Category: Power Dynamics

Categories
Power Dynamics

Corporate Mercenaries

The LM Gang are back, this time advocating, in a new C4 documentary Britain's Trillion pound Horror Story, the privatisation of healthcare and education and downsizing of the rest of the public sector to reduce taxes, the national debt and stimulate economic growth.

Back in 1998 a post-modern intellectual associated with the former Revolutionary Communist Party, which later became Living Marxism and then just the LM Group and more recently Spiked Online, produced a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Against Nature, railing against misanthropic greens. They have taken some radical and provocative stances aimed mainly at the thinking left, those of us who are not completely brainwashed by corporate conditioning and actually want to see a more caring, sharing and, dare I say, sustainable society. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, they have argued that the socialist cause they once espoused is dead and instead they began a campaign against what they considered reactionary forces opposed to progress. To them progress was redefined as the globalisation of labour and consumer markets, rapid evolution of technology to enable constant material growth and the replacement of previous social structures such as families and close-knit communities with a shared cultural heritage with new structures based around life-style choices and special interests. The clique around Frank Füredi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Reviews of Where Have All the Intellectuals
Gone?, have morphed from extreme proponents of a worldwide Bolshevik revolution in the dying days of the modern era, to extreme advocates of postmodern neoliberal globalisation. Back in the 1970s and 80s, most on the left opposed immigration controls and welcomed multiculturalism because of a basic sense of humanitarian solidarity with the downtrodden, the perceived victims of imperialism and irrational ethnic prejudice. That was my gut instinct until the early years of the new millennium.

Yet as I try to explain in another post, modern globalisation owes its roots in 18th and 19th century European colonisation and the expansion of the United States as a world power. The left also championed women's rights, another very noble cause, which has arguably been perverted to disempower families, as wel as gay rights, which while removing stigma against natural feelings of erotic attraction towards the members of the same gender, served similar purposes in weakening traditional family units and empowering big business and the state. Thus for many years the disciples of Frank Furedi could pose on the left. When other sections of the left opposed nuclear power and later genetically modified food, the descendants of the British RCP, championed these technologies as a means of feeding the poor.

As noted elsewhere, former RCPers have become very media-savvy, but we'd be very naive if we thought they had somehow successfully inflitrated corporate media organisations in order to promote a revolution that would see the overthrow of the today's ruling elites. Rather they serve as fifth-columnists embedded in media and organisations appealing to the wishful-thinking left on behalf of a corporate elite who owe no allegiance to the ordinary people of any country.

Smart propagandists like to build on concerns about a very real problem and then differentiate themselves from other more mainstream opinion leaders to appeal to a disgruntled section of the gullible electorate. If we sum the government debt accumulated thus far and the total commitments for debt repayments, planned public expenditure, the UK public debt is forecast to reach a staggering 4.8 trillion pounds, which as the documentary pointed out could not be repaid if every house in the country were sold at current market rates. This is obviously unsustainable, indeed so obvious that even advocates of unlimited growth admit it. The documentary rightly sheds light on the huge bureaucracy within the UK's public services. Of 9 million public sector workers, only 2 million are engaged in frontline jobs as teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers etc... Instead most sit in offices administering and monitoring others. Many dependent services become self-serving as they only exist to service the administration of the public sector. For instance, an equal opportunities commission does not provide the underprivileged with new opportunities, but merely liaises with other employers and service providers to ensure their client groups are well represented. However, as they're in the communication business, they inevitably require IT, multimedia, printing, catering and transport services and their infrastructure relies on hardware technicians, builders, plumbers, joiners, mechanics and electricians. However, this huge waste of resources is not confined to te public sector. We not only have a huge rise in the third sector of NGOs, charities and not-for-profit foundations promoting this or that agenda, but large corporations, even those with an industrial base, have morphed into miniature states. For all the talk of lean manufacturing and streamlined organisation, most large private sector companies are chock-a-block with non-productive penpushers and people-managers. hile the public sector is undoubtedly inefficient, it is at least in theory accountable to taxpayers. The documentary completely missed the point, why would the government and its corporate masters subsidise non-productive people management on such a large scale? The previous NewLabour government, which ran up the largest deficit in the UK's history, can hardly be accused of not acquiescing to the needs of large transnational corporations. More important before the government began its huge spending splurge following its 2001 re-election, banks had begun lending irresponsibly to millions without stable employment or even on benefits. The UK doesn't just have a public debt, but also a huge private debt to the tune of £1.4 trillion. Most owners of typical 3 or 4 bedroom houses do not really own their homes outright, their bank or building society does. They are in most cases 6 months to a year away from eviction should they fail to honour monthly mortgage repayments. Worst still as property prices skyrocketed in the South East of England, hundreds of thousands took out interest-only mortgages, i.e. for an initial period, usually 1 to 2 years, they pay only interest on their mortgage, but after this period of grace, their monthly repayments go through the roof. Many believed in a era of unprecedented financial growth that 2 years later they would double or triple their earnings and once they were on the property ladder living the middle class dream, life would be sweet. In the end the government had to bail out the bankers, so a good deal of the huge £4.8 trillion debt is actually inherited from the private sector. I would suggest that both the state and corporate sectors wanted to stimulate consumer growth. Miraculously, as NewLabour launched Private Finance Initiatives and continued to transfer public services to private contractors, quangos continued to grow.


Expropriation

Most transfers of ownership from private to public and the from public back to private hands disempower locals and empower transnational corporations. In its early stages in a favourable resource-rich environment , a market economy can theoretically reward hard work and let entrepreneurs build communities around the provision of useful products and services. This certainly appeared to be the case in 19th century North America and even in prosperous enclaves of Western Europe. However, such a system relied on a working class willing to let their bosses profit from their labour in exchange for job security. As small companies grew larger to take advantage of economies of scale and drive industrial development, the proletariat became a distinct class whose interests clashed with those of their bosses. Before the emergence of capitalism, most workers were mere peasants tilling a small plot of land and handing a large proportion of their produce to their landlord as rent. Much of the British economy came under government ownership in the aftermath of the Second World War as much of the country's industrial infrastructure such the still important railways, coal mining, steelworks, health system could not operate effectively at a profit. The State left the profitable sections of the economy to the private sector. Indeed much had controlled by huge state interventions, not least through massive armaments contracts. Nonetheless after the austere 1940s, the 50s and 60s saw the longest period of economic and social betterment, as measured by rapidly decreasing infant mortality, the reduced incidence of poverty-related diseases (such as rickets) and full employment. Although the tertiary sector continued to grow, Britain still had a manufacturing base. Most cars, lorries and trains were still made in the UK as was most industrial machinery, coal and steel. While more and more women chose to pursue careers, most mothers of young children were happy to work as housewives. In many ways the 50s and 60s were the hey day of the modern nuclear family with its typical 2.3 children. Social services still played a relatively marginal role and Health and Safety inspectors were few and far between, hence despite apparent technological limitations before the advent of microprocessor-enabled information technology, public sector bureaucracy was a lot smaller.


Proponents of nationalisation or privatisation often use the democracy argument. Thus nationalisation makes an organisation democratically accountable, while privatisation frees an enterprise of the constraints and inefficiencies of state control and places it in the hands of private shareholders. In reality nationalisation merely transfers ownership to the state, which in turn serves the interests of its corporate backers and usually rewards former owners handsomely, while privatisation leads to a temporary injection of capital into the public coffers, but has always transferred ownership to monopolistic capitalists, thus failing to provide any real competition. We could even argue that nationalising loss-making industries did an enormous favour to venture capitalists as they could invest their compensation oversees, allowing other entrepreneurs to acquire the more profitable remnants when the government privatises again.


The post-war boom would simply not have happened without an advanced welfare state, a healthy and largely contented work force and the survival of strategic energy, transportation and manufacturing industries. Hence even capitalists, claiming to favour a free market, supported nationalisation in the mid 20th century. The Thatcherite revolution practically outsourced most major manufacturing and refocussed on non-productive media and banking, a trend that continued unabated under New Labour. The only segments of Britain's industrial base that remained almost unscathed were the multi-billion pound government-subsidised armaments industry (so-called defence), the pharmaceutical and biotech industries with some niche luxury and entertainment gadget producers. Manufacturing saw a brief comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with an influx of American, Japanese and German inward investors. However, by the early twenty-noughties factories resumed closing, replaced only by supermarkets, call centres, entertainment complexes. In 2006 Tessa Jowell promoted regional casinos as a means of job creation and urban renewal in Britain's depressed former industrial heartlands.


