Layer 533 . . . It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Raging (Again)

Who knows where the time goes? It's not as though anything much has been happening in the world of late. The government's ratings have plummeted in opinion polls - not least because they produced a ridiculous budget that made no sense either politically or economically. The economy is officially back in recession, if not depression. Aren't we all?

This week's headlines have all concerned the Murdoch empire and its relationship with the government. I've been pretty much glued to the televised proceedings of the Leveson Enquiry, and its examination of James Murdoch (Tuesday) and Rupert Murdoch (Wednesday and Thursday). What a pair of bastards. Finally banged to rights! Along with the ridiculous 'Culture Secretary', and his 'Special Adviser'. Stupid Hunt. Jeremy! As Jeremy Hardy said on The News Quiz this evening - Jeremies are invariably knobends.

This morning the wonderful and intrepid Nick Davies had a story on the front page of the Guardian:

Will Rupert Murdoch's reputation survive Leveson's verdict?

Man who made millions out of paying people to ask difficult questions finally faced questioners he could not cope with

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/26/rupert-murdoch-reputation-leveson-verdict

Rupert Murdoch is in trouble. In two days as a witness at the Leveson inquiry he has blocked and blasted, smeared and smiled, and, at the end of it, this most powerful of men still has his ankle caught in the snare of scandal. He is vulnerable.

This is a man who is used to getting his way. He is not used to being confronted by people who have the power, the skill and the simple effrontery to challenge him – and to keep on challenging him. On Wednesday morning, he walked in with all the protection that his advisers could give him in the previous days of detailed briefings and endless rehearsals. By Thursday morning, there were times when he had lost the script, lost the plot and he simply sat there, with nobody to help him and no way out.

Excellent. Nick finishes his article, which should be read in full, with the following:

The great underlying question – whose answer will settle finally the reputation of Rupert Murdoch and perhaps the future of his business – is whether those denials are to be believed. It is Lord Justice Leveson and not Murdoch who will deliver the verdict. Even the head of News Corporation sometimes must have to stand naked.

I love Nick's allusion to Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", and its relevance to this entire sleazy tale of Murdochs, Camerons, Tories, Blairs, New Labour, and assorted hangers-on:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked.

The wonderful Steve Bell was also thinking 'Emperor's New Clothes' with his cartoon in the Guardian today:

Take another look at the words of Dylan - which are as relevant, perceptive and evocative today as they were nearly 50 years ago when they were first written:

http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

Absolutely nothing is sacred to the Murdochs and their businesses. The collaboration between Jeremy Hunt and his team and the Murdochs and their team in the BSkyB takeover affair stinks to high heaven, and it's only thanks to Nick Davies and the Guardian that the shit hit the fan and the deal didn't go through. Which is partly where we are today. The other part, of course, is the telephone hacking, the hasty closure of the News of the Screws, the resignations of corrupt coppers, and so on. Big Daddy Rupe has now gone nuclear and started lashing out at everything and everyone - claiming that yes indeed there was a cover-up over the phone hacking, but they also covered it up from me and my naive dipstick twat of a son.Or words to that effect.

The question is - are we going to be able to prove that Cameron was also actively colluding with the Murdochs at their various parties and meetings? And - is this the deal that was struck with Murdoch in order to get him to switch the support of his papers to the Tories at the last election? What IS bleeding obvious is that Cameron had no problem with News Corp getting full control of BSkyB - by whatever means necessary. And it doesn't take a genius to know that Rupe (and his newspapers and TV channels) would have felt very well disposed towards Cameron and his government if that had occured. As Rupe said to Leveson - everyone scratches everyone else's back. At least that's what they do on Planet Murdoch. But please don't call it bribery!

Then again, as Leveson said to Merdeoch - who says he always behaves ethically (har har) - surely it's the head of any organisation (such as News International) who sets the ethos and the ethics of that organisation? And the reason the Screws was shut down was because it behaved completely and utterly without regard to ethics.

What we all need to ask ourselves is to what degree WE would have been passive bystanders if this outrageous BSkyB takeover had been driven through?

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

And by the way - take a look at these other reports on the Murdochs in the Guardian:

http://yfrog.com/z/myocr5j

http://yfrog.com/z/jcj7rxj

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

Ed Miliband, incidentally, has had a good week, and Polly Toybee, inevitably, has written superbly this week:

Murdoch and the Cameron entourage: a shameful tale laid out for all to see

If you think this is a navel-gazing media story, here's a reminder of what the Tories were about to unleash on the country

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/26/murdoch-cameron-shameful-tale

Could this scandal bring down the government? That's not entirely fanciful. But even if not, their every step will be hobbled through to the next election, stifling any high-flown protestations of political virtue. Bang to rights, in Andy Coulson, David Cameron imported into the heart of his operation an agent still in the pay of a powerful political and commercial manipulator. The cascade of revelations of the intimacy between the Cameron entourage and the Murdoch empire saps the government's authority. That's the "shadow of sleaze".

Cover-ups unravelling is what sees heads rolling. The picture emerges of a party deciding long before coming to power to gift Rupert Murdoch a media and cultural dominance beyond anything seen yet. So much is known already: Cameron made a hasty speech threatening Ofcom with the chop. Jeremy Hunt rejected Ofcom's advice to refer the BSkyB bid to the Competition Commission. Cameron was completing what Margaret Thatcher began – and all for what? Fickle support from Murdoch's press.

None of this is news to our readers – but the Leveson inquiry evidence so forensically laid out by Robert Jay QC sets out the shameful tale for all to see. Murdoch's replies will enter the annals of amnesia and economy with the truth: "I've never asked a prime minister for anything in my life." Of course not. He just breathed on them.

Is there anything so exceptional about Rupert Murdoch? He's canny and fly, but probably no more so than many sharp-witted businessmen who spot their chance in a flabby market. All he has done is exactly what Adam Smith (the real one) famously said every businessman does given half a chance – corner markets and conspire against the consumer. The success of his business was built on gaining the edge by evading regulators and avoiding taxes, as all companies will unless stopped. So let's not obsess over his character.

If you think this is a navel-gazing media story, here's a reminder of what Hunt was about to unleash on the country, with Cameron and George Osborne's approval. If Murdoch were allowed to own all BSkyB, within a year or two he would package all his newspapers on subscription or online together with his movie and sports channels in offers consumers could hardly refuse, at loss-leading prices. Other news providers, including this one, would be driven out, or reduced to a husk. His would be the commanding news voice. Except for the BBC – which his media have attacked relentlessly for years.

