Layer 468 . . . The IMF, Strauss-Kahn, Hattie Carroll, Naomi Klein and Bob Dylan

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IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn refused bail on sex assault charges


Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who denies the charges, remanded in custody in New York over fears he might flee the US

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/16/dominique-strauss-kahn-medical-examination-court-hearing

As far as Oxzen can see the IMF is still a New York-based ultra-powerful right-wing institution controlled by individuals who have aligned it with the doctrines of the notorious Chicago School of Friedmanite economics. For several decades it has forced governments throughout the world to privatise public assets and impose austerity on their citizens (a la New Labour and New Tories who did it without any external encouragement or direction - simply for fun and profit) in return for receiving emergency loans, etc. Read what Naomi Klein has to say about the IMF:

IMF Go to Hell


The IMF had its chance to run Argentina [ETC!]. Now it's the people's turn. 

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2002/03/imf-go-hell

Naomi also has plenty to say about the IMF in her book, The Shock Doctrine, which, of course, everyone should have read by now.

"The IMF has three trademark demands - privatisation, government deregulation, and deep cuts to social spending . . . " [P9]


"The colonisation of the World Bank and the IMF by the Chicago School [graduates] was a largely unspoken process, but it became official in 1989 when John Williamson unveiled what he called "the Washington Consensus".  It was a list of policies that he said both institutions now considered the bare minimum for economic health - "the common core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists". These policies, masquerading as technical and uncontentious, included such bold ideological claims as "all state enterprises should be privatised", and "barriers impeding the entry of foreign firms should be abolished". When the list was complete it made up nothing less than Friedman's neoliberal triumverate of privatisation, deregulation/free trade and drastic cuts to government spending. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the last holdouts against the new orthodoxy, wrote that "Keynes would be rolling over in his grave were he to see what has happened to his child [the IMF]". [P.163]


"The IMF's official mandate was still crisis prevention - not social engineering or ideological transformation - so economic stabilisation needed to be the official rationale. The reality was that in country after country the international debt crisis was being methodically leveraged to advance the Chicago School agenda, based on a ruthless application of Friedman's shock doctrine." [P164]

Sounds familiar?

Wikipedia says -
The IMF sometimes advocates “austerity programmes,” increasing taxes even when the economy is weak, in order to generate government revenue and bring budgets closer to a balance, thus reducing budget deficits. Countries are often advised to lower their corporate tax rate. These policies were criticized by Joseph E. Stiglitz, former chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank, in his book Globalization and Its Discontents. He argued that by converting to a more Monetarist [ie Friedmanite] approach, the fund no longer had a valid purpose, as it was designed to provide funds for countries to carry out Keynesian reflations, and that the IMF “was not participating in a conspiracy, but it was reflecting the interests and ideology of the Western financial community.”

Now, Mr Strauss-Kahn is a member of the French Socialist Party (!) and has apparently made a pretty good fist of managing the financial current crisis, insofar as he's advocated the expenditure of reserves [ie OUR money] on propping up the financial institutions, banks and indeed whole countries, such as Greece. What's not clear [to me at least] is whether he's also been calling for re-regulation of financial institutions, and indeed the nationalisation of banks and finance houses. And if not, why not?

Something happens to people who rise to positions of enormous power - people like Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Blair, and, possibly, Strauss-Kahn. Either they start to feel omnipotent and godlike, in which case they assume the right to think and to do whatever they like, or else their latent psychopathic tendencies completely take over and they feel no limits on their desires, impulses and need for personal gratification.

This story instantly brings to mind the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYM4WYFAiLg&feature=related

Play the video and listen to the words -




The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll


William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears


William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears


Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears


In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence . . .
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.

...................................................

Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a maid
In his New York hotel bedroom that she was a'cleaning
He came out of his bathroom and stood there stark naked
He grabbed her and hit her, and he raped her
And the cops were called in and his name took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked Dominique Strauss-Kahn for all of his sex crimes -
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears

..................................................................

Bob's written an interesting piece on his website, on his China gigs -

http://www.bobdylan.com/news/my-fans-and-followers

Allow me to clarify a couple of things about this so-called China controversy which has been going on for over a year. First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China . . . 

So much for the right-wing press - who have, let's say. . .  issues - with Bob, and with China.

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Layer 450 . . . Class War, Economic Fundamentalists, The City's Mafiosi, Pambazuka, Changing the World and Blessed Unrest

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It seemed strange to be blogging about the competing economic theories of Keynes and Friedman recently (Layer 447) - as if anyone's really interested? However, Michael Tomasky wrote this piece for the Guardian last week -

So this is the Tea Party's endgame. No government

In 1995 Clinton and Gingrich were always going to deal. But these economic fundamentalists don't want compromise

As the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait observed last year, America is in a new culture war, but "this culture war is not over social issues – it is over economic ones".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/23/tea-party-endgame-no-government

Over the last 30 years – during which time overall union membership has gone from about 25% of the workforce to barely 11% - the richest 1% have seen their pre-tax incomes nearly quadruple while median earners have stayed flat.

Were the Democrats cleverer and braver, citizens would broadly know these facts. But most Americans have no idea of the massive class war – stealing from the bottom and the middle and giving to the very top – that has been waged over the last three decades. Instead, they appear to know, or "know", that Barack Obama has governed from the hard left, that unions are piggy, and that an uprising of Tea Party patriots has been all that stands between the good old US of A and a kind of Muslim-Marxism state.

In such an atmosphere, the right can move with impunity.

...............................

Why omerta still suits the City's mafiosi

Banks will begin the process of reform when their employees aren't penalised for speaking out

by Nick Cohen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/20/nick-cohen-banks-reform-whistleblowers

'Why are we so hated?" the City asks with increasing nervousness as it begins to realise that its gaudy allure is fading. "Because you wrecked our prosperity and then stole our taxes," is the short answer it will hear during the coming weeks as bankers pick up £6bn in bonuses.

The national consensus holds that the City is being "rewarded for failure" and, for once, the national consensus is right. Most understand, too, that in the cases of RBS, Halifax and the other bailed-out banks, the financiers are engaged in a theft of public money beyond the dreams of a mafia crime family. What we must grasp if there is to be serious reform is that the bonuses are rewards for cowards as well as for failures.