In 1997 I suggested to an acquaintance who worked as an advisor for the Labour Party that he'd better save up for his daughter's university education. "Nonsense", he said, "New Labour would always ensure higher education remain accessible to all". A few months later, New Labour announced the introduction of tuition fees, initially just £1000 a year, soon rising to £3000 and now, under the Con-Dem government to £9000. As a result millions of young workers will either have to accept low-paid jobs to escape repaying their loans, thus defeating the purpose of higher education, or forever be in debt. However, the true cost of higher education actually exceeds £9000 a year, but that misses the point, the whole sector is slowly but surely being primed for privatisation, relying on wealthy foreign students and failing to train the country's future generation of engineers, doctors and scientific researchers, while the relative academic value of degrees has been significantly debased. In the 1970s only 15% of school leavers went to uni, by 2010 that number is nearly 50%. Despite the Blairite mantra of education, education, education!!, class sizes have grown and student behaviour worsened leading hundreds of thousands of middle class parents, including Labour cabinet ministers, to send their offspring to private schools. When they consider the costs of a UK university degree, they might as well use their academic loan to send their offspring abroad. I suspect Indian universities will soon start offering cut-price degrees to the same disgruntled moneyed middle classes who travelled to Eastern Europe for cosmetic surgery.


The previous government pumped billions into the national health service, insisting all new hospitals be built via PFI (Private Finance Initiatives). Despite the rhetoric the NHS bureaucracy has mushroomed with billions squandered on management consultants (not doctors) and centralised IT projects, as detailed brilliantly by David Craig in his 2008 book Squandered. More disturbingly, vast sums of public money have been spent not on essential frontline healthcare, but on promoting awareness of new mental illnesses and lifestyle-related ailments ( diabetes, obesity, angina, high blood pressure etc..) hugely boosting demand for pharmaceutical products. Amazingly, the new Con-Dem government, depsite a massive debt, has committed itself to maintaining the previous administration's spending plans. In real terms public health spending has doubled since 1997, yet the nation's health patently hasn't as any gains in prosperity have been offset by culture of hedonism and a growing rich-poor gap. Any recent gains in life expectancy have more to do with improvements that occurred 30-40 years ago (i.e. your life expectancy is largely determined by your health in your 30s and 40s) than multi-million pound anti-smoking campaigns. The US probably has the world's most wasteful healthcare system with 16% of GDP devoted to public and private healthcare. This compares with 10 to 11% in France, Canada and Germany and 8.9% in Italy, 8.7% in Australia, 8.4% in the UK and just 8.1% in Japan, while life expectancy is highest in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Iceland, probably more down to diet and lifestyle than provision of drugs. The US Model is to boost public demand for healthcare services persuading more people that they need long-term medication and cosmetic surgery (not included in the above figures), creating a huge comsumer market. In my humble analysis the UK health system is being primed for privatisation in all but name. It has become such a monster as to be completely unsustainable and the corporate elite will rely on a knee-jerk reaction to reports of waste and inefficiencies to soften public opposition to the removal of universal provision of healtcare free at the point of delivery. Nadeem Waylayat of

Market Oracle

has detailed the almost inevitability of the failure of the NHS project ( see

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23744.html

), however, he seems to welcome its downfall. I hasten to add, when the NHS collapses, millions will suffer the consequences.


Martin Durkin's documentary is just the latest salvo in a war against common sense, i.e. a rational world in which education and healthcare serve the needs of taxpayers rather than those of multinational corporations and are not allowed to become unsustainable. Apparently he has the government on his side as they have now allowed the cloning of animals for human consumption and given the green light to transgenic farming and quiely announced the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Migration Myth Busting

It looks like the globalist growth lobby has been busy copying and pasting its Migration Myths all over government-sponsored Websites and many run by spurious NGOs. Hint if someone is providing information free of charge in a glossy format, it's probably not very reliable. As always first-hand fact finding goes a long way. I live in a small single room in London, am not entitled to housing benefit as I have a job and my kids do not live with me. I've visited many former council estates around Inner London and my observations on the rapid socio-ethnic transformation should surprise no-one with their feet firmly on the ground

Government Migration Myths exposed

Original source: Fear of Migrants: a Myth

Myth: Official reports are objective.
Fact: Government-commissioned reports select skewed statistics to suit their agenda.
Myth: Objective population realists suggested 98% of all new jobs go to immigrants.
Fact: As stated above, around 50% of new jobs in the UK as a whole go to immigrants. In London that percentage is bound to be significantly higher, but in the UK as a whole recent immigrants still account for fewer than 20% of the population. More important, many natives have lost their jobs and are simply not re-employed.
Myth: Immigration does not boost unemployment within the indigenous population.
Fact: Only as long as continuous economic growth can keep producing new jobs. (See next item).
Myth: Economic and population growth are good
Fact: We live on a finite planet with finite resources. The UK is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Indeed England alone is now more densely populated than the Netherlands. To sustain London's population, we need on area of land larger than the UK. The UK imports 40% of its food, most of its manufactured goods, is now a net importer of fossil fuels and exports pollution created by domestic consumption.
Myth: Unsustainable migration has not caused a housing crisis in London.
Fact: Most indigenous workers in London commute from the home counties or beyond and have been effectively priced out of London. For someone on the min wage, an average rent of £150 - £200 per week is simply not affordable. People can only afford to stay in London in acceptable accommodation on low wages if they receive housing benefit, i.e. if they are subsidised by other tax payers...
Myth: Population realists are racists:
Fact: Any peaceloving human being abhors racism, but the consequence of more unsustainable growth will be internecine warfare... The country is hugely indebted and entirely dependent on services nobody really needs.
Myth: There is a skills shortage...
Fact: Only a small minority of newcomers can offer engineering, IT and medical skills. Most offer the kind of skills that use to be very common in the UK before the demise of manufacturing and the rise of a benefits culture. Anyone can serve lattes.... provided they have sufficient food and shelter. Maybe newcomers can fake smiles better... There are 8 million Britons of working age not in employment or education. An estimated 5-6 million of these are perfectly capable of working, if motivated and trained, and coming off incapacity benefit.
Categories
Power Dynamics

You’re just a customer!!

Many of us have been so beguiled by corporate speak encroaching on everyday conversations that we have failed to notice how previous categories of people such as travellers, passengers, users, taxpayers, citizens or just plain people have morphed into customers, worthy only because of our purchasing power. Yet just 10 or 15 years ago, the word customer would have sounded creepily corporate in many everyday circumstances. Thus council taxpayers are no longer simply citizens paying their due, we have become customers. Likewise passengers on public transit systems are no longer human beings, but only valued as revenue-yielding customers or subjects.

Instead of saying "Please let other passengers off the train before boarding", staff are trained to announce "Please let customers disembark from the train before boarding". However, passengers and customers are not the same. At least in theory most passengers these days are technically fare-paying customers, but the term's meaning has now been extended to include anyone with whom a service provider has to deal, i.e. the client in the client-server system, a mere consumer of services whether or not the former has any choice over the matter or any commercial transaction is involed. When I recently had my passort renewed, I was not referred to as a citizen or as a British subject, but as a, wait for it, customer. Housing associations and loal authortities refer to recipients of housing benefits as customers because they receive a service. Even former convicts on probation are customers. A few years ago mental health service users were known as clients, but have since become customers. The term has become devalued to such an extent, we might as well just say subjects.

The term customer defines a business relationship. If I buy a laptop from a computer retailer, I am indeed a customer. They rely on my payment to stay afloat financially, purchase goods from manufacturers, pay bills and staff. What's more if I am not satisfied with the product sold or the retailers' service, I can take my custom elsewhere. The notion of a customer makes sense in a free market when you have choice. However, if I use a computer in a public library, I am not a customer of the computer supplier, the library is and if I pay taxes and participate in the administration of the local council, I might in a very indirect way be a customer, but in reality powerless to affect the purchasing decisions of large organisations who can usually only source hardware from a select set of preferred suppliers. As a citizen I might use my vote to support a party wishing to expand the provision of computing facilities in local libraries and I might campaign to urge the council to switch to a more cost-effective supplier or adopt open-source software to save money, but if I called their supplier as a private citizen I would not be treated as a customer, but as a disgruntled powerless member of the public. Their only concern would be public relations.