Jeremy Hunt was within days of giving Murdoch everything, because the government wished it. A token gesture would have put Sky News behind Chinese walls, but on all previous precedent, soon his newspapers, print, online and TV would have merged into a single newsroom. That would require repeal of the law imposing impartiality on broadcasters. But already Murdoch's friends were softening up opinion against old-fashioned, dull TV news, unsuited to the rowdy, opinionated internet era: Fox News would soon be here. If the arrival of Murdoch's kick-arse Sun was a shock, we'd look back on it as an age of innocence compared with what Fox would do – look what it's done to US politics.

Cameron has said it is his ambition to finish Margaret Thatcher's work. As she privatised nationalised industries, so he would marketise the public sector, with his NHS commercialisation and his promise to put all public services out to tender. The dismantling or shrivelling of the BBC would soon have followed. If Nick Davies had not exposed the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone in the nick of time, all would have been lost – an odd way for the BBC to be reprieved.

The 81-year-old under scrutiny this week rambled a bit and remembered nothing to his own detriment. He was an unsatisfying villain, as most are. But the villainy here is not about one man. He stands as an Adam Smith lesson in the primacy of competition law and what happens when politicians let the free market rip in order to do political favours.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgeVFw0GuGI

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Layer 466 . . . One Wedding, One Referendum, One Assassination, Scottish Elections, FPTP, SlutWalking, the Guardian, and Praising Essays

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The incredible weather continues. Temperatures have been reaching 26 degrees, with cloudless skies, and mostly no wind at all. The cyanothus trees and shrubs are in full blossom, as are the standard white lilacs. The first roses are out, the sunflower seedlings are nine inches tall, and it's late Spring already.

So what's been happening in the world? Something about a royal wedding, and something about Osama bin Laden. Also some local elections and a referendum. All very boring.

Meanwhile, here in the centre of the universe a friend of mine had someone walk up to her outside a local library and squirt a water pistol in her face, before carrying on down the street, squirting as he went.

At roughly the same time, in another part of our lovely borough, a drunk walked - nay tottered - up to me, stood right in my face, and said, "D'you know where sunshine comes from? Eh? Where it comes from? NOT FROM WHITE MEN!" At which point all one can do is either, a) punch out the lights of the poor pathetic drunk, who no doubt gets slighted and shunned several times a day on account of his nasty drunkenness and not his skin colour, or b) walk swiftly away. Instinctively, as a man of peace, I did the latter. It's not my place to tell him he's a nasty drunk and a racist. Who am I to judge? We all have our dark sides.

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The elections for the Scottish Assembly turned out to be very interesting. The SNP, led by Alex Salmond, is now in complete control of the Assembly - much to the consternation of the other parties, all of whom seem to fear that there's nothing now to stop Scotland declaring its independence from Britain - assuming the people of Scotland agree to the proposition in a referendum.

As I've been saying for some years to my Scottish friends - why on earth wouldn't Scotland want to free itself from control from Westminster? The argument is supposed to be that Scotland does very well from its share of the UK budget, but this is surely bogus. No self-respecting individual makes themself an absolute servant to someone in return for slightly higher wages than they'd get if they were autonomous - so why on earth would a whole country want to remain in perpetual servitude if it didn't have to? Why would Scotland want to remain a vassal of Cameron & Osborne, any more than it wished to have Thatcher as its unelected dictator?

The SNP is an avowedly social democratic / democratic socialist party that believes in greater social justice - which is what the Labour party used to do, but does no longer. It's a party that puts the welfare of the people above the wellbeing of non-humans such as bankers, international financiers and oligarchs. It's a party that believes in public ownership of high quality public services, such as education, health, housing and social services. From the average citizen's point of view, what's not to like?

The loss of Britain's nuclear umbrella, and its trillions of wasted funding? Having to rely on NATO for military protection? (From whom? The English?) How scary might that be? Being put in the same position as Germany, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg and all the rest? How big a deal is that?

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From the average English person's point of view the potential loss of left-leaning Scottish MPs from Westminster might appear to be a catastrophe. The prospect, under first past the post, of perpetual Tory government in England is grim indeed.

Looking on the bright side, however, it would finally reveal what a complete con the first past the post electoral system really is. How can you possibly call anything a democracy when English Tory-supporting shire counties can completely outnumber and outvote a small number of urban constituencies where the left-leaning working classes, on account of the land-grabbing Enclosures Act, happen to reside in their tower blocks, estates and terraces? And all the anti-Tory votes in the shires count for absolutely nothing.

People in England are, by and large, too ignorant to realise that they've been fucked over by the FPTP voting system - so much so that they've just voted overwhelmingly to keep it in perpetuity! The lack of any sort of proportional representation will guarantee perpetual government by Tories and their lackeys, if Scotland leaves the Union. Hurrah!


Polly Toynbee:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/06/start-of-long-conservative-hegemony

Editorial:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/may/07/editorial-elections-referendums-all-shook-up

Letter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/07/lesson-for-libdems-and-labour

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There's an interesting story in the Guardian this weekend, all about so-called sluts.

SlutWalking gets rolling after cop's loose talk about provocative clothing


Lecture to Toronto students ignites protests across Canada and US . . . 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/06/slutwalking-policeman-talk-clothing


When a police officer from Toronto went on a routine visit to Osgoode Hall Law School to advise the students on personal safety, little did he know that he would unwittingly inspire a movement that has caught fire across Canada and the US.


"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here," Michael Sanguinetti began, blandly enough, as he addressed the 10 students who turned up for the pep talk. Then he said: "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised."


Fast forward three months from Sanguinetti's unfortunate remarks, and a movement that was born in riposte to his loose talk has now gone international. "SlutWalking" is attracting thousands of people to take to the streets to put an end to what they believe is a culture in which it is considered acceptable to blame the victim.

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The Manchester Guardian, born 5 May 1821: 190 years – work in progress


The paper has essentially changed neither its ownership nor its character during its long life


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/05/manchester-guardian-work-in-progress


It is good to pause and reflect that the things that matter most – truthfulness, free thought, honest reporting, a plurality of opinion, a belief in fairness, justice and, most crucially, independence – do not change.