Inside Job opens this week and the title of Charles Ferguson's intelligent and quietly angry documentary on the causes of the crash hints at the destructive effects of fear and secrecy. The world does not experience a financial meltdown without insiders realising that the system is going haywire.

We need to break up a system that rewards those who bite their tongues because it suits their private interests and punishes those who speak their minds in the public interest. We need to recognise that we live in a half-free country, where we have freedom of speech at home but not at work; where people pride themselves on their freedom to criticise politicians, but dare not criticise their employers.

A minimum programme would include the outlawing of gagging clauses in redundancy settlements, the lifting of the limits on the compensation whistleblowers can receive from employment tribunals, a ban on financial institutions using the libel law, the appointment of compulsory worker-directors to corporate boards and the establishment of a statutory regulatory body that can punish bankers who fail to protest against misconduct.

The banks are as great a threat to our national security as a foreign enemy. We collect intelligence on hostile powers. Why should we not collect it on the hostile City?

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Pambazuka News

http://pambazuka.org/en/

Egypt and the revolution in our minds

by Nigel C. Gibson - activist and scholar

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70972


Egypt: How to overthrow a dictator

by Samir Amin

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/71173

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How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm


[Review in the LRB by Terry Eagleton]


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable


How to Change the World is the work of a man who has reached an age at which most of us would be happy to be able to raise ourselves from our armchairs without the aid of three nurses and a hoist, let alone carry out historical research. It will surely not be the last volume we shall be granted by this indomitable spirit.


Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate wisdom. It is hard to think of a critic of Marxism who can address his or her own beliefs with such honesty and equipoise.


You cannot speak of what free men and women are bound to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion.


Marx was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.

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Blessed Unrest

http://www.blessedunrest.com/

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Layer 447 . . . The Rights of the Child, Education, Michael Morpurgo, Schools, the Dimbleby Lecture, Lessons in Hate and Violence, and the Need for Apologies.

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Continuing with yesterday's economics theme, the following articles are very good summaries of the case for Keynesian approaches, and the case against Friedmanite economics:

The Economy: We Are All Keynesians Now

Friday, Dec. 31, 1965

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842353-1,00.html

from 2008

The End of the Age of Milton Friedman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-madrick/the-end-of-the-age-of-mil_b_94228.html

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Children and Education

The wellbeing of children, the brainwashing & indoctrination of children, the education of children, and the abuse of children, are subjects that every one of us should be concerned with and pay attention to.

I'm still seething about that insane 'Tiger Woman' and her abuse of her own children. [see last blog] I'm even more seething about people like her who encourage other parents (and teachers) to put extreme pressure on children to achieve academically at the cost of their overall wellbeing, at the cost of their right to a proper childhood, and their right to a proper education.

I'm now seething at a programme that was broadcast by Channel 4's 'Dispatches' team this week -

Lessons in Hate and Violence

Dispatches goes undercover to investigate allegations that teachers regularly assault young children in some of the 2,000 Muslim schools in Britain run by Islamic organisations.

The programme also follows up allegations that, behind closed doors, some Muslim secondary schools teach a message of hatred and intolerance.

The programme is presented by reporter Tazeen Ahmad.

Dispatches: Lessons in Hate and Violence will not be available on 4oD at this time, due to an ongoing police investigation concerning subjects featured in the programme.

http://www.channe4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-80/episode-1

There are clips of the actual programme on the website, where Salahuddeen Ali has commented:

Great documentary. I am a muslim and I find this issue of muslim teachers/schools abusing children worthy of broadcast and investigation. As a muslim child growing learning the Quran, I was beaten and whipped. This is a fact. I read many muslims comments saying they're unhappy about this report. Well I hope they realize that when abuse is applied to children in their faith schools it will not be hushed down in respect to their image. Children's rights are above any faith, group or agenda. Thank you for this brilliant work.

Mohammed Abdullah commented:

Although I have not watched the full program I believe it is right to bring these issues to the forefront just like one would do with racism. Indeed there are preachers in Mosques and Madrasa's preaching Islam without the proper knowledge of the subject. We can deny the truth much as possible but these problems do exist I myself have experienced this. Those preachers only have a tunnel vision of religion and do not have a broader knowledge of this world. Those preachers who spread hatred, corruptions and mischief in the land they need to be bought to Justice. Al Quran Surat Al-M?'idah: Chapter 5: Verse 33: gives clear punishment for those who Spread hatred, Corruptions and Mischief on the land. I would like to praise TAZEEN AHMAD for this brilliant work.

The programme had used hidden cameras to film teachers and teachers' assistants barking at children and indoctrinating them about the vileness of non-Muslims - shouting at children who weren't concentrating hard enough on their Koran-reading. Worse than this, they were shown kicking and slapping children for not working hard enough.

The children worked in isolation - not speaking to or collaborating with any of their peers in their learning.  During unsupervised break times some of the children were aggressive and abusive to one another.

But let's be clear - this model and this pattern of learning exist in many other schools throughout the country, where children learn through didactic instruction, learn by rote, learn in isolation, and have an unbroken diet of uncreative, meaningless cramming.

It's a disgusting fact that more and more children learn in ghetto schools of one sort or another - instead of learning alongside children of all backgrounds and abilities. This is something the 'free schools' idea is meant to promote. The Tories have been searching for ages to figure out a way of giving public money to private and independent schools in order to reduce private tuition fees, and this a perfect wheeze for doing it. These people really do have a sense of entitlement to exclusive schools which are subsidised by public taxation, and which are run by the parents whose children benefit from them. People like Toby Young want control of the curriculum, the management, the recruitment of staff, and the style of teaching - and they don't give a toss about what more enlightened people say about the learning and wellbeing needs of children. Their sole aim is to have a neighbourhood school for their own children, run by the parents, which doesn't charge fees, and which will guarantee 'rigour' and a smooth passage to the Oxbridge college of their choice.

These schools may be less hate-filled than those shown on the C4 documentary, but just as negative in their effect through causing fragmentation of the system, entrenching privilege, promoting ghettoisation and destroying the rights of children to a proper childhood and an enjoyment of school and of learning itself.

........................................

Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo is an exceptional human being, and a great champion of the rights of children. He was rightly given the honour of delivering the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV this week.

In this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Michael Morpurgo explores the increasingly urgent issue of children's rights, and investigates the wrongs that young people have to endure.

