hassle-free as I’ve ever known. Well done the drivers of England! Long may it continue!

Year of the Ox

So far the Year of the Ox is living up to expectations.

Last year’s Rat year began a new cycle, and was seismic in many, many ways. The sense of breaking with the past was immense. The near-collapse of capitalism, which has been shaken to its very foundations, echoed the collapse of communism in 1989/90. Huge sums of public money have been poured into repairing and propping up what's left of the old financial system.

The Year of the Rat brought about the beginning of vast numbers of people starting to question old assumptions about values, money, economics, the way they live, and their quality of life.

There was the rise of Obama and the demise of Bush and Cheney. A truly seismic event if ever there was one. The felling of those two arseholes, those twin towers of evil. The World Enslaved Centre, or the World Corrupt and Depraved Centre. The Project for the New American Century! Ha! What a project it turned out to be. The ‘Washington Consensus’ is well and truly a pile of rubble.

Clearly the Ox year is about building on last year’s beginnings, and recreating our world, re-imagining our lives, taking a fresh look at politics, economics, finance, business, social policy, equality, climate change, sustainability, education, etc. Those that don’t participate don’t deserve a say. No play, no say.

G20

Next week, dammit, Oxzen is going to be away on the other side of the planet just as huge events unfold in London - the meeting of the G20 and massive demonstrations in the City and elsewhere, when people will at last take to the streets in an organised way and make clear their demands to what is the nearest we currently have to a World Government. It’s going to be very interesting.

My advice is to book a day’s holiday, wherever possible, and either join in the various demonstrations, or stay at home and watch what happens live on News 24. Or possibly do both. Hopefully the BBC’s coverage of events will be re-run throughout the evening on News 24. There’s bound to be plenty to watch and to think about. There’s a hell of a lot of anger waiting to be expressed, and a hell of a lot of demands to be voiced. This is the Big One.

There were two very good pieces in the Guardian on Monday on pages 24 and 25 under the headline, Grave new world: hard choices leaders face to solve the crisis. It behoves everyone to read carefully and to form their own opinion.

Larry Elliot, the economics editor, “suggests five areas for leaders at next week’s G20 summit to focus on”, in which he describes the need for a new economics, reform of the IMF, tougher global regulation, etc.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/larry-elliott-proposals-for-g20

Aditya Chakraborty, under the heading ‘The pursuit of happiness’, says: “Forget growth: let’s focus on wellbeing”. Some interesting thoughts there on The Art of Living, which is probably worth a google as well. We’re talking here about rethinking our entire attitude to who we are and why we do what we do, as well as re-making the entire global web of economic and cultural relationships.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/gdp-economic-growth-happiness-wellbeing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2009/mar/23/globalrecession-financial-crisis


Katharine Ainger wrote a good opinion piece in the Guardian this week - on the G20 and 'global social movements'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/anticapitalism-protest-recession-g20


Dr Jonathan Sachs

His Thought for Today focused on the transformations that are due to global communication technologies. Are we equal to the challenge of thinking in global terms, realising that we share a common fate? Only by turning outward can we create a movement for change. Moving from national pride to a new age of global responsibility.


Education

More headlines this week about the Primary Curriculum Review and its implications for schools - more right-wing commentators getting hot under the collar about the possibility of teaching kids to use Facebook and Twitter, and dropping the teaching of history. Hilarious. Those bastards sense the beginnings of a fightback against all they’ve done to diminish the rights of children and to destroy the work that had gone on over two or three progressive decades to make education and learning in this country fit for the needs of children in the 21st, and not the 19th, Century.

Not that it was ever fit for purpose, even in Dickens’ lifetime, when the first national network of state-run schools was constructed. Children should NEVER have been so inhumanly treated. They should never have been made to sit passively and silently focused on a teacher who saw his/her role as doling out imperial gallons of facts, and been punished if they failed to do so.

This morning we hear that the NUT and the NAHT have got together to formulate motions which they’ll put to their respective annual conferences this Spring demanding that this year’s KS2 SATs will be the last of them. Leaving aside the fact that these two large and potentially powerful organisations should have done this a decade ago, in fact prior to the imposition of this evil idea, this is incredibly positive news. My flabber is ghasted. This is seismic. I really didn’t imagine, after all this time, that they were up to such sensible collaboration.