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Bloggers take note:

In praise of … the essay


Michel de Montaigne crafted a personal and conversational genre which has been the preferred literary mode of free spirits


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/05/in-praise-of-the-essay


The best essays, like George Orwell's, are tough but not fanatical, delight in the commonplace and ambiguous and can see the world as easily in a ham sandwich as a morning rose. 
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Layer 392 . . . Wikileaks, Collaboration, Transparency, Ed Miliband, New Politics, Promoting Happiness, Cutting Welfare

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An excellent letter in the Guardian:

Filling Ed Miliband's blank sheet

Your editorial (27 November) and at least two other articles in the same edition (A misleading Blair lesson; Move beyond New Labour, urges Miliband) concern themselves with the current predicament of Ed Miliband.

 However, it is appropriate for him to "dither" and even to maintain a "blank sheet" on policy while he carefully assesses the mood of the nation and allows current events to unfold. All three major parties boasted about a "new politics" before, during and after the election, but so far the only innovations we have seen are from the people themselves, in their demonstrative responses to existing politics.

Meanwhile the impetuous coalition have disastrously mistimed their swingeing changes, when they have nothing like the mandate Blair had in 1997. If the election demonstrated anything it was the profound uncertainty of the people, and it is therefore wholly irresponsible and destructive to attempt such major changes at a time when the country cries out to be allowed to relocate its identity, its economic and social equilibrium.

Ed Miliband may look a little green, but that is precisely why he had to be elected leader and not his brother, who was so tainted by New Labour. Ed Miliband's hesitations and perceived youthfulness therefore seem appropriate in an hour when our politics is truly being led by students and schoolchildren.

 We must hope there is a truly "new politics" on the horizon, and it would be good if Labour can play a significant part in it. But Ed Miliband probably understands that Labour first has to defer to the greater knowledge of the British people – something the coalition has completely and tragically misunderstood.

Dr Paul O'Kane
London

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WikiLeaks: the revolution has begun – and it will be digitised

The web is changing the way in which people relate to power, and politics will have no choice but to adapt too

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/29/the-revolution-will-be-digitised

By Heather Brooke

Individually, we have all already experienced the massive changes resulting from digitisation. Events or information that we once considered ephemeral and private are now aggregated, permanent, public. If these cables seem large, think about the 500 million users of Facebook or the millions of records kept by Google. Governments hold our personal data in huge databases. It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.

When data breaches happen to the public, politicians don't care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn't just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world.

To some this marks a crisis, to others an opportunity. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography – replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency.

The former US ambassador to Russia James Collins told CNN the disclosure of the cables, "will impede doing things in a normal, civilised way". Too often what is normal and civilised in diplomacy means turning a blind eye to large-scale social injustices, corruption and abuse of power.

Having read through several hundred cables, much of the "harm" is embarrassment and the highlighting of inconvenient truths. For the sake of a military base in a country, our leaders accept a brutal dictator who oppresses his population. This may be convenient in the short term for politicians, but the long-term consequences for the world's citizens can be catastrophic.

Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak. The way to move beyond leaks is to ensure a robust regime for the public to access important information.

Thanks to the internet, we have come to expect a greater level of knowledge and participation in most areas of our lives. Politics, however, has remained resolutely unreconstructed. Politicians, see themselves as parents to a public they view as children – a public that cannot be trusted with the truth, nor with the real power that knowledge brings.

Much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviable strongholds of authority. In the past, we deferred to authority and if an official told us something would damage national security we took that as true.

Now the raw data behind these claims is increasingly getting into the public domain. What we have seen from disclosures like MPs' expenses or revelations about the complicity of government in torture is that when politicians speak of a threat to "national security", often what they mean is that the security of their own position is threatened.

We are at a pivotal moment where the visionaries at the vanguard of a global digital age are clashing with those who are desperate to control what we know. WikiLeaks is the guerrilla front in a global movement for greater transparency and participation.

Ironically, the US state department has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for technical innovation as a means of bringing democracy to places like Iran and China. President Obama has urged repressive regimes to stop censoring the internet, yet a bill before Congress would allow the attorney general to create a blacklist of websites. Is robust democracy only good when it's not at home?

It used to be that a leader controlled citizens by controlling information. Now it's harder than ever for the powerful to control what people read, see and hear. Technology gives people the ability to band together and challenge authority. The powerful have long spied on citizens (surveillance) as a means of control, now citizens are turning their collected eyes back upon the powerful (sousveillance).

This is a revolution, and all revolutions create fear and uncertainty. Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the backlash from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism? What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century, so it would be well if our leaders responded to the current challenge with an eye on the future.

Good Article.

Heather Brooke has written a book called The Silent State, and is currently writing The Revolution Will Be Digitised.

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Madeleine Bunting is always worth reading:

Promoting happiness and cutting welfare: what a devious combination

Bentham's 'architecture of choice' is echoed by Cameron's initiative, but the reality is that many have no choice at all

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/nov/28/happiness-cameron-welfare-cuts-bentham

Most people – and Cameron explicitly acknowledged this – think that there is very little if anything that government can do to make people happier. Good marriages, happy families, meaningful hobbies aren't created by legislation.

This is zombie politics: a prime minister spending time on a subject on which it is generally agreed politicians can't do much, while abdicating responsibility for the things on which they can have considerable impact – such as inequality.

New Labour used to talk seductively about how people wanted to be the "authors of their own lives". A fond hope. But the one thing no one can do is to say that they don't like any of the options, they are all terrible.

Yet terrible options are the reality for a growing proportion of the population. Standing, in his book Work after Globalisation, coins the term "the precariat". These are the millions whose jobs are insecure, who have limited access to secure housing and who juggle jobs and childrearing in a frantic effort to keep up. They are exhausted, stressed and anxious. They are disproportionately represented among the young.

Above all, the lives of the precariat are deeply insecure and Standing draws on research that has shown that insecurity is linked with higher levels of intolerance and lower levels of social solidarity and altruism. Standing estimates that about 40% of the UK population now belongs to the precariat – a definition that he argues is far more important than the outdated middle class.

The precariat may not like any of the choices in front of them – short-term contract jobs, pricey homes, long commutes and costly childcare – but they are too fragmented and isolated to organise to achieve better options. They are more likely to blame themselves, or find someone even less fortunate to blame, than to criticise the system. There Is No Alternative, they believe, so their dreams of security are invested in luck. Winning the lottery or X Factor.