Likewise if I need to travel within Central London, I have a limited set of practical choices. Forget cars, as the average speed of vehicular traffic is down to around 10 mph and even then you would need to contend with congestion charges and parking fees. Buses are often slow, unreliable and overcrowded. The best choices for rapid transit are bicycle, if you're fit and have somewhere safe to lock it up at your destination, moped, usually a larger investment with parking restrictions in a busy city, or tube. Neither bicycle nor moped are ideal if it's raining or you need to carry luggage or any other bulky objects such as a laptop. So when you travel from say Kings Cross to White City, and have a choice of braving chaotic pedestrian and vehicular traffic, sweating in a bus for over an hour or taking 15 minute tube journey, the tube is the only viable choice. You cannot take your custom elsewhere as alternatives simply do not offer a comparable service. London's rapid transit network would never have seen the light of day without significant public sector investment, and while it may have been semi-privatised, it operates as a monopoly and relies on huge subsidies. Your fares simply subsidise the service and restrict access to those prepared to pay or entitled to special passes. You are just a fee-paying passenger expected to endure chronic overcrowding in peak hours.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Keynsian Dream is Over

None of the major parties in the UK have had the courage to tell the electorate the unpalatable truth. They act as mere middle managers or public relations officers, somewhere between their masters in global banking, energy cartels and military-industrial establishment and the hundreds of thousands of minion bureaucrats in the UK`s non-productive public and private sector institutions. It takes relatively little research to expose their presumed facts and figures. Indeed what should surprise us is not their apparent disagreements on issues such as Britain`s adoption of the Euro or immigration controls, but their agreement on the continued need for economic growth by injecting more virtual cash into an economy that has long ceased to produce more than a small fraction of what it consumes.

Over the last 13 years Britain has experienced its biggest collective spending spree in history. We may look back nostalgically at the monuments and urban infrastructure of Victorian Britain, erected over a period of some 70 years when the country`s industry not only led the world, but could exploit the resources of a huge empire. Yet the UK`s national debt didn`t really figure until the great depression of the late 1920s. In the aftermath of the seconds world war, the US had amassed such a large surplus it could easily bail out much of Western Europe to fuel growth and give rise to a new age of mass consumerism. It may seem ironic, but without huge government intervention through fiscal stimulus packages, direct subsidies, nationalisation and social welfare, mass consumerism would never have spread beyond the affluent upper middle classes.

Unlike previous splurges, Britain has gained little in lasting infrastructure. We have literally squandered 1.3 trillion of the country`s personal debt on holidays in the sun, property trading and 60" plasma TV screens. Most recent extensions to the country`s rail and rapid transit network were planned back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, yet owing demographic growth in the Southeast of England and increased commuting as people are forced to buy houses further and further away from their place of work, road and rail networks are bursting at their seams. To accommodate a rising population and smaller households, property developers have littered the countryside with suburban sprawl composed of compact houses designed to last 30-40 years requiring more roads, plumbing and wiring. Superficially, much of the country still has vast expanses of greenbelt, farmland and pastures. In reality it relies on natural resources from abroad to temporarily support current levels of aggregate consumption. Everything from vegetables to bottled water, electronic gadgets to coal, timber to steel, plastic utensils to fridges or cars to ships are imported to the birthplace of industrial revolution, in effect exporting pollution. Arm-chair human rights activists may bemoan the working conditions and exploitation of the Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Eastern European labourers who actually produce the goods we consume, but would they get out of bed for less than £5 an hour, let alone the derisory pay packets of the millions of virtual slaves who enable us to party like there were no tomorrow? Left-leaning Guardian-readers tend to live in a bubble, in which their non-productive service-sector earnings are exchanged for real goods labelled fair-trade, organic or environmentally-friendly and inspected by wishful-thinking corporate compliance officers.

The same government that bleats incessantly about climate change promotes economic growth and the globalisation of production. They may talk about investing in public transport, but rely on advertising revenue from automotive multinationals. The Blair years will be remembered as the final act of a 60 year experiment in mass consumerism, the age of 60" Plasma TV screens, people carriers and 4x4 off-road vehicles in suburbia, cheap Ryanair flights ferrying young Brits to stag or hen nights in Eastern Europe as well as for the commercialisation of the Internet and a national obsession with re-enactments of warfare and gangster violence. An age when absurd thought-suppressing political correctness coexists with disrespect for the uncool and widespread moral depravity, drunken binges and deregulated gambling.

Rather than champion Blair as a great democrat or human rights activist, future historians will view his fervent support for US/NATO military intervention in the context of depleting fossil fuel resources. Whether the recent consumption binge will trigger catastrophic climate change or not, sooner or later we will be confronted with the harsh reality of limits of growth on a finite planet and will need to readapt to a more humble localised existence. New Labour left future generations with a cultural vacuum, unsustainable material expectations, a huge debt and a woeful shortage of practical hands-on skills.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Metamorphosis of the Labour Party

How the Party of workers came to represent a bunch of non-productive consumers

Little divided the main political parties in the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election. They all support the supremacy of transnational corporations, the banking cartel and the Euro-American military-industrial complex. The Liberal Democrats and Conservatives may voice their theoretical opposition to some of the grandiose projects championed by New Labour such as the multi-billion pound ID card system, but they remain firmly wedded to the cause of global corporatism and, more important, relentless economic growth. Since the demise of large-scale British manufacturing, economic growth has largely been consumption-led, meaning to thrive big business needed a huge of army of happy consumers supported by a sophisticated welfare system. To generate revenue to fund imports of material goods and resources, we presumably offer services, related to banking, people management, surveillance, marketing, education and health. Every real worker with hard skills,driving the country`s high-tech sector, requiring the application of brainpower, is supplemented by a plethora of project managers, coordinators, pen-pushers and assistants. Yet even skilled service sector jobs attract a steady influx of workers trained abroad.

If anything the May 2010 general election revealed a growing geographic chasm. On the one hand New Labour receives most of its votes from inner cities with large migrant populations, and former industrial areas with large sections of the population dependent on welfare or public sector jobs. On the other the Conservatives and Liberals dominate middle England. One can travel from Penrith in the North of England to Devon without ever encroaching on Labour-held territory. Yet Labour still holds a majority of Scottish seats and Gordon Brown received 64% of the vote in his home constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, despite betraying his roots and future generations by bailing out bankers to the tune of £600 billion and supporting an oil-soaked war in Iraq. In Fife over 1 in 5 workers are employed by the council, 1 in 8 adults are on incapacity benefits, school kids are more likely than anywhere else in the UK to be diagnosed with ADHD and thousands of jobs dependent on defence contracts. As they say, "better the devil you know". In the recent Glenrothes by-election New Labour saw off a challenge from the Scottish National Party by denouncing the SNP-led council`s move to reduce subsidies on home-helps, and presumably divert such handouts to the provision of other services. New Labour thrives where people feel helpless without the guiding hand of the state or the omnipresence of friendly corporations. A loyal New Labourite shops at Tesco, buys National Lottery tickets, subscribes to Sky TV, only uses genuine Microsoft software and supports our troops fighting for freedom and democracy abroad. If state largesse faded away, people would have to get real jobs.

As late as the 1970s skilled workers, whether miners or automotive engineers, could bring the country to its knees, for within weeks it would be without power or a viable manufacturing base. Fast-forward to the early 21st century and any group attempting to exploit their collective professional bargaining power, are readily dismissed as overpaid troublemakers who can be replaced at a drop of hat, largely thanks to the atomisation of skilled professionals and the globalisation of labour markets. Instead a small elite of highly specialised and generally well-remunerated technicians are shunted around the globe, often as temporary contractors, owing little allegiance to their fellow workers or geographic community, and focussed entirely on advancing their career for personal gain. It might seem rather ironic, but the remnants of the trade union movement have steadfastly opposed all restrictions on immigration, presumably to show their solidarity with workers abroad, yet rendering settled workers powerless to take any action against their bosses. Few workers today see the fruits of their labour with their role reduced to that of teamworkers, dependent on other professionals to produce any good or service of worth. Life skills, which every family needs, have been transformed into professional specialisations. Everything from childcare to nutrition, emotional wellbeing to safety precautions or learning to entertainment has been professionalised, while such services were all once provided by one`s extended family and local community. Instead of childminders, child psychiatrists, nutritionists, health and safety inspectors, learning assistants, television sets and game consoles, we had mothers, fathers, siblings, cousins and other members of our local community. If all childminders went on strike, an unlikely scenario because they are one of the least well organised professional categories, parents would have to give up their jobs and become full-time parents. However, as so many are single-parents this would often mean no income or dependence on yet more state handouts. In the real world, it often makes little for single parents to take up an offer of employment unless they stand to earn much more than the combined cost of childcare and transport. In this context working family tax credits encourage couples on low to middle incomes to substitute parents for childminders. Yet such while incentives have benefited the middle classes, they habe been relatively unsuccessful in attracting a huge reserve of home-grown dropouts, by which I mean not just neets (not in employment, education or training), but a wider group of average intelligence who simply lack a combination of specialised skills, experience and motivation to compete in the labour market, especially when confronted with a deluge of eager newcomers, often recruited proactively because of their alleged work ethic. Modern British culture, as promoted by TV, seems to encourage wanton consumption, brand awareness and dependence more than creativity and hard work