One of Britain's most popular children's authors, Morpurgo has written over 120 books and more recently he has become a campaigner on behalf of children, both at home and abroad. In this role he visited the Middle East where he witnessed, first hand, the difficulties children face in times of conflict.

His most well known book, War Horse, was recently dramatised to great critical acclaim and it is now being made into a Hollywood feature film by Stephen Spielberg.

Related Links

    * Wikipedia: Michael Morpurgo (en.wikipedia.org)
    * Michael Morpurgo: Home (www.michaelmorpurgo.com)
    * BBC Scotland: Authors Live - Michael Morpurgo
    * BBC News: Entertainment & Arts: Michael Morpurgo on War Horse and beyond
    * BBC News: Entertainment & Arts: How to operate a War Horse puppet
    * IMDb: War Horse (www.imdb.com)
    * BBC News Magazine: How children's war fiction has changed

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ymf57

Seven days left to view this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ymf57/The_Richard_Dimbleby_Lecture_15_02_2011/

The Rights of Children - summary of the lecture

UN Convention on Children's Rights - do we live by it?

Only two countries have yet to ratify this convention - Somalia and the United States.
 
The right to survival, access to healthcare, liberty and education

These rights are woefully neglected.

3.5 million of our children in the UK are mired in poverty.

Some of the most vulnerable have been appallingly treated.

We must tackle the impoverishment, neglect and exploitation of children.

The Yarls Wood detention centre - a deeply shameful institution - injustice was done to children put in this prison.

"Motherland" - a play by Natasha Walters.

"12 big men banged on our door. They took us to a police station."

We lock up asylum-seeking children, even though they are innocent of any crime.

The rights of children are flagrantly ignored.

"Are we doing the best for our children? No - and we are all to blame."

Librarians are the unsung heros of the book world. Unglamorous
people like this make a real difference to children's lives.

The younger the children, the less status for the people involved. Primary school teachers are the worst paid.

We have a short-term target-driven mindset. We need to go back to the needs of children. We need children to burn brightly and shine.

What we actually do is corral them and stifle them - we put them in places where success and failure [in tests and exams] is all that counts . . . Fear of failure is what does the most damage. We're like Mr Gradgrind in Dickens' 'Hard Times', whose notion of education was to ram 'facts' into children's heads . . .

We may not beat children any more, but I wonder how far we've moved on since Gradgrind . . .  We still have classes that are twice the size they should be - far too big for teachers to make proper relationships, particularly with children who are already disengaged and alienated.

New Zealand ranks 4th in the OECD education rankings, and doesn't have league tables. Finland ranks 2nd, and children there don't begin formal schooling till the age of seven. Britain ranks 20th.

We must remember that we are preparing children NOT simply for employment, or for the common good, but for the difficult decisions they will have to make in their personal lives, for the moments when they will have to take responsibility for themselves and for others, when they will be tempted to have inappropriate sex, or to take drugs, or to bully someone, or carry a knife, or throw a brick through a window . . .

There is no league table for mature behaviour, for the quality of relationships, for self-worth and for self-confidence.

The quality of their relationships is the most important factor in any child's life.

We must allow children to go 'off-piste', and we must trust them.

Forget the league tables and the targets, and let's break free of the shackles of a narrow curriculum - it's time to focus on the commitment and the talent of the people who touch our children's lives.

But we can't leave it all to the teachers. People from all walks of life can make a contribution.

Let's have more trips, visits and outings, more time in theatres, concert halls and museums, and let's get them out into the open air, tramping the hills . . . all this should be an integral part of their education, a right of every child - not an extra. It will pay dividends in the end.

What we absolutely do NOT need is to be closing down our libraries, cutting down our youth services and our provisions for special needs . . .

Let's give children the time to dream, to listen and to learn.

Too many of us, and too many children, are disengaged and alienated.

I shall continue to speak up for the rights of children as best I can.

"I hope you understand the enormity of my fury."

"One day we will apologise for Yarls Wood, and for the bureaucracy of neglect."

Very well said, Michael. 

..................................

One day we, the English - not the Scots or the Welsh, since they don't have them - will apologise for SATs, for league tables, for bureaucratising and micro-managing teaching and learning, for national 'strategies', for the narrowing of the curriculum, for depriving children of their right to learn in a stimulating and creative environment - learning at their own pace, pursuing their own interests and passions, finding their own voices, developing all their intelligences, developing the habit of joyful lifelong learning.

How many of us have continued to speak up for the rights of children, in spite of the pressures to ignore them, in spite of the pressures to return to Gradgrindism? How many  have kept their heads down, for fear of government agents and inspectors, for fear for their futures in their careers and in education? How many have been bullied and cajoled into silence, and how many have been converted willingly into the education Newspeak, and the language of attainment, SATs, value added, strategies, NLS, NNS, targets, payment by results, monitoring, challenge and all the rest?



How many parents and how many paid professionals have even a half of Michael Morpurgo's vision for children, and even a tenth of his determination to stand up for children's rights?

How many need to hang their heads in shame?
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Layer 261 . . . Return to Bankers, Reform, Progressive Solutions and Obama's Democrats

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There are lots of things to catch up on this week, and three good pieces in the Guardian today.

Simon Jenkins wrote another superb column -

The bankers lied. And Darling, a mere puppet on their string, knows it

Britain has paid a horrific price for allowing the City to dictate credit policy. Yet there is no inquiry, no questioning, only silence

Still no inquiry. Still no answers.

The lack of accountability, the sheer lack of curiosity from the political community, is amazing.

 Advised by bankers, surrounded by bankers, obsessed with bankers, Darling paid.

I would like to know why. Ask those involved and they go wide-eyed and mutter "Armageddon", rather like Tony Blair explaining the Iraq invasion. To these people, not letting banks fail was not an option but a creed. They cannot explain what is "wrong" with taking hold of a reckless bank in trouble, guaranteeing its deposits (and cash machines) and continuing to lend against a Treasury guarantee, while dumping the casino activities into administration. Shareholders lose out, but that's capitalism. Talk of bank doors closing is rubbish.

So why were RBS and Lloyds/HBOS not fully nationalised, rather than given unconditional largesse?

An Economist headline put it pithily: "Banks fine: pity about the customers."

Darling did not even require banks to curb their extraordinary bonuses, even when they consumed a large share of reported losses. The American financier, Warren Buffett, famously protested that banks were "being run for their employees… with lucrative paydays that enriched people who are not particularly intelligent and add little value". Since he claims to own them, Darling might at least explain why he was further enriching them at public expense.