The neatness of neoliberal utilitarianism is that it echoes consumer culture; it flatters the individual that they are in control and are making their own choices, whereas the treadmill of work and consumption is tightly constrained.

All that is asked of you is to find happiness – the goal endorsed by consumer culture and now placed centre stage by Cameron. And the feedback loop insists that happiness is perfectly attainable, just within your reach as long as you keep trying to find it. It's a cruel mythology.

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Layer 376 . . . Human Rights, Truth, Torture, Bush, China, Waterboarding, and Lessons to be Learned

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"Truth is the first casualty of war."  -  Aeschylus

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There are another 100 million people throughout the world living in poverty since the great banking crisis took place. Western-style so-called democracy and capitalism do not, and have never, guaranteed prosperity. Various countries in Scandinavia, South America and Asia have long ago woken up to the fact that capitalism needs regulation, that societies benefit from greater fairness and equality, that poverty is intolerable where it is avoidable, and that a free press in itself is no guarantee of better public information, understanding and enlightenment.

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Cameron in China: What does Beijing think of us? Let's start with hypocrisy

Alleged British war crimes in Iraq and George Bush's comments on waterboarding have weakened David Cameron's hand 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/10/cameron-china-beijing-hyprocrisy

As David Cameron vowed to raise human rights as a topic of discussion in Beijing, it became the subject of two other international news stories.

One was a report that British troops may face trials for war crimes in Iraq. The other was the insistence by George Bush – who enjoyed British support throughout his "war on terror" – that waterboarding is not torture.

Despite Downing Street's dismissal of the former president's claim, the conjunction is likely to feed the perceptions of some in China that western concern about human rights is at best selective and at worst downright hypocritical.

Beijing has embraced such ideas. In its annual riposte to the US state department's country reports on human rights, official news agency Xinhua wrote this spring: "The reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China, but turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory."

"There is no better example than Guantánamo Bay of abuses committed by governments that say they uphold rights both at home and abroad," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. "But if we sat around and waited for a government that had a pristine record to raise other governments' rights records, we would be standing by watching gross abuses take place on a significant scale."

Campaigners also point to Beijing's deliberate elision of foreign governments and other foreign entities – portraying activists or critical media as part of a coalition of hostile forces intent not on reforming China, but containing or even destroying it. In this view, expression of concern for human rights is not just hypocritical but a ruse.

"The Nobel peace prize … is part of a concerto supplemented by various NGOs, economic identities and international organisations orchestrated by the developed countries. They hope to harass China's growth, and press China to surrender more economic interests. They even hope that China will one day collapse under the west's ideological crusade," the People's Daily article said.

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Waterboarding is no basis for truth

George Bush's defence of torture relies on a belief in information that our intelligence agencies treat with deep scepticism

by Richard Norton-Taylor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/nov/09/george-bush-waterboarding-torture

Bush cannot be allowed to get away with making these kind of claims about information based on torture, information that Britain's security and intelligence agencies treat with deep scepticism and – as far as the supposed links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq are concerned – incredulity.

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George Bush's torture admission is a dismal moment for democracy

When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/09/george-bush-torture-admission-democracy

by Philippe Sands

Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush's straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.

Unlike the UK's coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama's administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.

Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah "saved lives", including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.

Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn't produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me – on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear.

What is accurate – up to a point – is Bush's claim to have acted on legal advice.

Bush fails to mention that the advice prepared by Yoo and Bybee – which did not go through the normal inter-departmental consultations – has been subject to devastating criticism. The DOJ's own office of professional responsibility concluded that Yoo "put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice and … therefore committed intentional professional misconduct".

It found that Bybee had acted in "reckless disregard" of his professional obligations. Both men escaped sanctions only because an associate deputy general counsel, David Margolis, later concluded that both men had exercised "poor judgment" but did not knowingly provide false advice. Margolis nevertheless concluded that Yoo's "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client".

This is the dismal, bogus legal advice on which Bush relied, and the fact that he continues to invoke it today says much about his judgment. He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.

When Bush first authorised waterboarding, says former US Centcom commander General Joseph Hoar, "he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers". So much for saving lives.

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No charges over destruction of CIA interrogation tapes

Videos showed harsh interrogation techniques used on two al-Qaida suspects at secret CIA detention centre after 9/11 attacks

by Ewen MacAskill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/09/no-charges-destruction-cia-interrogation-tapes

The US justice department announced today that there is to be no prosecution of CIA officers who destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two alleged terrorists, both subjected to waterboarding.

The 92 tapes covered the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was accused of being the al-Qaida mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and Abu Zubaydah, who the US claimed was a senior al-Qaida operative involved in the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998.

The interrogations took place at one of the CIA's "black sites", a secret detention centre, in Thailand. The tapes were ordered to be destroyed in 2005 during the Bush administration by the head of CIA clandestine operations, José Rodriguez, but it is not known if he was acting on his own initiative or on orders from higher up. The tapes had been held in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand.

The justice department offered no explanation today why no prosecution case would be forthcoming or why the tapes were destroyed.

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Servicemen at 'UK's Abu Ghraib' may be guilty of war crimes, court hears

Evidence of alleged systematic mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at JFIT facility near Basra submitted to court

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/08/servicemen-uk-abu-ghraib-court-iraq

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British military interrogators may be charged as war criminals

Videos produced in court appear to show Iraqi detainees being abused at secret prison

by Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/10/iraq-prisoners-abuse-british-military

The Ministry of Defence is at the centre of a new crisis over the abuse of prisoners after it was disclosed yesterday that a number of British military interrogators may be charged as war criminals.

The development comes after videos submitted as evidence to a high court case appeared to show members of a military intelligence unit threatening, abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees at a secret prison near Basra.

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British troops may face Iraq war crimes trial

Interrogators at secret jail dubbed 'UK's Abu Ghraib' referred to chief military prosecutor

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/09/british-military-iraq-war-crimes

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War crimes charges against military interrogators would put MoD on trial

Human rights lawyer in high court action that aims to force an inquiry into 'systematic abuse' of detainees in Iraq

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/09/war-crimes-charges-military-interrogators-iraq

The revelation that a number of members of a secretive British military intelligence unit could face war crimes charges threatens to put the Ministry of Defence's entire interrogation regime on trial.