Hence we witness the spectre of benefits claimants watching Top Gear on their 60" plasma TV screens, while their offspring indulge in virtual first-person shooting or online dating in their bedrooms, all subsidised by the country's still buoyant private service sector who in turn depend on the marketing and consumption of goods produced somewhere else. Even the most deprived neighbourhoods are replete with mobile phone and video game shops, often flanked by betting shops and pawn brokers. In a consumption-driven economy it matters little whether consumers are paid to perform a niche task in the ballooning people-management bureaucracy, or are simply paid to stay at home and raise the next generation of benefits claimants, either way they are slaves to debt and consumption, whether they owe that debt to banks or the state

New Labour`s spin doctors love to emphasise their achievements such as the national minimum wage, working family tax credits and huge injection of funds into the national health service as well as the extra 3 million jobs their policies allegedly helped create. On closer analysis the number of jobless adults of working age has actually increased from 7 to 8 million, while the official unemployment count is just 2.5 million. According to some estimates as many as five million adults of working age are perfectly capable of performing the huge range of uninspiring and menial, but very necessary jobs, now dominated by an army of recent immigrants. Yet despite millions poured into bogus employability and disability awareness training schemes, Britain`s employers still seem to prefer to well-motivated, presentable and amenable newcomers to emotionally insecure, relatively workshy and often rude homebred Brits. Of the 5.5 million jobless citizens, not officially unemployed, only a fraction have debilitating conditions that would prevent them from performing a whole range of practical and useful jobs. It may seem paradoxical, but the recent rise in the diagnosis of personality disorders, has been exploited to justify some people`s inability to compete in a labour market that relies increasingly on soft rather than hard skills. We keep hearing about alleged skills shortages in key sectors, such as health care, engineering and IT, yet such shortages are not unique to the UK. From personal experience I know talented software developers are actively headhunted. It seems ironic to work on a contract basis in London alongside developers from other European countries, only to receive a call about a contract in Germany or France because one has some magic skill unavailable locally. Recruiters will often suggest relocating for as little as 3 months. Britain`s best and brightest are often found not in old Blighty, but abroad enjoying the sun in Dubai, Australia or the US, heading up international teams in Spain, teaching English in Eastern Europe, or working remotely from their Bulgarian mountainside chalets. Sociologists explain this heightened labour mobility as a positive sign of a new era of globalisation and cultural exchange, yet cultural trends everywhere show a narrowing diversity between countries, but growing gap between the internationalised professional classes and the lumpen proletariat, the huge underclass of unskilled or in some cases de-skilled consumers

Endless economic growth is an illusion, destined to end in failure. Rather than harness technological innovation to let people work less, reduce stress and strengthen families and communities, consumption-led growth has produced an army of support workers attempting to alleviate the side effects of our over-indulgence. The Keynsian Dream is well and truly over and the next generation will have to readjust to a lower material standard of living. True progressives, those of us who want to reduce social tension and promote social harmony, should support the relocalisation of our economy. Nobody should pretend such a transition will be easy. The cuts introduced by an incoming Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition may be a bitter pill to swallow, but they will in a way soften the blow. If you rely on state handouts, you have in effect relinquished your personal freedoms. Let us return to our previous role as a proud working class, struggling to gain a fair share of the fruits of our labour.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Reality Denial

When do we let our political judgements be swayed not by a rational analysis of the facts, but by self-interest, wishful thinking, superstition or just plain irrational prejudices? Whether rapid climate change is taking place and is caused by human activity is surely a matter of scientific analysis, on which I suppose you may hold different perspectives. You may return from an unusually mild southern Greenland only to witness subzero temperatures in Madrid. Your objective analysis during a Spanish chill may sway you against the global warming hypothesis, but if you used a weather event selectively to discredit much more voluminous evidence to the contrary that would be bias. Supposing, as a mainstream newspaper pundit, I wished to prove most Iraqis supported the US/UK liberation of their country despite all the trouble, with sufficient funds I could easily arrange for a group of pro-occupation Iraqis to acquiesce to a little public relations. I could simply choose my sample in an area renowned for its support of the US/UK invaders, such as the Kurdish north. What I'm alluding to is our ability to construct a reality that matches our aspirations and prejudices by picking the facts that suit our agenda,

Some of us might like to think only others are prone to biased constructions of reality. We may accuse others of prejudice often as a rhetorical weapon against an argument we cannot empirically refute. This often follows fuzzy logic, e.g. "You claim there are too many people in London. The BNP (xenophobic British National Party) makes the same claim. The BNP is irrationally racist. So are you. Only a warped racist could believe London is overcrowded" or consider this "You claim we should take action to cope with climate change. So does the mainstream media representing big business, so you must be wrong". Well let's consider these assertions. First the portrayal many tend to exaggerate the arguments of their adversaries. A statement like "Planet Earth cannot support six billion human beings at current rates of consumption in the long term" soon becomes simplified to "We'd better start culling excess human beings now, so the rest of us can continue enjoy the same standard of living". Next comes a bold assertion about a common bête noire, an extremist grouping or demonised tyrant with whom is simply not done to sympathise. Sometimes media may have been so successful at marginalising dissident idea that the bête noire in question may actually present rational ideas, but the existence of genuine extremists and assorted nutters serves the establishment`s mind control agenda very well. Suppose a small radical Islamic sect called for the liquidation of all US millionaires.

The Problem Reaction Solution and Counterreaction

The basic difference between the infamous Italian Mafia, Camorra and Ndragata clans running protection rackets and modern states lies in their size, influence and control of the mainstream media, but the former often act as immature micro-states within states often offering many of the same services as the latter. Paying a pizzo or protection money to your local Mafia boss may seem extortion, but it's basically what we do when we pay taxes. Sure, to some extent, government money trickles back to the general populace providing many of us with jobs and redistributing wealth in an inherently unjust corporate economy. Here are just a few examples of classic problem reaction solutions:

  • We have rampant crime, therefore we need more police, more surveillance and tougher sentencing.
  • We have terrorists and political extremists in our midst, therefore we need more monitoring of people`s everyday lives and clamp down on hate speech.
  • We have unsustainable immigration, therefore we need tighter immigration controls, more police, more social workers, more new houses, more money spent on integration etc.
  • We are facing an environmental crisis, therefore we should trust our leaders to impose greater controls on our irresponsible behaviour as private citizens.

Thankfully many of us don't buy this logic. Why should we accept greater hardships because of macro-economic decisions taken by remote business leaders and politicians? All the above problems, if indeed they are problems, are created by an absurdly unsustainable and unbalanced economic system hooked on perpetual growth. Instead of asking "how should the state combat crime?", "how should the state deal with troublemakers?", "how should the state control the migration of human beings in a never-ending rat race?" or "how should the state and big business address climate change?", we should ask "Why do people turn to crime?", "Why do people resort to violence and hateful ideas?" or "Why are we facing an environmental catastrophe?". These more rational questions do not negate the existence or perception of real problems, but turn the questions raised by the mainstream media on their heads.

Nevertheless many of us react by negating the reality of the problems. A common notion on the liberal left is that "We don`t need Draconian legislation" (a conclusion I agree with) because crime has not risen recently and may have actually declined, a perception only possible if you live in a leafy suburb somewhere. Likewise we should value free speech, again a view I wholeheartedly agree with, because everyone is so tolerant and nice in these enlightened days, a perception only possible if you genuinely believe in the benefits of over twenty years of neo-liberal economics and social engineering. Next consider the conclusion that "we should not deport illegal immigrants, (and I would be loathe to trust the state to do so in anyone`s interests but their own), because we need more immigrants to boost our dynamic economy and do jobs we don`t want to do and besides this country can host tens of millions more (as long as we can continue importing cheap food)". Once again this conclusion tends to appeal to those who are doing fairly well and can afford to steer clear of the adverse side effects of unplanned economically driven migration. We see two sections of the mainstream media engaging in a phoney debate over immigration with both sides supporting the unsustainable model of perpetual growth that drives immigration in the first place. Some on the left are simply incapable of admitting that overcrowding will exacerbate the very socio-economic tensions we wish to eradicate, hiding behind a façade of cultural diversity, interethnic tolerance and international solidarity while relying on a globalised economy controlled by a small number of supranational corporations.