At a time when consumer demand was collapsing, the government found itself unable to respond with more VAT cuts, pensions bonuses, higher social security and more public projects, in other words a classical Keynesian answer to a slump.

That is what Germany and many far eastern countries did, with benefits rises, tax holidays and consumer scrappage schemes. The British government did the opposite.

Why did Darling not let HBOS or Lloyds fail, merely guaranteeing their deposits? Alternatively, why did he not nationalise and split up the ailing banks in October 2008? Again, if they really were too big to fail, as they alleged, why has he not made them emphatically smaller, so when they fail next time they do not drag the economy down with them?

Gillian Tett's book on the psychology of credit greed, Fool's Gold, shows the corrupting effect of unfettered derivatives trading on the whole financial system. Darling has done nothing to mitigate that effect. The world is alive with talk of curbs on bonuses, hedge funds, short trading, proprietary dealing and transaction taxes. There is talk of stress tests, living wills and higher reserve ratios. In almost all these arguments, Labour ministers are on the side of unregulated banking and against further controls. They are the wildest of free-marketeers. Brown and Darling have gone native and become puppets on a banker's string.

Britain has paid, and will go on paying, a horrific price for this government allowing bankers to dictate credit policy after 2008. To avoid ministers suffering the ideological odium of proper nationalisation (as opposing to bailing-out), Britain is being forced to lose jobs, firms, infrastructure, prosperity and the happiness it brings.

Too big to fail has taken a savage toll on the economy. If it was worth it, I would like to see the account. If not, someone should pay. Yet because the policy was backed by all three main parties, there is no questioning, no inquiry. All is silence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/banks-lied-darling-puppet-city
..............................................................

Mehdi Hasan wrote this:

It's defeatist nonsense to talk of a crisis of leftwing thinking

Progressives have been vindicated. The public are far ahead, and to the left, of government on the reforms we need

The left never seems to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Social-democratic political parties across the west are in danger of allowing the financial crisis to "go to waste". Instead of seizing this once-in-a-lifetime chance to promote a radical, progressive and even populist political and economic agenda, much of the left has retreated into a familiar and introspective comfort zone, in which navel-gazing and self-flagellation become substitutes for action.

Eighteen months on, few, if any, of the leading neoliberal ideologues have recanted their belief in the sort of market fundamentalism that unleashed the worst financial crisis in human history.

The irony is that leftist analyses, for example, of the fragility of financial markets and the corrosive effects of inequality, have been vindicated by events. Never before in living memory have such large swathes of public and expert opinion endorsed policies and positions long advanced by the progressive end of the political spectrum. The public is to the left not simply of New Labour, but the political and media classes as a whole.

The reality is that the public are far ahead, and to the left, of the government on financial and economic reform. Polling by YouGov in February, for example, revealed that 76% of those surveyed wanted the government to introduce a law to cap bonus payments; 51% said they backed the so-called Robin Hood tax, or Tobin tax, on financial transactions; and 68% said they supported rules to split retail and investment banking. The latter view is backed by the Trotskyist governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and the former by "Red" Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority.

Then there is the role of the state. The right could offer no real alternative to the de facto nationalisation of the banks in 2008 – and the late Michael Foot went to his grave having seen a key section of his 1983 "suicide note" manifesto implemented by a (New) Labour government. But the hankering for state ownership of the so-called commanding heights of the economy is not restricted to the financial sector. Polls show voters in favour of the renationalisation of electricity, gas, water, the railways and the telecommunications industry.

In fact, throughout the Thatcher era, more people voted for high-spending, tax-raising parties than voted for Thatcher. Despite three decades of tacking to the right, under Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, the public has remained rather collectivist in its attitudes. Happily, recent events have only served to entrench this British mindset – and Labour's belated semi-conversion to a populist, Keynesian social democracy surely explains the narrowing of the Tory lead since the new year.

To talk therefore of a crisis of leftwing thinking is defeatist nonsense. It is the market-worshipping right that should be in crisis. But there is a serious question as to whether, after a decade-long Faustian pact with the City, Labour, as it is currently constituted, is capable of delivering the radical, progressive agenda voters crave.

The left should be much more confident, triumphalist even; for this is a progressive moment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/defeatist-nonsense-leftwing-thinking
.............................................................

Michael Tomasky wrote this very depressing piece about the state of the nation in the USA:

A disgrace for the Democrats

Obama's congressmen will sabotage the health bill to keep their seats. It is stomach-churning

The players in this drama are participating in the destruction of their own party. They know this. And they persist.

They live in fear of being tarred by a future Republican opponent of having abetted the march of socialism. So they voted no on the most important piece of social legislation that body has had before it in probably 40 years.

Living in mortal fear that they might lose their seats. But are they thinking about how to fix the bloated mess that is American healthcare, or serve their uninsured and underinsured constituents? Maybe in private, but certainly not in public.

Disgraceful. Virtually all of them have tens of thousands, or sometimes more than 100,000, adult constituents with no private insurance. If they're not in Washington to do something about that, then what are they there to do? Please don't answer that question.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/11/disgrace-democrats-sabotage-health-bill.

Layer 228 . . . Life Begins At . . .

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Remember when people used to talk about life beginning at 40? Channel 4 are currently running a series of programmes called Life Begins at 60.

I guess the meaning of this expression used to be that after passing the age of 40 people usually had more confidence, more money, more opportunities for self-expression and enjoyment, etc. Child rearing used to be pretty much over by that age, and more freedom and autonomy were potentially on offer. Even if you were still responsible for kids, they were normally past the stage of needing constant attention and supervision by the time you reached 40.

Of course life could still be wonderful before the age of 40, but as a young(ish) adult you were still in many ways a work in progress, and not fully formed. Becoming a mature human being, and possibly at one with yourself and the world - self-actualised as it were - was something to look forward to, and a thing to appreciate when you got there.

With the passing of the decades and the Americanisation of our society, people tend to work harder, commute further, work longer hours and become more exhausted. These days many people no longer feel in control of their lives, as they career ever-onward with their careers and their busy, busy existences, getting and spending money, trying to keep their heads above water.