The high court heard today that the cases of three men have been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions, who has been asked to consider war crimes charges under the 2001 International Criminal Court Act. Possible charges, the court heard, included "committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" – a war crime under article 8 of the act.

But as the Guardian reported last month, men and women who undergo training as interrogators at the Intelligence Corps headquarters in Chicksands, Bedfordshire, are instructed to do just this. Among the training material upon which last month's report was based are PowerPoint slides and training manuals telling trainee interrogators that they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear. The material also suggests how this can be achieved.

One aid, created in September 2005, tells trainees that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. "Get them naked," it says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands." Another manual, prepared around the same time, advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that "Cpers" – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are "valid operational reasons". It also urges enforced nakedness. Prisoners should be "conditioned" before questioning, the material says, with conditioning defined as the combined effects of self-induced pressure and "system-induced pressure". Harsh questioning – or "harshing" – in which an interrogator puts his face close to the prisoner, screaming, swearing and making threats, is recommended as a means to provoke "anxiety/fear". Other useful methods include "insecurity", "disorientation" and "humiliation".

This material was created for the instruction of "tactical questioners", who conduct initial interrogations of prisoners of war, as well as for the instruction of servicemen and women from all three branches of the armed forces who conduct "interrogation in depth".

The material suggests not only that British military interrogators have employed techniques that may be in breach of the International Criminal Court Act, but that the MoD has spent a considerable amount of time and money training them to do just that.

Subsequently, hundreds of men who were prisoners of JFIT between 2003 and the end of 2008 alleged that they were subjected to mistreatment, including sleep deprivation, starvation, beatings, sensory deprivation, threats and humiliation.

Phil Shiner, a Birmingham human rights lawyer, has brought proceedings at the high court aimed at forcing the MoD to concede a public inquiry into the men's allegations.

Many of the former inmates complain that they were severely beaten when arrested, usually at their homes. Many allege they were again beaten in transit, in the backs of trucks or aboard helicopters.

On arrival at a British base, most of the former inmates say they were photographed and examined by a military doctor who would take no interest in their injuries. Many say they were forced to kneel upright for long periods on arrival. Many also say they were hooded or blindfolded and forced to run in zig-zags before interrogation.

For reasons that remain unclear, the interrogators filmed themselves while conducting these interrogations, and 1,253 of their recordings have now been seized by military police investigators. Those recording are expected to be central to any prosecutions.

The former inmates say the most severe mistreatment was meted out while they were not being filmed, however. In all, Shiner's team has documented 59 allegations of detainees being hooded, 11 of electric shocks, 122 of sound deprivation through the use of earmuffs, 52 of sleep deprivation, 160 of sight deprivation, including 117 using blackened goggles, 132 of the use of stress positions, 39 of enforced nakedness, and 18 allegations that detainees were kept awake by pornographic DVDs played on laptops.

In bringing proceedings on behalf of 222 former prisoners, Shiner's team argued that a public inquiry was needed to examine the systemic issues and the lessons to be learned. Anything less, they said, would fail to meet the UK's obligations under the European convention on human rights.

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Layer 348 . . . Blair Again, Labour Leadership, William Hague, New Orleans, Katrina and Spike Lee

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Dear Diary, Summer's definitely over. The heat's gone and the light's beginning to dim - the days are markedly shorter. The past few days have been pleasantly warm and sunny, and the forecast is for even better weather today. But the fact is we're into autumn. August was pretty much a wash-out, with hardly a day of high pressure airstreams or real summer heat. And now we're into September - a beautiful month for sure, but it's definitely autumn. Sunflowers have turned to seed, tomatoes are struggling to ripen. Oleanders have finished flowering already.

I'm cursing yesterday's Guardian for putting Blair's mug on the front page - seriously scary.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/02/tony-blair-photography-guardian-journey

They also had a full page photo of him inside the paper - presumably a quid pro quo for the exclusive interview he gave the paper as a launching pad for his latest WMD. The guy just doesn't want to go away.

http://twitter.com/VizTopTips

"BRIGHTEN up your day by moving at least one of Tony Blair's books to the crime section in your local book shop."

The man's an appalling maniac. And I hate the way people still maintain that Blair somehow made (New) Labour 'electable'. How many times do they need to be told that a fucking three legged horse would have been electable after 17 years of Thatcher and Major and their vile crew? The country wanted rid of the Tories, and indeed it still doesn't, on the whole, want them back. It's just that New Labour became extremely UNelectable after people had woken up to the vileness of . . . New Labour. We voted Labour IN SPITE OF Blair - not BECAUSE OF him.

The Guardian's editorial yearns for David Miliband to repudiate and apologise for the New Labour awfulness. The editorial hints at a kind of Kennedyesque scenario being the outcome of the leadership election - the elder of the brothers becoming head honcho whilst the younger drives through progressive social and economic policies.

Labour leadership: Fraternal brotherhood

Labour's loss in the spring was as painful as it was inevitable

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/01/tony-blair-the-journey 

For all the achievements of the last 13 years, the country had wearied of New Labour, with its wars, its disdain for liberty and its timidity with the ruinous bankers. Tactical positioning had crowded out serious thought, and on some really big questions, such as the authoritarian erosion of civil liberties, the regime had become incapable of perceiving any problem at all.

In the end, new policies will count for more than a new personality, and the campaign's quiet success has been stirring a smidgen of intellectual life back into the party.

A [new] Labour leader will provide three things – a plausible economic plan, a grasp of the new shape of politics, and a decisive break with the Blair-Brown years.

Besides mastering the new politics, however, the next leader must dispense with the old. The younger Miliband has come into his own by drawing a line under the Blair-Brown era. In indulging plutocrats, trampling on liberties and invading Iraq, the last government got it wrong, and Ed Miliband is willing to say so, where his brother is not.

Ed Miliband's last posting as climate change secretary was a political blessing. It provided a platform on which to fight the good fight, which he did. Together with his sustained interest in narrowing the wealth gap, his brief ministerial record stirred hopes of replacing New Labour's
rudderless expediency with a more principled pragmatism.

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Other Viz Top Tips:

GOOGLE: Assist night surfers by replacing the "I'm feeling lucky" button with the "I'm feeling horny" one.

ALWAYS MASTURBATE whilst eating a carrot to cancel out any adverse effects.

BAKERS AND TOASTER MAKERS: Get together and decide what fucking size slices of bread should be and stick to it.