We see the same fuzzy thinking behind the looming environmental catastrophe, except here we see a distinct trend towards outright denial or downplaying of the evidence before us. To some extent it would be easier to argue with some left-leaning climate change deniers, if the mainstream media denied its reality. Why should we rely on former Vice President Al Gore to warn us of a pending disaster caused by human hyperactivity in large part due to his own country`s grotesque overconsumption?Yet we have let TV, Cinema and commercial Web services dominate our lives to such an extent, some of us only ever believe something when Hollywood-style edutainment movies endorse it.

The Rense Dot Com Mindset

Personally I`d treat many articles promoted by rense.com with the same degree of scepticism as I reserve for the Daily Mail, the favourite newspaper of Britain's disgruntled middle classes. They remind us of some home truths, correctly identify some social problems and then pursue their own agenda. Rense Dot Com has recently featured numerous articles challenging the notions of Peak Oil and manmade climate change, while simultaneously providing a platform for one of the US`s most vehement anti-immigration crusaders, Frosty Wooldridge. That unsustainable immigration is driven by unsustainable overconsumption does not really occur to a narrow conservative American mindset that just wishes to conserve their uniquely prosperous way of life threatened by low-paid immigrants and politicians attempting to increase fuel taxes.

The Greg Palast Mindset

I've covered the strange case of the Frank Füredi sect (RCP => LM Mag => Spiked Online) with their characteristic form of technocratic polemicism. However, much more commonly on the left we encounter an ideological refutation of environmental hard truths to support an unremitting optimism for the human progress. Such social optimists are willing to identify and expose the reactionary or unprogressive nature of today`s ruling elites. They rightly participate in the rhetorical crusade against Bush, Blair, the IMF/World Bank and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, but somehow deep down still believe in the enduring myth of Western enlightenment capturing the hearts and minds of an oppressed underdeveloped world. Many on the left view the world in terms of good causes and are thus very susceptible to the emotional arguments of mainstream pundits promoting hidden agendas. Few could pretend life was easy for Afghani women under the infamous Taliban. I certainly would not like to live in a society in which women become little more than the property of their husbands kept in ignorance and under veil, but what right do we have to impose our worldviews on an autonomous community. Human rights is very relative concept with many trade-offs. When the warlords of the Northern Alliance gained power before the Taliban imposed its variant of Sharia law, women were regularly raped and many actually welcomed the protection these drastic laws claimed to provide, possibly in the same way many people in this country welcome the installation of CCTV cameras at every street corner, e-mail snooping and lynching of suspected paedophiles. The spectre of extreme misogyny served to dampen opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan and steer attention way from the true geopolitical goals of the exercise. Likewise leftwing immigrants rights campaigns fail to address the true causes of socially and environmentally unsustainable migration, often acting against the immediate interests of their own native working classes,

The Immigration Conundrum

The traditional difference between the left and right, at least in my simplified way of thinking, is that the former stands up for the rights of common people in general and the downtrodden in particular, while the latter defends the status quo often appealing to the forces of reaction against subversive and destabilising elements. In the fantasy world of the radical left working class British workers struggling to pay their mortgage or rent, forever in debt with their bank and doing overtime to settle bills and loan repayments, will, once politicised and enlightened, unite in struggle with the oppressed masses of the not-so-prosperous world. While we can cite many examples of Western European striking for better pay, improved working condition or against cutbacks or privatisation, we can cite few in which the same workers have taken industrial action in solidarity with much lower paid workers elsewhere. Indeed all evidence shows working class Europeans flocking to retail outlets to buy the very consumer goods whose deceptively low prices are only permitted only by favourable exchange rates or rather an injection of virtual money by banking cartels into high consumption economies. Whether you like it or not migration nearly always flows from economically and/or environmentally disadvantaged regions to more prosperous or more environmentally sustainable regions. The British didn't colonise Australia just to get a suntan or enjoy a more outdoor lifestyle, but because by the late 18th century the growing population of Britain's newly industrialised regions had become too much of a burden, so the excess population either died early through hunger or disease or emigrated. The same is happening today, except we see a movement away from countries currently undergoing structural readjustment to countries with plenty of virtual money, most of which have been or still are colonial powers. At the same time we see a smaller movement by the propertied classes away from the bustling metropolises of the wealthier countries to the greener and sunnier pastures of low-income countries. So while Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians flock to London, many Londoners are buying up properties at knock-down prices in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Qatar, France or Spain. However, in both cases we see the resurgence of 19th century divisions between a servant class and their professional masters. This is just fine, if you happen to own a house in London (currently a modest four-bedroom semi can fetch around £500,000 in many boroughs) and you don`t mind retiring or relocating. Many opt simply to move to the surrounding home counties and rent their London property. Indeed whole residential streets are now rented out to London's new migrant classes with several families often sharing a Lilliputian three-bedroom house. The new immigrant classes fill two key gaps in the labour market, traditional hands-on skilled jobs that fail to appeal to young Britons and low-paid service-sector-servicing roles. The latter category encompasses anything ranging from bartenders, childminders, care assistants, bus drivers to newspaper distributors, but the apparent gap in the labour market would cease to exist if the clientele had less expendable cash and more indigenous young people were prepared to do these jobs as they did until recently. Currently a high proportion of home-grown fruit and vegetables are harvested by migrant labour. If we paid home-grown farm workers a decent wage and sourced all crops suited to our climate locally, prices would inevitably rise even more than they are now as a result of fuel crops and soaring oil prices, but we`d adapt by consuming less junk. The immigration wave of the early 21st century has in effect enabled an unsustainable consumer-led service-oriented economy to stay afloat. In one extreme case a Polish family doctor flew every weekend all the way from Poznan, Western Poland, to Glasgow, hired a car to drive all the way to remote area of Aberdeenshire to earn £2000 as a weekend general practitioner owing to a temporary shortage of qualified GPs willing to work in the area. As budget airline Ryanair announce cutbacks following recent rises in oil prices, we may wonder how long this absurdity can continue, burning umpteenth barrels of fuel to cope with the consequences of unsustainable hedonism and a rat race that attracts the best minds away from their provincial to the citadels of power and corruption.

The Sick Man of Europe

Back in the 1970s Britain, as we then called England + Wales + Scotland, was known as the sick man of Europe, strike-prone, inefficient and basking in the glory of a bygone era of imperial and industrial might. Thatcherism proved a very bitter pill to swallow, with unemployment rising officially to over 3.5 million and unofficially to over 6 million with millions of manufacturing jobs gone forever. The economic resurgence of the mid and late 1980s saw mainly the growth of services. While the early years of the Major government saw a brief resurgence in the manufacturing sector through inward investment and a low pound, the current administration has overseen the almost complete outsourcing of what remained of Britain`s manufacturing base. Besides services, three industries dominate UK industry, military hardware, energy and pharmaceuticals, all relying on imported components and raw materials. In an idyllic past each community had the right mix of professional farmers, manufacturers, craftspeople and service providers. We all need and expect housing, furniture, plumbing, electrical power, domestic appliances, food, restaurants, roads, public transport, schools and healthcare, yet for some reason the professions essential to the provision of these goods and services do not appeal very much to young Brits, by which I mean anyone who grew up mainly in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result numerous essential professions were by the mid 1990s severely under-resourced. People management, sales, media and leisure-related professions tend to appeal much more to a generation raised on TV, pop music, movies and now video-games and the Internet. However, on a structural level we can observe that many traditional professions only exist as human resources within a larger organisation rather than self-employed workers and small tradespeople offering services to their local community. Rather than encourage entrepreneurism, the gradual takeover of a handful of supermarket chains and retail outlets of not only the food supply, but also furniture, clothing, DIY and commodity appliances restricts the scope of small businesses to essentially franchisees or minor service providers, or rather contractors, of larger corporations. If you grew up in a sprawling suburban housing estate, went shopping once a week at large supermarket, while your parents worked as loyal enforcers in a state-corporate system to earn credit to buy readily available goods, you may be tempted to opt for the easiest and least stressful means of making money. Thus the prospect of becoming a baker or plumber only becomes attractive, if the potential earnings offset the enormous effort required to learn the tricks of the trade and other members of one's extended family or local community serve as professional role models. Instead too many people in this country have grown to consider such tradespeople as simple low-end and easily replaceable human resources or possibly quaint characters portrayed on TV sitcoms or seen in exotic backwaters. TV chef, Jamie Oliver, recently took his healthy school meals campaign to the wilds of rural Lincolnshire, only to discover school catering staff unaware of local vegetable suppliers literally a stone`s throw from the school grounds preferring instead to visit their nearest supermarket. Yet down on the ground farmers are compelled to hire cheaper migrant labour in order to maintain the low prices that the big supermarket chain impose. As always there are two sides to a story. Polish smallholders have been driven off their land because foreign food chains like UK-based Tesco and the French Carrefour group have taken over large sections of the distribution chain preferring to buy from a smaller number of large agribusinesses rather than from thousands of smallholders that had until recently dominated Polish farming. The resulting conglomeration and restructuring inevitably caused rampant unemployment and a huge pool of cheap labour. Not surprisingly many Polish newcomers to the British Isles consider the natives here lazy, spoilt little brats.