For many people these days a new life can begin at 60(ish), in the sense that post-retirement they can finally get out of the rat race and start to fully enjoy their lives. Not having to spend time doing zillions of things you'd much rather not be doing, you can finally focus on the things that really matter, whatever they may be. Even for those who love their work, their profession and their careers, there can be a huge benefit in starting to live differently, away from a lifetime of duties and responsibilities.

I mentioned in Layer 226 Jeff Koons's remark, “We should follow our interests and focus on them. There's nothing else you can do in life.” Which is all very well, but being a committed professional, or just someone who's trying earn money so that their family can live well, may well mean that many other interests have to fall by the wayside. Post-retirement, people really can follow their true interests, whether or not they're able to make money from them.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/11/layer-226-thick-of-it-game-of-politics.html

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How much money is enough?
By Robert Skidelsky

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/22/maynard-keynes-wealth-economics

In 1930, Keynes predicted that by 2030, we'd be working a 15-hour week. But he underestimated our appetite for wealth

The economic downturn has produced an explosion of popular anger against bankers' "greed" and their "obscene" bonuses. This has accompanied a wider critique of "growthmanship" – the pursuit of economic growth or the accumulation of wealth at all costs, regardless of the damage it may do to the earth's environment or to shared values.

John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue in 1930, in his little essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". Keynes predicted that in 100 years – that is, by 2030 – growth in the developed world would, in effect, have stopped, because people would "have enough" to lead the "good life." Hours of paid work would fall to three a day – a 15-hour week. Human beings would be more like the "lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin."

Keynes's prediction rested on the assumption that, with a 2% annual increase in capital, a 1% increase in productivity, and a stable population, average standards of living would rise eight times on average. This enables us to work out how much Keynes thought was "enough." GDP per head in the United Kingdom in the late 1920s (before the 1929 crash) was roughly £5,200 ($8,700) in today's value. Accordingly, he estimated that a GDP per capita of roughly £40,000 ($66,000) would be "enough" for humans to turn their attention to more agreeable things.

It is not clear why Keynes thought eight times the average British national income per head would be "enough." Most likely he took as his standard of sufficiency the bourgeois rentier income of his day, which was about 10 times that of the average worker.

Eighty years on, the developed world has approached Keynes's goal. In 2007 (ie, pre-crash), the IMF reported that average GDP per head in the United States stood at $47,000, and at $46,000 in the UK. In other words, the UK has had a five-fold increase in living standards since 1930.

It is likely that Keynes's "target" of $66,000 will be achieved for most western countries by 2030.

But it is equally unlikely that this achievement will end the insatiable hunt for more money. Let's assume, cautiously, that we are two-thirds of the way towards Keynes's target. We might therefore have expected hours of work to have fallen by about two-thirds. In fact they have fallen by only one-third – and have stopped falling since the 1980s.

This makes it highly improbable that we will reach the three-hour working day by 2030. It is also unlikely that growth will stop – unless nature itself calls a halt. People will continue to trade leisure for higher incomes.
Keynes underestimated the weight of “relative” needs, especially as societies got richer, and, of course, the power of advertising to create new wants, and thus induce people to work in order to earn the money to satisfy them. As long as consumption is conspicuous and competitive, there will continue to be fresh reasons to work.

Keynes did not entirely ignore the social character of work. "It will remain reasonable," he wrote, "to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself." The wealthy had a duty to help the poor.

Keynes did not really confront the problem of what most people would do when they no longer needed to work. He writes: "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional economy." But, since most of the rich – "those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties" have "failed disastrously" to live the "good life," why should those who are currently poor do any better?

Here I think Keynes comes closest to answering the question of why his "enough" will not, in fact, be enough. The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts.

Finding the means to nourish the fading "associations or duties or ties" that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world, and it is looming for the billions who have just stepped on to the growth ladder. George Orwell put it well: "All progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached."

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There are several interesting responses to this on the Guardian's CiF, including,

gloriana

I would love an explanation from Dr Skidelsky -- or anyone else -- of the apparently insatiable need of the rich to acquire more and more wealth. What human being, what family even, needs billions of dollars or pounds to live a good, comfortable, secure, even luxurious life? There seems to be something which impels millionaires and billionaires to go on adding to their fortunes ad infinitum -- or perhaps I should say ad nauseam -- regardless of how much actual use it can be to them.
This does not arise from envy on my part -- at nearly 80 I have enough money for my needs and don't want any more. I am just intensely curious and desirous of understanding this strange phenomenon.

princesschipchops

I know quite a few people earning what I consider large amounts of money. None of them are particularly happy but they are all considerably happier than the people I know who are living on paltry benefits and being treated like criminals by the DWP.

The happiest I know (not a scientific survey obviously) are those who have medium or even low - but not appallingly low - incomes and time to spend on family and friends.

As someone who has been forced out of the rat race by illness I know when I re join it it will be on a part time basis and hopefully doing something that I enjoy.

We only have one life. Unfortunately those struggling to earn more and more and more and voting to keep more and more of that wealth all to themselves are not only ruining their own lives - they are messing it up for the rest of us.

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Layer 107 Shock and Awe, and the Shock Doctrine

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The ITN reporter actually used the phrase, when reporting on the continuing Israeli air attacks on Gaza this morning - “shock and awe”. Blasting the shit out of Baghdad using ‘shock and awe’ tactics was assumed to be a good thing, We’re therefore encouraged to believe that the people of Gaza had it coming to them. 240 targets were said to have been hit in the first hour of ‘operations’, which have now been going on for four days.

By this morning more than 300 people were said to have died, with more than 1,000 seriously injured. Mortuaries are filled and hospitals unable to cope, given the shortage of drugs and equipment brought about by the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which has been turned into what is essentially a massive prison camp.

The people of Gaza clearly made the ‘wrong’ choice when they voted Hamas into power, to be their government, and they must continue to suffer the consequences . . .

The deputy Israeli ambassador to Britain was on R4 Today, speaking about the situation, in a voice whose tone and delivery were bordering on hysterical, clearly in the grip of a shedload of destructive emotions.

Yesterday’s Observer reported Gordon Brown as expressing “deep concern”. He apparently said the only way to reach a lasting solution was through peaceful means, no doubt recalling events in Northern Ireland.

"I understand the Israeli government's sense of obligation to its population. Israel needs to meet its humanitarian obligations, act in a way to further the long-term vision of a two-state solution, and do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties," he said.