STEER clear of kettle chips. Just bought a packet; they turned to mush and welded themselves to the element.

PETER CROUCH - Avoid getting into trouble with Abbie Clancy when booking hotel rooms by using the alias Mr and Mr Hague.

SAVE VALUABLE TIME running water from the tap by purchasing pre-poured water in bottles.

http://twitter.com/VizTopTips

My son tells me he doesn't read Viz 'cos it childish . . .

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The William Hague thing is interesting. Very interesting. It even features high on the list on Yahoo's "Trending" page. Who'd have thought that Wee Willie could be so interesting to the general public?

As for what he's alleged to have done - who really gives a monkey's? Surely it's more worrying that he's a Tory than he's bisexual, or whatever?

Pretty poor show though - trying to prove his hetrosexuality by saying he keeps on shagging his missus but she keeps on aborting.

It seems most people just assume he's a liar.

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There were some excellent letters in the Guardian yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/01/drawing-a-line-moving-on

Polly Toynbee's spot-on tirade almost brought a lump to my throat (These vain, venal has-beens should bow out and shut up, 31 August). In May I reluctantly voted Lib Dem in the hope of creating a fairer, better politics. What made me abandon my lifelong affiliation was not any catalogue of Labour's policy mistakes, not even its mad war. It was the rancid ethos created and exuded by Blair, Brown, Mandelson and their acolytes. I'd grown to despise these men for betraying Labour's very raison d'etre, a commitment to a more just and equal society. I despised them because they didn't seem to care. For many thousands, this is the toxic legacy of Blair and co. Let's hope the new Labour leader, like Pip at the end of Great Expectations, grasps his chance to throw open the windows, let out the bad smell and let in some fresher air.

Alan Clark

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/01/opposition-must-be-ready-coalition

The trouble with the Labour leadership election is that it is difficult to see any of these affable candidates as party leader, let alone prime minister. It's hard to work out exactly what they stand for or what it is that inspires and motivates them. I struggle to find anything new or exciting in either substance or style. I wonder if I were to get to meet any of them, who would I rather have patronise me in order to gain my support?

If only one of them would have a serious bitch about something important – like what has happened to the Labour party, like the Labour MPs who have scrounged thousands out of the parliamentary expenses system, like how the rich continue to exploit the rest of us.

Democracy not just about getting people to vote for your party so you can form an administration and have a career in politics. It's about having a voice and being heard. While the candidates waffle on about being able to run capitalism more efficiently than the real capitalists in the Tory party, millions of people remain without representation and feel that nobody is listening to them.

Keith Luckey

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/01/labours-choice-chance-for-renewal

Polly Toynbee is mistaken in thinking there is not much to choose between the Miliband brothers (The Labour project now is the reverse of 1994, 28 August). In fact their differences over strategy – with David wanting to continue to pursue the centre ground, and Ed seeking a "progressive coalition" – go to the heart of Labour's problem. David's solution is a dead end, one which offers only another centre government, when the voters eventually get fed up with the Con Dems, but not very different from theirs, or Blair/Brown's. Ed offers something more leftwing that will win back the support of Labour's lost "core" vote and retain that of the "progressive" middle class. This is feasible, but only if we change the electoral system to one of full proportional representation. Under our current system parties will always pursue the centre ground to win, as elections are decided by "don't knows" in a minority of seats. It worked for Blair and Cameron, and could work for David, but it won't deliver a radical government. That requires a proportional system, where a "progressive coalition", even if it initially consists of Labour and Lib Dems, can sustain its trajectory. So vote Ed, vote AV, forward to PR. (I'm sure Ed will soon come round to it!)

Peter Rowlands

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The problem with all these candidates is that they all look like, and sound like, a load of muppets.

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Last night, to mark the anniversary of the Katrina disaster, Channel 4 screened parts 3 and 4 of Spike Lee's 4 hour documentary about what took place in New Orleans.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/arts_entertainment/film_tv/when%20the%20levees%20broke/168015

This was Lee's attempt to let the people "have their say". What the film brilliantly shows is the appalling neglect and incompetence by all levels of government and their agencies - leading up to the disaster, during it, and afterwards.

Wynton Marsalis, who really does have a way with words, said,

"In this moment we see a lot of what's wrong with this country."

Indeed we do. It's hard to consider America a civilised country when it has such incredible levels of poverty, inequality, neglect, filth, destitution, unhappiness and bitterness.

There were amazing stories of searches not being done properly, new mobile homes piled up in depots and not distributed for months on end, electricity not being reconnected, insurance companies refusing to pay out, levees not being reconstructed adequately, properties being bulldozed and people being evicted so that neighbourhoods could be gentrified, etc. Horrendous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Levees_Broke
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Layer 336 . . . The Politics of Education, Graduates, Sweat, Debt, and Disillusionment

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Oh well, it's back to keeping up with politics, beginning with the politics of education.

Peter Preston, loud-mouthed supporter of SATs and league tables, and scourge of trendy lefty teachers, as he imagines them, is suddenly concerned about children and students actually enjoying life. Why? Well wouldn't you know it - he's been awarded an honorary degree (why?) and he wants us to know about it. Being at a graduation ceremony has caused him to focus on real students and their experiences of the education system.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/25/university-not-just-exam-slog

University: learning to enjoy life

Witnessing the hope of a graduation day, I remember that education is about more than sweat and debt

He remembers!!! At last!!

Actually this piece is only concerned with university students, and I suppose it's too much to expect him to think laterally to what also goes on in schools, and whether pupils enjoy their lives within them. To do that he'd need to actually go into a school, having been awarded an honorary GCSE or maybe an honorary Level 4 in English.

So what does he have to say about learning and enjoying life?

University isn't a mere staging post to a well-paid job . . . Nor is it just an investment in Britain's future, so we can compete with Beijing by 2020. It isn't wholly a practical slog, either, a skill box of computer or engineering skills. University is an experience, often a life-changing one. You leave school a spotty child, and three years later, you're sort of grown up. You have friends you'll probably never lose. You've looked after yourself. You've sweated through exams. If you're lucky, you've learned how to think – the best boon of the lot.

Yes Pete, old duck, IF YOU'RE LUCKY. Because even at undergraduate level there's still no priority given to learning how to think. What we have is still a grim determination to force young people to swallow a curriculum, memorise its content, and regurgitate it in exams.