Would it not have been better for the English, Scots and Welsh to relearn the skills we need to fend for ourselves, and leave Eastern Europeans to develop independently and sustainably rather than emulate the ultimately soul-destroying and unsustainable Anglo-American neo-liberal model.

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Power Dynamics

Breeding Hatred

One of the biggest dilemmas for environmental realists is striking the right balance between the potential infringement of human rights required to power down to a more sustainable society on one hand, and the inevitable threat to human rights if we don't take action now. Let's call this the human rights dilemma. One solution is simply to deny the relevance of the coming environmental collapse by idealising a variant form of cornucopia, believing everything would be okay if we just wrested power from the corporate-military elite and brought about a new world order founded on the principles of liberty, fraternity and egalitarianism, extending the ideals of the French revolution to all 6.5 billion citizens alive today and making room for the 9 billion plus expected to grace our humble planet by 2050. Wouldn't it be wonderful if billions more could enjoy the North American way of life with sprawling verdant suburbs, neat bungalows with double garages and private swimming pools populated by shiny happy citizens. Sadly such a reality is just a fantasy promoted by soap operas, incessant but often subtle advertising and peer pressure, but it's the ideal to which billions of our fellow world citizens aspire. The endless, but usually fruitless, pursuit of consumertopia is, as amply documented in Oliver James' excellent book Affluenza, the cause of much distress. Many teenagers in affluent countries acquie a deep sense of inferiority because they lack the kind of consumer gadgets their peers have or because they fail to emulate the cooldom and aesthetic perfection of media role models. Worse still the exponential rise in aggregate consumption by our species is ultimately suicidal, not just for indviduals but the vast majority of our fellow human beings. When nature begins to take its course, with its periodic natural distasters affecting ever greater numbers of people, you can bet the poorest and most vulnerable will always be the first to go.

The trendy left has long believed they can metaphorically have their cake and eat it. We can somehow let newcomers to our land join our consumer frenzy and cut carbon emissions. We can somehow guarantee everyone affordable transport, cheap food, free healthcare and an extensive welfare state and reduce collective consumption. We can incredibly subsidise single parents and unwanted babies and simultaneously guarantee every child love, affection and good education. Such idealists live, pardon my French, in cloud cuckoo land. We can obviously only welcome newcomers to our land if our environment and economy can sustain their presence. Likewise we can only provide transport, food, healthcare and social benefits if we can sustainably maintain the material means required. We can only subsidise unwanted children by spending billions on social workers, childcare professionals and state benefits, diverting resources from other needy categories, e.g. a child in council care can cost a UK council as much as £90,000 a year and in all likelihood will continue to be a burden on public finances later in life. A prevailing culture of hedonism and entitlements has created a situation in the UK where over 2 million adults live on incapacity benefit not because they suffer from a severe sensory or physical impairment, but because of essentially psychological problems brought on by social marginalisation and self-destroying indulgence in drugs and booze, whether legal or illegal.

As a result the country has recently attracted over a million newcomers from Eastern Europe to do jobs in the catering, building, transport and agricultural sectors that home-grown Britons used to do. The Polish plumber phenomenon has affected not just the bustling overcrowded metropolis of London, but has spread far and wide to areas with high indigenous unemployment. Some businesses like Subway and Starbucks have actively recruited new migrants and then sent them to their outlets the length and breadth of the land. In just 4 years we have learned to expect to be served by recent economic migrants and hardly blink an eyelid when outside we see another home-bred homeless islander selling the Big Issue or another alcoholic beggar pestering us for loose change. So why does the Big Issue seller not take up plumbing and why does the beggar not get a job in Starbucks, Caffè Nero or Costa Coffee? The sad truth is that too much hard work is required to learn the tricks of the trade required by competent plumbers and most native Brits on benefits would not be much better off on the minimum wage. Worse still most customers would rather be served by polite, attractive and smiling Eastern European staff in their early twenties than emotionally insecure and often incompetent members of Britain's underclass of non-productive long-term benefit claimants. The corporate-state behemoth has effectively dumbed down the former working class, while importing a steady flow of smarter and keener migrant workers from countries where young people are still motivated to learn the hard skills any viable society needs. To cap it all, I've even witnessed migrant care workers looking after mentally ill indigenous citizens. Such is the shortage of competent maths teachers willing to endure the stress of British secondary schools that increasingly education authorities resort to importing human resources from countries where an interest in the abstract science of numbers is still cool. Meanwhile indigenous teachers are deserting the profession in their droves, intimidated not only by children unruly behaviour but by a culture of fear, litigation, lack of respect and celebrity worship. The government talks tough on combatting the perceived threats of terrorism, street crime and illegal immigration, softening public opposition to draconian surveillance state legislation, but has actually created a hyper-competitive labour market with a large reservoir of disgruntled and alienated workers, desperately seeking a piece of the action. The net result is a brain drain in countries of net emigration and growing dependence on the tentacles of corporate grandeur and an enslaving welfare state. Yet for every newcomer to the wealthy world boosting their per capita consumption, there remain billions in the poor world unable to scrape together the funds for a one-way ticket to the citadels of consumerdom, but increasingly reliant on trickle-down subsidies sent home by distant relatives.

Opium of the People

It's hard to get closer to the heart of the corporate elite manipulating and conditioning the governing classes of the world's highest consumption economies than Rupert Murdoch. His media empire has in large part been responsible for winning popular support for neo-liberal or neo-conservative governments in the UK, Australia, the US and elsewhere. In the UK the switch from Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party to Tony's Blair's New Labour Party represented no shift in Rupert Murdoch's long term agenda. Both were tools that facilitated the implementation of globalist policies and transferred power away from local centres of power to unaccountable transnational corps and spurious supranational entities. Yet Murdoch has always known how to tailor his incessent propaganda to the target audience. In London, UK, you can pick up the Sun often bundled with free chocolate bars, bingo tickets or fuel discount vouchers, then enter Starbucks only to pick up a copy of the Times with your coffee. On the way home, you have to dodge distributors of the freebie LondonPaper, also owned by News International, and replete with celebrity gossip and other news deemed to be of a greater interest to trendy twenty-somethings who work in the city's thriving new media and advertising companies. This joins other freebies like the Metro, City A.M. and London Lite all aggressively handed out gratis by low-paid and usually migrant workers. Such papers end up littering the rapid transport system. The London Times still sets a semi-serious tone, requiring a reading age over ten, and a keen interest in world affairs. Its regular columnists include former Marxists and unlimited growth enthusiasts, Brendan O'Neill and Mick Hume, forever attacking green fascists as naive apologists for eugenics and simply writing their perceived enemies off as against progress. To this print media empire, we should of course, add Sky TV and Fox News.

It comes as little surprise alongside semi-intellectual apologists for our high-consumption lifestyle, the Murdoch press hires the services of populist automobile evangelist and TV celebrity of Top Gear fame, Jeremy Clarkson, responsbile for driving a landrover up a Scottish mountain, another 4x4 all the way to the North Pole and hiring a personal double-decker bus to take advantage of apparently empty bus-only lanes, which he thinks should be available to cars. At the Borders book store Top Gear now boasts its own section, replete with glossy picture books of shiny motors for aspriring Formula 1 champs to drool over.

It takes quite a huge leap of the imagination to conclude that the liberal media is largely responsible for environmental scare stories, but alas a growing number of left-leaning pundits such as William Engdahl and Greg Palast have gone down this route. A cult has arisen around climate change denial movies. Anthropogenic climate change is, of course, only a small piece in a much larger puzzle and, I dare say, often serves to dodge the key issue of the long-term sustainability of our growth-addicted model of development. We need merely raise the spectre of pseudo-environmentalist aristocrats such as Al Gore, Ted Turner or Prince Philip to whip up a mass frenzy of indignation against a secret plot to forcibly reduce the world's population and thus deny billions of the world's poor of the same luxuries we take for granted in the prosperous world.