In other words, Israel is not meeting its humanitarian obligations, is not acting in a way to further long-term solutions, and is not trying to avoid civilian casualties.

Our Foreign Secretary has at least condemned the Israeli action on the grounds that it’s disproportionate and it will fuel Palestinian militancy. But disproportionality is what ‘shock and awe’ is all about. And perpetual war is what keeps American funds flowing into Israel.

In order to remain financially and politically viable, and remain in power, the Israeli hawks need to maintain the status quo whereby their people are perceived to be seriously threatened by Hamas, amongst others, and require political leaders who are prepared to use shock and awe tactics, and so on.

The Guardian editorial , meanwhile, says that this carnage is being inflicted on Gaza “in reply to hundreds of rockets from Hamas militants which have killed one Israeli in six months”.

The editorial ends by saying, “Shock and awe, Israeli-style, have done nothing more than paralyse the very processes which both Israelis and Palestinians need in order to survive in peace”.

Precisely. That’s what it’s meant to do.

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The Shock Doctrine

I’ve now read the first six chapters of Naomi Klein’s masterpiece, and I’m awe-struck by her ability to write such a well-researched narrative that puts so much of the history of the world since the sixties into proper perspective.

I thought I was reasonably well-informed, and had a pretty in-depth knowledge about Friedmanite (‘Chicago-School’) economics, CIA involvement in the military juntas that crushed democracy in places like Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Indonesia, and the spread of ‘globalisation’, but clearly I didn’t understand the half of it.

Her introductory chapter is called “Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World”, and this is clearly what went on, thanks to tens of millions of US dollars being channelled through the CIA in order to subvert and overthrow, in the first instance, democratically elected governments in South America and Indonesia that were successfully implementing economic and social policies that benefitted their people but displeased the US government and US corporations with huge financial interests in the region.

As far as the CIA were concerned, they were fighting the spread of socialism and communism, ‘by whatever means necessary’.

Also in this chapter Klein describes the way in which big business saw the New Orleans disaster as “an exciting business opportunity”- since the shock of what had happened enabled the authorities to replace huge areas of social housing with middle class apartment blocks, and enabled the business community to cash in on huge construction projects, including rebuilding and renovating schools, business premises, public buildings, etc.

“One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hypermobile global economy.”

Three quotes from the people of New Orleans:

“I don’t see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn’t have died.”

(Levees had not been repaired and upgraded. There weren’t enough evacuation buses.)

“What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn’t an opportunity. It’s a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?”

“No, they’re not blind, they’re evil. They see just fine.”

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Evil seems a pretty good description.

“In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back on line, the auctioning off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union’s contract had been shredded, and its 4,700 members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers had been rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.”

“I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism’.”

“Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending, and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a “Chicago School” revolution, since so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago. Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that “facilitate the adjustment”. He coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic “shock treatment”. In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programmes, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy”, has been the method of choice.

Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments; these were performed in the regime’s many torture cells, inflicted on the writhing bodies of those deemed most likely to stand in the way of the capitalist transformation.

Exactly thirty years after these distinct forms of shock descended on Chile, the formula re-emerged, with far greater violence, in Iraq. First came the war, designed, according to the authors of the Shock and Awe military doctrine, to “control the adversary’s will, perceptions, and understanding and literally make an adversary impotent to act or react”. Next came the radical economic shock therapy, imposed, while the country was still in flames, by the US chief envoy, L. Paul Bremer - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. . . . When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical.”

September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the US version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disaster to advance.

It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

The Falklands War in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher in the UK: the disorder and nationalist excitement resulting from the war allowed her to use tremendous force to crush the striking coal miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a Western democracy.

When the September 11 attacks hit, the White House was packed with Friedman’s disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed . . . seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the “War on Terror” but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that breathed new life into the faltering US economy.

The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the [disaster capitalism] complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state - in effect, to privatise the government.

To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush administration outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government - from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and “data-mining” information on all of us.

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More on interrogation techniques in the next blog.

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"What of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of over-zealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism - almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism."

*

"This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story - that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the free market - better understood as the rise of corporatism - was written in shocks."

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“The bankers responsible must be held to account.”

Will Hutton was in good form, writing in yesterday’s Observer:

Could there be a greater corporate disaster in British history than the humbling of the Royal Bank of Scotland? Without £20bn of taxpayer support, the bank, with assets of £1.7 trillion, more than Britain's GDP, would now be bankrupt. Its mutation from bank to de facto giant hedge fund, cheerleader for casino capitalism with a portfolio of £500bn in derivatives and £100bn of takeovers in its wake, perfectly sums up our times.

The financial wreckage it has induced explains why the wider economy is in such trouble. There were many other asinine banks, but RBS was leader of the pack. News that it had lent the hedge funds of the now disgraced American fraudster Bernie Madoff £400m with insufficient due diligence was symptomatic of the failure of every aspect of RBS's corporate strategy.

Sir Fred Goodwin, the now deposed CEO, and his team should be asked hard questions by both shareholders and the police. So should the outgoing management at sister Scottish bank HBOS, whose incompetence rivals Goodwin's. The former RBS chief has rightly been dubbed the world's worst banker by Slate magazine's Daniel Gross.

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Labour's philosophy in favour of government activism, never wholly abandoned, was right for new times. It could not be clearer that markets were inefficient, made horrendous mistakes and needed governments; the philosophy that argued otherwise was bust. The public noticed and Labour's opinion poll ratings climbed out of the abyss.

The criticism of Brown and Darling should be not that they are Keynesian, it is that they are not radically Keynesian enough. They only understood the severity of the crisis too late, disbelieving that markets could make such enormous mistakes. They were too slow to nationalise Northern Rock. They should have introduced the package of schemes to make lending less risky not next month but last spring, as I and others argued. They have allowed the governor of the Bank of England to be too conservative and restrictive on the terms the Bank supplies cash. They have not urged police investigations into senior bankers, so vital for our collective sense that justice is being done, nor quickly introduced the tougher regulatory regime for which many seasoned bankers (privately) beg. They do not propose root-and-branch reform of the City. The terms of the bank rescue plan were far too penal. As a result, Britain is much less well placed than it should be.