In fact, this happens even at postgraduate level! A friend's very bright son decided to bale out of his Masters course as soon as he realised that there was still no scope for self-directed learning and research, and it was still a bloody boring exam treadmill.

Pete goes on:

When did we begin to forget such things?

When did YOU forget, you old bastard? Some of us have been saying this stuff forever. Beginning with primary schooling.

He goes on to blame education ministers for making "degree courses seem like tests for national survival."

This is the man who talks about Primary tests and league tables as though they're essentials to national survival!

And there's more. He concludes:

Is school, and then college or university, there as an obstacle race, a slog of tests and hurdles? Is it just a rehearsal for 50 years of frustration, sweat, debt, disillusion and staffroom tears?

The danger is making education seem unutterably grim. The hope – see that beaming [graduation] queue of something achieved – is that happiness has a part to play. For learning in this crunched, short life means learning to enjoy yourself, too.

Thanks to people like Peter Preston, Melanie Philips, Chris Woodhead and their politician friends, schools and universities HAVE become unutterably grim results factories where pupil and student wellbeing, as well as their social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, have been increasingly neglected and marginalised - in the rush to "drive up standards".

Learning to enjoy yourself? How can you enjoy yourself when you're racking up debt doing stuff day in and day out that's basically cramming for exams, with little or no opportunities for self-directed creative experience?

What a fucking idiot.

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There's more evidence of the university system being useless and actually harmful to young people's life chances reported in the education section of the Guardian this week.

Should universities teach students how to find a job?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/27/graduate-job-crisis

Sarfraz Manzoor has been following the fortunes of six young people who graduated last year. How well do they feel that university prepared them for today's economic realities?

The class of 2009 left university knowing they were facing the toughest battle for jobs in a generation.

That was, at least, the dire prediction, but what was the reality? I have spent the last year documenting the post-graduation lives of six students who are among the class of 2009. The six studied at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University, and agreed to keep audio diaries throughout their year in which they recorded their hopes for the coming year as well as their reaction to the reality.

By the end of the year, the six students were scattered around the world and were far more cynical about the value of a university education than they had been on graduating.

For a start off it's interesting that none of the six was interested in using knowledge gained from their degrees - they all wanted to pursue careers in areas like sales, journalism and the media - careers that had nothing to do with the subjects they'd been studying. Given the likelihood that they'd originally chosen those subjects for their interest and enjoyment, what does that say about the universities making them somehow utterly tedious and uninspiring?

Page and Ali both left the country to seek work in Cyprus and Saudi Arabia, while Del Core found the soul-crushing business of being rejected hard to take. "I've looked for jobs in newspapers, at the job centre, on the internet, and by word of mouth," she says. "I've had several interviews, some of which I got to the second stage, but I never got past that. It has been quite disheartening – some positions I applied for were more the dream job than a means to an end, and I was very upset when I didn't get those. I was in tears."

Having spent time with the graduates, I was struck by how much they seemed to have believed, at least at the start, that they were entitled to a well-paid and fulfilling job simply because they had been to university. "When you look at the people who are going to university," explains Professor Kate Purcell, of Warwick University's Institute for Employment Research, "they have been encouraged to think that education has given them employability skills, so as well as learning about history or English or business studies they are also learning problem solving, developing communication skills, so they are pretty confident about themselves."

This confidence is not necessarily well founded.

A lot of people go to university for the sake of it because they think it is the right thing to do. So that makes lots of graduates. Universities are still selling the idea to people that if they go to university they are guaranteed a great job at the end of it, and that is just not the case any more.

The increasing number of graduates entering the job market has meant that employers are often insisting that prospective employees pass psychometric tests as a way of selecting candidates, and it has also led to claims that too many young people are being herded into university.

"When I think about a university course, I think of something that teaches people a skill so that they are qualified to do a certain job," says Gerrard. "But, in reality, after my degree I don't feel qualified for anything – degrees don't indicate someone's common sense or people skills, and I don't think you can get through many interviews without a little of both."

Just a little? It's pathetic really - these young graduates aren't even properly aware of what they're lacking. Common sense? What's that? People skills? Such as?

What's more, it's not their fault. They've been told since Primary school that high attainment is all that matters - and too late they find it isn't. What's more, they don't really know what does matter. And they're not the only ones. Politicians and university bosses don't know either. Their assumption is always that a first class honours or a 2.1 degree will get you anywhere in life. Beyond that, they haven't a clue. Well - that's what got them a meal ticket to their high status, was it not?

And it's no wonder that employers put more trust in 'psychometric tests' than university attainment in subjects whose facts and figures they won't be using anyway. The poor bloody students think that having a degree tells people they're "bright". Actually it doesn't. It's just as likely to say they're a dull swat, a boring little library-goer, a self-regarding 'academically able' nonentity with little experience of life, proper work, or real people. Possibly a dull conformist who's unable to think for themselves, unable to think creatively and imaginatively, unable to work well in a team, or communicate effectively, or write well, or show any empathy, intuition or instinctual intelligence. Common sense indeed.

The New Learning Revolution is about developing all of these intelligences and skills. How come the people who run education in this country don't realise that yet? How many more generations of our young people will go through our education system deprived of the sorts of learning that are taken for granted in countries much smarter than ours?

What's more, they're deprived of their human right to enjoy learning for its own sake, and to be free of undue pressure and stress within the education system.

This country used to be known for its creative and innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Not only have other countries overtaken us, we've actually been going backwards for the past 20 odd years.
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Layer 326 . . . A Gathering Storm, Voodoo Economics, the Budget, the Banks and Will Hutton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poverty of action is inexcusable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Will's column in today's paper says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Football: a dear friend to capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Layer 322 . . . Hopper, Laws, Ashley, Balls, Conservative Pretenders, Gaza, Deficit Hawks and Lessons in Economics

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Style and Substance

Dennis Hopper died this week. A strange guy. I'd never heard of him before Easy Rider, and his character in that film was certainly HIM - a money-oriented bastard making lots of cash from flogging hard drugs whilst masquerading as some kind of spiritual freewheeling hippy on wheels.

Whereas the Peter Fonda and the Jack Nicholson characters clearly had depth and something  to say about life, about freedom and the state of humanity, you had the feeling about Hopper that he didn't really give a shit about anything except taking care of business and looking after himself. He reminded me of quite a few people who were students at that time - growing their hair and dressing in denim but essentially on their way to making as much money as possible through the pursuit of cruddy careers in accountancy and business.