It's hard to deny that environmental concerns tend to appeal much more to the better-educated professional classes than the wider working and welfare-dependent classes, including most recent economic migrants. Billions are invested annually in the never-ending promotion of consumption, entertainment and pure unadulterated mind control. The other day I asked a lady why she was reaching so eagerly for her copy of the Sun. Apparently unaware of who owned and controlled the newspaper, her reason for buying it was simple, to find out what's on the telly and read more celebrity gossip. No doubt she wrote me off as pompous twat with no affinity for the working class. Out in the provinces away from cosmopolitan metropolises, the UK has become a maize of Tesco Towns, with the masses meeting only for their weekly shopping sprees or to engage in entertainment events organised by large corporate operations. When not at work or at school, most are glued to gigantic plasma screens watching action-packed movies, surfing the commercialised Internet, engaging in violence-themed videogames or seeking new partners in dumbed-down chatrooms.

Green Tokenism

The real debates on the future of our species and sustainability of our civilisation we should be holding have been significantly dumbed down on two fronts. First, the masses from Aberdeen to Zagreb or Sydney to Shanghai are lured by the never-ending promotion of the North American way of life, quite obviously unattainable for most. In this context eco-friendliness is just another desirable commodity. Second, the chattering classes are presented with simplified moral arguments about our duty to tackle a whole host of evils, ranging from climatic catastrophes, racism, despotic regimes, famine, energy security, homophobia, women's rights, child abuse, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. Whatever the purported problem, the solutions on offer assume the moral and cultural superiority of the enlightened global elite. Take the UK's Independent Newspaper, renowned for its championing of environmental causes. It's also one of the most unashamed proponents of immigration to an already overcrowded island. Yet for the simple minds of many sandal-wearing leftists, there is no conflict. Welcoming newcomers to our shores and buying energy-saving lightbulbs or cycling to work to reduce our environmental footprint are both part of our duty to help build a better world. Sadly in the grand scheme of things such efforts are futile. I can cycle to work or choose to tolerate overcrowded trains to reduce my carbon footprint, but the brainwashed masses, especially those who have just moved to a high consumption region, want to indulge as long they can afford it.

Some former Marxists and a handful of those who still adhere to this religion are acutely aware of the environmental paradox. Mike Davis, a Los Angeles-based activist, formerly associated with the International Socialists and author of Planet of Slums. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster and City of Quart, has finally realised that decades of unsustainable development and reliance on a globalised network of multinationals and governmental organisations, has all but destroyed the last vestiges of worker solidarity. In a recent article published in www.informationclearinghouse.info, he concludes:

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards. (full article)

Nonetheless to alleviate the human consequences of catastrophes caused by climate change in the poor world, Mike Davis still asks us to welcome more immigration on board our lifeboat. It's like inviting passengers from the lower decks of the Titanic, about to drown in a purportedly unsinkable ship, to board a luxury yacht just a few hundred metres away. Some would brave the icy waters, but while the yacht may accommodate a handful of desperate Titanic passengers, it too would sink if they all reached temporary safety. One way or another our failure to act now by powering down both consumption and reproduction will see an escalation of internecine warfare and famine, while the new corporate aristocracy run for the hills, building themselves havens of tranquillity with the resources they plundered in times of plenty.

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Power Dynamics

Knee Jerk Hysteria

Most Sudanese citizens of all religious affiliations are desperately poor. As in most other African countries early deaths through malnutrition and disease are so rife that many just count themselves lucky to be alive, let alone benefit from the wonders of Western consumerism, fun culture and post-modern enlightenment (the kind of fuzzy thinking that endows us with some kind of moral superiority over all things ethical). But Sudan has a hidden jewel, the oil reserves in its Southeastern corner known as Darfur. Anglo-American multinationals are keen to gain the lion`s share of the oil extraction business there and more important stop the Chinese from striking deals with African governments bypassing Western multinationals altogether. While it seems improbable that a Chinese-led world would be any more humane than an American-led one, the lives of millions of human beings and billions of dollars of oil revenue are at stake. For more see:

Yet the media focuses on the plight of one woman, sentenced for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Mohammed. That she should endure a jail sentence is obviously absurd, but it is equally inconceivable that the Sudanese government could gain any propaganda advantage through a rigid interpretation of Islamic law.

Has everyone somehow forgotten the 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pill factory, manufacturing antibiotics badly needed in a country with poor sanitation and rampant malnutrition, causing an estimated 10,000 excess deaths through disease due to disruptions in the supply of life-saving medication (not the lifestyle drugs people take over here). Instead we let the liberal media dictate whose human rights are being abused by whom. In their simplistic model the Muslim government and its militias are baddies and a Christian minority in Darfur are the goodies. Hence we need Western intervention, Kosovo-style, to save the oppressed minority from near certain annihilation by fanatical Muslims. As usual, the human situation on the ground is much more complex, but the economics are wonderfully simple. On the economic front the Sudanese government in Khartoum would like to strike a deal with the Chinese for the exploitation of oil reserves in a distant corner of their fiefdom, whose borders were drawn by their former colonial masters, the British. Oil reserves extend into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic, both with close economic ties with France, but the former also has a special relationship with neighbouring Libya. What unfolds is complex chess game in which the human rights cause is just a strategic pawn in a propaganda campaign to win hearts and minds behind US-led intervention.

The BBC`s Have Your Say forum is moderated allegedly to guard against spam and hate speech, but most of my posts remain unpublished and 6 that were published only appeared several hours after my posting, while others more favourable to the US/UK establishment, appeared almost immediately. If the BBC really censored discussion to avoid hateful speech, this post would never have appeared at around 18:30 01/12/07:

If the government nuked all Islamic countries and gave lethal injections to all Muslims. The world would be a much better place to live. And you know it's true, that's why you won't show this comment.

Matt

Recommended by 21 people

This pretty much reflected the general flavour of the reaction. Now how should Brazilians have reacted when plain clothed London police officers shot dead an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean De Menezes. Everyday the London underground is teeming with people carrying rucksacks, wearing unseasonal clothing and exhibiting behavioural oddities. The chance that anyone of these shifty characters, in the eyes of brainwashed antiterrorist officers, may be about to detonate a bomb is less than a million to one. More to the point if De Menezes were a genuine suicide bomber, which he was not, and had just wanted to kill people he could have detonated his explosives at any stage in his long flight down the escalator and through a tunnel. How many Brazilians reacted by suggesting their country nuke London or intervene to overthrow the despotic regime there?

1. I'd say stop feeding those idiots. Stop feeding them. Stop educating them. Stop helping them in any way.

2. Let's agree that Islam is the religion of hate. Islam teaches nothing but hate and intolerance. Stop being so PC, and admit it. They hate us, and they want us dead. There are no just "bad apples" in Islam.

daniil, Minneapolis USA

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Recommended by 100 people

These brainwashed posters are totally convinced of the moral superiority of their ruling classes and totally mesmerised by a media spectacle that mixes news with violence-themed entertainment.

Added: Saturday, 1 December, 2007, 18:16 GMT 18:16 UK

Not OK to call a toy bear Mohammed but OK for the Sudanese government to massacre many thousands of innocent Muslims in Darfur.

Well, I'm glad that's cleared up.

Tony Fisher, York

I suppose we can just let over three centuries of Anglo-American imperialism, the last century of rapid resource depredation and the 1998 bombing of a Sudanese medicine factory go down the memory plug hole. The word that dare not speak its name in this whole media frenzy is oil. It ended up under their sand, but our enlightened supercool fun lifestyle needs it. That`s the hard truth. The Sudanese Muslim obsession with the abuse of prophet Mohammed`s holy name is as absurd as our obsession with celebrity deities, simulated violence. commercialised sex, gambling and gadgetry, except we use up more resources to sustain our enlightened lifestyle.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Blaming the Messenger

Spiked Online are at it again, jumping at the chance to blame common atrocities on the spectre of green fascists. To the likes of Frank Füredi and Brendan O'Neill a green fascist is anyone who doesn't believe in their technocratic vision of unlimited human and material growth, if indeed they believe their own propaganda. More is always better and anyone who says otherwise opposes progress.