If the government moves to radical Keynesianism - reconstructing and restructuring the financial system - it is possible that it might avert the need for [printing] money. It needs to develop policies that will assure us all that capitalism will be arranged more fairly in future. That would be crucial to lifting depressed expectations. There are many civil servants and senior financiers who are desperate that we are still in mainstream Keynesianism, however well-intentioned and even aggressive it is. This is a time for outside-the-box thinking.

For in one respect, the arguments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury are right. People everywhere are taking stock. The last decade and its values have ended in disaster, in potential depression. Everybody knows that we cannot go back. The bankers responsible must be held to account. Capitalism has to be done differently, both here and abroad. It has to be fairer. It has to comprehend that enterprise is a collective as much as an individual endeavour. It cannot just be based on "fairy money". Recovery will require radical Keynesianism. It also needs a moral vision.
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Layer 85 The Class Divide, The State We’re In, and the Democratic Crunch

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Radio 4 - Today

"New research published by Downing Street suggests that Labour policies may be narrowing Britain's class divide. The study, from academics at Bristol University and the London School of Economics, finds that family background appears to have less influence on educational attainment than it once did. Shadow work and pensions secretary Chris Grayling discusses the report with Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne. "

So how, exactly, are these ‘policies’ narrowing the ‘class divide’? Here we go again - educational attainment - GCSEs and SATs. The conflation of academic attainment and social mobility? That must be it. Such a pity the Beeb puts such rubbish on its website.

Messrs Grayling and Byrne, aided and abetted by the man from Today, waffled on about whether there’s now a less well-defined correlation between family background and doing well in tests and exams, all of them unquestioningly going along with the ‘common sense’ assumption that academic success is the key determiner of success in life - meaning material success, of course.

So who really believes that child poverty (and its related afflictions - stress, ill-health, etc,) isn’t the key issue when it comes to doing well in school, by whatever measures we might use, and also doing well in life?

Well then, enough of this nonsense and let us focus on something more worthy of attention. Which is - why do these discussions NEVER consider the real factors that determine whether someone will live an authentic, creative and worthwhile life - these factors being the extent to which young people:

1) Become life-long learners who enjoy learning for its own sake
2) Are creative and imaginative
3) Are high in social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.
4) Have high self-confidence and self-esteem.

Assuming that they move on from school possessing high levels of the above then they will always have the option of doing further studies, either part-time or full-time, and moving up the academic ladder towards whatever qualifications they need to pursue their ambitions.
Without these qualities and achievements then it won’t matter that they have 5 A-C grades, or whatever - they will never achieve self-actualisation or achieve fulfillment, or indeed reach their full potential.

So why don’t these pundits address the real issues in education and the development of human potential? Who bothers to track how well schools and pupils are progressing in these four key areas?

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Failure to address the real issues in the economy and world-wide financial systems have put us in the current crisis, and as I’ve been saying, Will Hutton’s masterwork, The State We’re In, set out all the real issues back in the mid-90’s. It’s pathetic and shameful that New Labour has failed to address any of them, being totally sucked into the neo-conservative ideology and mindset.

In last weekend’s Observer Mr Hutton posted his usual excellent column, focusing on the need to pursue ‘real’ Keynesian policies in order to deal with the crisis and the recession.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/economics-economy-john-keynes

“The great economist is back in fashion, but it will be a disaster if his brilliant theories are now misapplied.

For Keynes, the interaction of the financial system with the real economy is capitalism's existential problem.

The job of finance is to recycle savings back into investment and so sustain overall levels of demand, production and employment at a balanced rate.

Intervention in the financial markets - regulatory, institutional, via monetary policy and in collaboration with other governments - is vital. The socialisation of the financial system may, paradoxically, be an imperative to save capitalism. Contra-cyclical government borrowing in recessions may be helpful. But the big game is to do everything you can to stimulate private sector credit flows.

Keynes would be completely unsurprised by today's events; he would have spent the previous decade warning of the existential danger posed by the mania for financial deregulation.
Keynes was the economist who put it all together, the liberal who understood why free [deregulated] finance is capitalism's greatest enemy.

The State We're In was my attempt to devise a Keynesianism for our own times. I will stand by the heart of the book - deregulate financial markets and create a financial system that dominates business at your peril - to my last. But there was no constituency for reform 10 years ago. Keynesians of my ilk were seen as irrelevant and wrong.

But now, with Keynes back in fashion, if we don't do Keynesianism right, we risk a very nasty recession indeed.

There are only weeks left before the downward vortex becomes irretrievably deep.

These are very scary times. Let’s hope someone in government is finally paying attention to Mr Hutton.

More quotes from The State We’re In to follow.

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Tomorrow’s D-Day for Barak Obama. The latest news bulletin says he has a lead of between 8 and 11 points. Let’s hope all goes well.

His grandmother died today.
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“This is not just an economic crisis, it is a crisis of democracy”, say Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford in last Saturday’s Guardian.

“New Labour thrived on good times and bull markets. The culture of easy credit and consumerism disguised its evasions of class and power. Now the markets are in freefall, and its ideological failings are brutally exposed. In the manors and town houses of the super-rich those who have brought about the calamity harbour their wealth. They are untouchable and unaccountable. Their tax havens are sacrosanct. Corfu reveals how our political elites, seduced by their opulence and power, do business with them. This is not just an economic crisis, it is a crisis of democracy.

Collective political action and the power of citizenship have been traded in for the ownership society.

The stakes are high. Who will pay for this recession - capital or labour? The Labour party must reinvent itself for this battle.

There are no easy solutions, but the goal is simple: a fundamental transfer of wealth and power back to the people. This will help stop the deflationary spiral and lay the foundations for a more just, sustainable and equal society in the future.

We need urgent action to address the housing crisis, which is replicating that in banking.
This is market failure on a grand scale.

The state must step in with an emergency public-sector housebuilding strategy, and if necessary, take a stake in some housebuilders to revive the sector. Local government must be re-empowered to fill the space vacated by the private sector.

The relationship between market and state is being redrawn. Nowhere is this more needed than in housing. This is where the battle lines are being drawn up. The left must create a democratic and accountable state capable of strategic intervention in the domestic economy and creating global alliances. A new settlement means a progressive tax system, a restructured financial economy and a Green New Deal. Ahead lie the perils of global warming and peak oil. But now let us give homes to people, and with them the hope of a better life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/01/labour-housing
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On a lighter note, I had another look at last week’s episode of Brand’s Ponderland. You must try to catch it on the C4 website before Thursday. Hilarious.