In real life Hopper spent many years addicted to hard drugs and booze, and was an anti-liberal paid-up Republican far-right-supporting nihilist. He also liked guns. Not a very attractive character. What the hell's a 'hell-raiser' anyway? A loud-mouthed drunken egomaniac. About as far from hippy ideals as you can get.

Hardly in the same class as Hopper, but David Laws is another anti-liberal dressed up as a Liberal caring sharing good guy. He's a City man through and through, an Orange Book believer in Chicago-school neo-liberal economics. It seems it was only his sexual proclivities that kept him away from entering politics as a Conservative.

And then there's the strange case of Jackie Ashley, who this week shed her left-wing political make-up and came out as a defender of the indefensible - Sex and the City 2. This film has been widely panned as a total dog of a movie - about four women who used to be strong characters in favour of freedom and fun, now reduced to hankering after marriage and endless shopping trips in places like Abu Dhabi. Ashley is a waste of space. She defends these women's indulgence in frivolity and air-headed materialism on the grounds that such escapism is no worse that men's indulgence in football and gadgets.

Nobody sensible should be mad enough to pay extortionate amounts of cash to see a bunch of millionaire footballers running around a football pitch for 90 minutes, agreed, but nobody should enjoy the sight of grown women doing stupid stuff either. Weird, Jackie.

And finally we come to the other weirdos of the week - the other style over substance attention-seekers vying for the leadership of the Labour party. A feature on Ed Balls in G2 was just as vacuous as the man himself, who had nothing interesting to say at all. This is a man who didn't even realise that you need to go to Paddington and not Euston in order to catch a train to Swindon. Duh!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/iain-duncan-smith-ignorance-welfare?

Lots of interesting comments here, prompted by this piece, and by Iain Duncan Smith's proposals.

It's surely a mistake for those who see themselves as anti-Tory to attack someone like IDS when he's a lone Tory voice making at least some constructive points about work and poverty.

For example, when he says, "If you are unemployed, and you come from a family that is unemployed, all you can see when you think about work is risk", he's surely not mistaken. He's talking about thousands of people who receive benefits and are likely at present to lose those benefits as soon as they take a job, no matter how temporary that job may be, no matter whether they will be able to cope with its demands, and therefore could soon find themselves having to go through all the hassles of re-applying for their benefits.

IDS seems to be saying, let's allow people to keep their benefits for some time until it's established that they have some job security, and are doing work for which they have some capacity, some aptitude and perhaps even some liking. I know from personal experience within my own family just how hard it can be for people to cope with being laid off several times within a matter of weeks or months from jobs they'd understood to be long-term .

Secondly, the author of this piece says, "In fact, very few are materially better off unemployed, as there are numerous financial incentives to ensure that taking a job is financially rewarding. Jobcentre advisers are trained to offer "better-off calculations" that detail claimants' potential earnings from these benefits."

What this is failing to address is that financial benefits are only part of the equation when someone's deciding whether to take certain, usually low-paid, jobs. Being unemployed and cash-poor, but time-rich, for example, which might permit a poor but pleasant lifestyle, especially if it involves being able to offer more care for one's children and elders, may also be a key factor. And we shouldn't forget that those who are unemployed, time-rich and claiming benefits also have more opportunity to do odd days of work for cash in hand.

If I understand him correctly IDS is proposing to help create a fairer society partly by persuading parliament to approve measures that will allow those on benefits to keep most of what they earn when they take a job, without any fear of losing their benefits, for a reasonable stretch of time. This is surely the only way to get people to give up an unemployed and cash in hand lifestyle - to make work pay and to make people significantly better off by taking even a low paid job.

It's only by finding a niche in the world of work that people can acquire the habit of working and a desire to acquire further skills. I believe IDS, through his work with his Centre for Social Justice, genuinely believes that it's worth the state spending more on the unemployed, or rather, not immediately grabbing back state benefits when people start work, in order to spend less on unemployment in the long run. He sounds to me as though he means it when he says that it's wrong for people to pay back proportionately more to the state when they start work than even those on 50% income tax are paying.

If I'm wrong about this, then maybe this is an idea that the Labour party ought to consider, and maybe should have considered already. If I'm right, then let's give IDS the credit he deserves.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/labour-leadership-hustings-john-mcdonnell


Labour leadership hustings: Lead resistance to the cuts

We must again become a grassroots social movement

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/labour-leadership-hustings-diane-abbott

Labour leadership hustings: I voted against the Iraq war

We need to rediscover our sense of moral purpose

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/may/31/deficit-hawks-social-security-wall-street

Why should we listen to deficit hawks?

Calls to cut social security come from economists who want to line Wall Street pockets with money from ordinary workers

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/david-laws-cuts-agenda

David Laws's life goal was to cast people out of work

I regret the manner of his fall, but he wasn't honest with public money, while his cuts agenda is terrifying to contemplate

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/22/lift-the-gaza-blocade-nick-clegg

Lift the Gaza blockade

The suffering is shocking. And nobody will benefit from the radicalism that confinement engenders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/israel-peace-activists-murder-sanctions



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/attack-on-gaza-aid-flotilla

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/gaza-blockade-bloodshed-editorial

Gaza: From blockade to bloodshed

Nothing has done more to establish Israel's status as a pariah state among its neighbours than the actions of its armed forces

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/state-market-nothern-rock-ridley

This state-hating free marketeer ignores his own failed experiment

Matt Ridley, the former head of Northern Rock, is peddling theories riddled with blame-shifting and excruciating errors

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/31/world-crisis-economic-experimentation

In a financial crisis, what counts is what works

Free-market capitalism has imploded, and Europe's moment has not come: big-picture explanations of the world rarely hold good for long

This is an excellent piece by Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor. Heavy stuff, but worth persevering with for the quality of his analysis and his conclusion:

The postwar era of strong trade unions, full employment policies and capital controls produced stronger, more equitable growth than three decades of deregulation, liberalisation and flexible labour markets. The more integrated Europe has become, the worse it has performed.

China and India prove that it is possible to thrive without a meta-narrative. Both countries have systems of managed capitalism fully in the tradition of the mixed economies that prevailed in the west during the heyday of social democracy. What counts is what works. There is a lesson in that somewhere.

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