Having given the government notice that they’ll no longer collaborate with such anti-child, anti-teacher evil fucking nonsense, it will only remain for their members to have absolutely no further truck with either coaching kids for the tests or indeed implementing them. What’s the government going to do? Sack them all?

Gandhi said this about chasing targets and results:

"He who is ever brooding over the result, often loses nerve in the performance of duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to action, never remaining faithful to any. He who broods over results is like a man given to the object of senses; he is ever distracted, he says goodbye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end".
If that sounds like New Labour and the majority of Westminster’s political establishment, and their obsessive whipping of public servants towards often unattainable targets and results, then so be it. Ed Balls’ instant repost to the unions’ statement was to the effect that headteachers had better not get involved in any test boycotts because they’ll be breaking the law. Tough talk, Mr Ed.

I wonder what’s better, and which is right - breaking an immoral politician-made law, or doing what’s right for children and teachers? Gandhi would have known. Gandhi took on the whole of the British state and its empire, without resort to arms or violence, and won. He was thrown into prison for his beliefs, and still stuck to doing what he knew was right. Is it too much to expect for headteachers to do the same? Especially if they have the vast majority of the public and parents backing them and urging them to do what is right.

Never mind a ballot of their members for a SATs boycott. The NUT and NAHT need to launch a major campaign against the vile SATs and league tables’ terror and then ballot the English public. No need to bother with Scotland and Wales - they have no truck with SATs anyhow.

http://www.youmeworks.com/clingfree.html


Public Sector Workers Unite Against Blunkett!

The Blunk lumbered into action this week with a Guardian column expressing astonishment that the bloody ungrateful public sector workers are telling pollsters that they’re not going to vote New Labour next time. His point is that under a Tory government many of them will lose their jobs through budget cuts, and the bastards should recognise how much the public sector has been expanded under Blair & Brown.

The world’s most hideous politician, (after Hazel Blears - what is it with these Northern twat politicos?), ought to take a moment to reflect on the fact that the public sector workers care more about the people they serve and being true to their own professionalism than they do about looking after their own job security. For that they deserve applause.

Cameron has said that the NuLabour targets regime is vile and must be scrapped, and professionalism and local autonomy must be restored to the public services. So why not vote for him? What’s not to vote for? Blunkett, of course, as a dinosaur trade unionist thinks only in terms of how many jobs he can create or preserve for ‘the workers’ - what he sees as operatives in miserable results factories.

He can’t understand either that many of us have very long memories and we still hate his guts (and Blair’s, and NuLabour’s) for what he did to education post-1997 - not only retaining Woodhead as his stick to beat the teaching profession, but going even further than the Tories would have done in micromanaging education through central diktat, publishing league tables, making Ofsted even more nasty and vindictive, payment and promotion by results, focusing exclusively on test and exam data, etc, etc.

We remember well his words to those who work in the most challenging schools - “No excuses for failure.” We’ll never excuse his failures, or those of NuLabour, through over 10 years of nasty neo-conservative dictatorship.

The only way we’d vote for his party next time would be if they came out and recanted, admitted that they’ve done all the wrong things, and declared their intention to reverse all their policies on running the public services, including privatisation and marketisation.

But that won’t happen. As the Blunk says in his column, “The government has to avoid blinking”. So carry on Blunking. Blinking is something the Blunk will never do. Never has, never will. His belief in his own infallibility is absolute. And he pays no attention whatever to what every sane, intelligent person had been saying for years.

His, and NuLabour’s, approach to improving public services has been entirely on the Soviet model. Invest in setting up more and more collective farms and tractor factories. Install compliant managers who agree to chase output targets. Give them precise directions as to how to achieve their targets. Punish them ruthlessly if they fail to reach their targets (No excuses for failure), and then wonder why the bloody ingrates hate them and rebel against them, plus the tractors are rubbish and crop production generally diminishes. Animal Farm indeed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/labour-conservatives-local-government-nhs


Whitechapel

This week sees the reopening of the newly refurbished and extended Whitechapel gallery. A full-sized tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica, which normally hangs in the United Nations building in New York, is the centrepiece of the first exhibition of the gallery. This is clearly a must-see show, and it’s brilliant that the gallery has had these improvements.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/pablo-picasso-guernica-spain-war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/17/whitechapel-gallery

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2009/mar/17/architecture-tour-whitechapel-art-gallery
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