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

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

* greater fiscal freedom by member states

* a substantially enlarged European budget

* fiscal transfers from rich to poor

* protection for employment

* support for wages

* cross-European investment in sustainable industries

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

* leave the eurozone and devalue

* cessation of payments and restructuring of debt

* banks would have to be nationalised

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

* industrial policy developed, including strategies to improve productivity

*  infrastructure and environmentally sensitive investment to support equitable growth.

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

In conclusion, he says,

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

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

* http://www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/


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

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

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

Oxzen posted this comment:

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

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

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

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

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Taxi!

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

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

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

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This should have been posted yesterday.

Springwatch 7

Devon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year of the Ox

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

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

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

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

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

G20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


Dr Jonathan Sachs

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


Education

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

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

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

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

Gandhi said this about chasing targets and results:

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

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

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

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


Public Sector Workers Unite Against Blunkett!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Whitechapel

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

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

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

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