Also good for a chuckle - Martin Kelner’s column on the back of the Guardian’s sport section: “Even wrestling honeys can't stir my libido”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/03/1
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Layer 7 A Long Strange Trip To The Buffers

I’m glad I managed to nip into Italy this year to visit Venice whist Berlusconi was out of power, as it’s looking likely that he’ll be back as president quite soon. Maybe everyone in Europe and elsewhere who regard themselves as progressive, liberal or left-wing should boycott Italy whenever it elects a raving neo-fascist to be its leader. That’s the least we could do by way of protest and to show solidarity with those in Italy who oppose the old bastard.

It seems he recently told a woman who was heckling him about poverty that she should have married a millionaire. He’s also on record as saying that women on the left are all ugly.

There’s an interesting line of enquiry here about good-looking women, and whether they do indeed tend support the rich and famous and fascistic. And an even more interesting issue about why the poor, the downtrodden, the sick and the unemployed often vote for people like Berlusconi, Thatcher, Major, Bush, etc.

It’s often thought that they vote for conservatives, neo-fascists and fat cats out of ignorance and stupidity, but such voters are not all ignorant and stupid. They are, however, victims of the power of a national media and a hegemony that blindly accepts that neo-conservative and right-wing political and economic theories are demonstrably correct, and that the world’s economy ought to be run for the benefit of short-term profit, capitalists, bankers and shareholders.

The poor who vote for parties of the right may well do so because they’re merely brainwashed and convinced that capitalism and its adherents are more likely to run the national and world economy better than the Left, and as such they’re more likely to do better themselves from ‘trickle-down’ - the crumbs that fall from the tables of the wealthy.

Is this not the way it works in the shires and the rural areas which are traditionally Tory: farm workers vote for conservatives because the interests of the farmers and agribusiness are deemed to be their own interests?

Where this falls down, of course, is the supposition that progressive governments are unwilling or unable to manage the economy, including the rural economy, as well as the Right; that they inevitably tax the rich and damage profitability. There’s also the fallacy that poor people do better by doffing the cap to their wealthy masters than they do from progressive tax and welfare policies, and higher investment in well-run public services such as health, housing and education.

The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs was back on Thought For Today this morning talking about how our economy’s pursuit of short-term profit is destroying economic stability and damaging our long-term interests. This is indeed a spiritual issue. I really like this CR. He’s always struck me as a very wise and spiritual leader. I remember him years ago on TFT quoting the old adage that education, more than wealth or power, is the key to human dignity.

The neo-conservative economic model that’s ruled and raped the world economy for so many years has now hit the buffers and everyone’s crapping themselves that the ‘credit-crunch’ is the beginning of a world economic crash. Even the fattest of the fat cats is yowling for government interference and bail out. Everybody fears banks falling like dominos. It’s easy enough to say ‘well fuck them’ but it’s actually the less than fat cats that will be hit the hardest by economic chaos and instability.

There’s good sense in government interference, and there always was. The problem has been that governments in the UK and the USA haven’t interfered enough - that they’ve given the City and Wall Street and the money markets free-reign and largely left unregulated their short-term greed and financial stupidity.

Germany and France by contrast have very sensibly maintained a properly balanced and regulated system and seem to still have a social-democratic concern for making capitalism responsible and effective and operating in their national interests - in the interests of their countries as a whole.

Professor Ulrich Beck had an excellent article in the Guardian yesterday, in which he says, “Even advocates of a global free market now detect that, after the collapse of communism, only one opponent of the free market remains, namely the unbridled free market itself. The market has shrugged off any responsibility for democracy and society in the pursuit of short-term profit maximisation”.

In this context ‘the market’ means the super rich and the financial elite, who clearly have no intention of regulating and restraining themselves and behaving responsibly towards the rest of us. They take the view that fools and their money are easily parted. As are the ignorant and ill-informed.

They have no intention of making themselves responsible in any degree for the well-being of the rest of the nation that supports them and provides them with a base for their activities. They don’t regard themselves as members of any nation. They are simply part of the world elite. They laugh at the idea of a social contract. They don’t need a base. They bank their profits ‘offshore’, and control their financial empires remotely, electronically, digitally.

This is why factories and production and call-centres are relocated to China and India. This is why oil prices are spiralling. This is why we’re seeing the beginning of food riots in many countries, and why fish sellers in places like Naples can’t afford to eat the fish they sell. Who gives a damn about the poor and the wretched of the earth? And will the poor re-elect Berlusconi tomorrow? Will the poor re-elect a Republican president in the USA later this year? Will the poor vote for Cameron and the Tories?

No-one could ever accuse any American president of being a social democrat - even the Democrats have always been on the Right of the political spectrum as we know it. Even the Kennedy’s and Roosevelts. No-one ever accused Harold MacMillan of being a closet left-winger. And yet politicians back in the post-war years all recognised the need for government controls over the economy and government investment in public services.

That was when Keynes was king and Keynesianism was the dominant economic ideology. I remember well the war taking place in universities and in government back in the Sixties and Seventies between the dominant Keynesians and the upwardly-mobile Monetarists led by Milton Friedman. Well, the monetarists won, at least in Britain and the USA, thanks to people like Thatcher and Reagan, thanks to the stupid tendency. And here we are - completely fucked. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Postscript
A guy on the radio has just described Italy’s political class as the most degenerate in Europe. Come on you Brits - we can do better than that!


Ulrich Beck: This Free-Market Farce Shows How Badly We Need The State :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/10/creditcrunch.economics

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Jack Mapange

I was delighted yesterday when I found out from listening to Front Row on Radio 4 that there’s a Malawian poet, Jack Mapange, who teaches poetry at Newcastle University. He teaches a course called Literatures of Incarceration, and he was probably banged up in prison as a radical or a dissident when I was working as a volunteer in Malawi, supposedly helping the country to ‘develop’, under the leadership of its dictatorial Life President, Hastings (Kamuzu) Banda.

At last I see a way, through Jack Mapange, of re-establishing my links with the family of my dear deceased friend John Mwale, and with Malawi. Like my friend John it seems Jack Mapange came to Britain as a political refugee. John was just an amazing human being, and all these years after his death (during a wisdom tooth removal) I still miss him badly.

Time to get on with writing my Malawi memoires.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/natpoetday/jack_mapange.shtml
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=5495