A couple of weeks ago a school shooting in the Finnish town of Jokela captured the imagination of the European and North American media. A loner with the Internet pseudonym of NaturalSelector89 who had published a gun-toting video on YouTube, advocating the culling of much of the world's population, shot dead six fellow students and then completed his cleansing of the human race by turning on himself.

Although the importance of school shootings pales numerically in comparison with the slaughter taking place in countries ravaged by foreign occupation and civil wars, they form a regular part of a media spectacle obsessed with violence. Over the last few weeks the British popular media has entertained the gullible public with the latest on the murder of a female English student in Perugia, revelations of sex fiend responsible for the murder of Vicky Hamilton over 16 years ago, more on the Madeleine McCann story and, if that did not sate the appetite of necrophiles, the copycat accidental throat slitting during a sex game by the daughter of a wealthy businessman, now two-timing as a New Labour MP. Once you've consumed the appalling tales of shock and horror violence in the tabloid press, you can switch on the telly or game console and consume yet more, always portrayed as the acts of psychopathic individuals or justified revenge by their victims or their saviours. Indeed the two genres of media violence are often interpolated with ads for violence-themed movies alongside news stories and gory titbits of domestic news in the break between segments of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Whoever may be directly responsible for these atrocious acts, the media guides us subtly to the conclusion that we need to grant the state even more control over our lives. If Madeleine McCann had had an RFID chip implant, we might know her whereabouts by now, and if a CCTV camera had been installed in her bedroom we would have video footage of her abductor or killer. So why not go ahead and implant RFID chips in all children and CCTV cameras in all bedrooms. Honestly, it will not be long before child abuse awareness raisers make such absurd calls. Without thinking some of us are letting the authorities turn this country into a police state way beyond George Orwell's wildest imagination, all because law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from a freedom-and-democracy-loving establishment. Yet the very same establishment that purportedly wants to protect us against psychopaths also promotes a lifestyle that breeds insanity and extreme disillusionment. Few of us can meet the high expectations set by a combination of the mass media and peer pressure. 'I must have a Wii gadget because I'll be the only person in my class without one and if you don't buy one you're a child abuser'. We can hardly claim that many Europeans lack the financial means to acquire essentials like food, water and shelter. Indeed malnutrition nearly always takes the form of eating disorders amid an abundance of readily available junk food and anorexic supermodels.

I can think of many problems that afflict today's youth, but somehow over-intellectualisation is not one of them. This should not come as a surprise to the author of 'Where have all the intellectuals gone?' and the founding father LM Mag group, Frank Füredi. Most youngsters are either too immersed in pop culture or wrapped up in their own personal issues to worry about the wider world. I don't see green fascists roaming the streets at night mugging innocent pedestrians or developing 3D simulations of a depopulation campaign to save mother nature from the curse of humanity. Instead, I see disenchanted youths joining gangs in inner-city ghettos and millions more alienated youths totally enraptured by virtual reenactments of fighting. One buys a 40-inch plasma screen in order to view gory scenes in their true glory, not apparently to view a documentary on climate change.

As Paul Flynn, one of the few critically thinking Labour MPs left, notes in his blog 'No British coverage I read mentioned anti-depressants, yet that have been a factor in 28 school shootings and stand-offs including the killing of 10 students in Columbine and 5 in Minnesota . The website www.ssristories.com/index.php has published the full lists.'

Now let us just briefly ponder on Brendan O'Neill's thesis. He claims that Pekka Erik Auvinen was somehow inspired by Finnish fisherman and ecofascist intellectual Pentti Linkola. The extreme pessimism and politically incorrect support for eugenics and authoritarian rule to bring the population down to more manageable numbers suits the arguments of technocratic polemicists fine. Pentti honestly believes humanity is doomed unless we urgently cull most of the world's human masses, but we should at least distinguish warnings from extreme reactions.

Tale of the Titanic

Consider the infamous Titanic ocean liner as a metaphor for planet Earth. The ship has a revolutionary new unbreakable hull and is heading full steam ahead for iceberg-infested water just to the south of Greenland. Like the global population, the ship contains a huge economic disparity of passengers, some occupying the upper decks with luxury cabins, private bathrooms, dance halls and room service. Others occupying the lower decks packed like sardines. As nobody expected the unsinkable ship to go down, lifeboats could only save a small minority of passengers. As it happened they did not even suffice to save all the first-class passengers let alone those in the lower decks.

Now, what would you have done if you had spotted the infamous iceberg in time? In hindsight, most humane people would have done everything possible to alert the crew so they steer the ship clear of the iceberg and alerted as many passengers as possible so we could make the best use of available resources to save as many people as possible. So what would the position of the Spiked sect be? In a nutshell, don't panic! Place your trust in the wonders of human technology and enjoy the cruise. Those who claim the ship will sink and kill off 90% of the ship's passengers are misanthropic green fascists. Now the likes of Pentti Linkola, a rare specimen indeed, might advocate shedding excess passengers even before we hit the iceberg and might not attempt to steer the ship clear of the near-certain calamity, but most environmental realists would accept the harsh truth that we'd better adapt in time or face high excess death rates. If I advise you not to cross a busy motorway on foot because you might die, that's a warning. But if I drive my car at 70mph (112kmh) through a quiet village and run you over, that's called murder. Whichever way, Pentti Linkola's musings represent the mind of melancholic cynicism that can appeal to alienated individuals with an axe to grind. If you are bullied at school and treated as an outcast, you can hardly be expected to have a very optimistic view of humanity, a subject to which I'll return in my next piece 'Is another World Possible'. But let's be clear Pekka acted as a paranoid pushing innocent passengers off the upper decks of the Titanic long before the ship had approached icy waters. The analogy might not be perfect, but we still have time to avert disaster and the likes of Pekka and those killed by his deranged shooting fell victim to technocratic means of mind control.

Population Pessimists

You see the position of population pessimists, as we call the likes of Paul Ehrlich is quite simple to summarise. Human population took thousands of years to climb gradually with ups and downs, from a few hundred million (estimates for global population circa 0 AD average around 300 million) to 700 million at the dawn of the industrial revolution. It then took another 150 years through famines and widespread ethnic cleansing in the epoch of colonial expansion, to climb to around 1.2 billion, circa 1890. All subsequent growth in little more than a century can be attributed to the petroleum revolution that significantly boosted agricultural yields and enabled regional specialisation through global distribution. So if this age is about to come to an end for hard scientific reasons, we may be in dire straits and thus need to adapt to lower aggregate consumption, an equation with two main variables per capita consumption and human population. Does that mean killing surplus people? No because if the pessimists are right, nature will take care of all human culling measures required to restabilise the ecosystem. The pessimists are merely predicting disaster. It's up to us to apply centuries of collective experience to avert this disaster or, at least, minimise the catastrophic consequences. Death and destruction are precisely what we want to avoid, but as I've pointed out in many other articles, will happen on a much greater scale if we fail to readapt to a post-petroleum age by consuming less and planning smaller, but viable and cohesive, families. So what if the population pessimists are wrong and, as the 1999 Channel 4 documentary, Against Nature, claimed the earth can genuinely support 32 billion human beings all with private motor vehicles, fridges and washing machines? What if hidden somewhere below the earth's crust are trillions of cubic metres of abiotic oil and we will soon develop the technology to tame Mars's environment? Well in that unlikely scenario, we still have plenty of time to grow and fill the void. It's planning for continued growth that's so drastically wrong.

Upside-Down Thinking

In my humble opinion neither the extreme pessimists, those who claim the earth can support only a few hundred million, nor the extreme optimists, those who claim we can happily embrace billions more human beings into our mass-consumer lifestyle, are right. Personally, I'd rather see a significantly lower consumption in the opulent world than significantly higher mortality through disease and starvation in the poor world. I kind of think on a purely pragmatic level we need to set priorities. We are already so interdependent that a prolonged power outage in a large city like London could kill thousands within days. Hospitals would shut and soon run out of supplies for emergency generators, refrigerated goods would rot, supermarkets would shut as would most places of work and education. Water pumps would fail and all supplies of bottled water would run out within hours. The whole place would grind to a halt and millions unable to flee. Indeed a tragedy could only be averted if other large organisations intervened promptly with a huge expenditure of resources. Just consider the fate of New Orleans in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina in times of plenty. The first victims are always the urban poor. If the United States can spend upwards of 400 billion bucks on invading and occupying Iraq, surely it could have devoted a small fraction of the quantity to saving its own citizens in its own territory? Apparently not, US multinationals need more oil to continue their addiction to economic growth at all costs. They don't really need 10,000 poor Louisianans as there are plenty more potential consumers and workers elsewhere. Their disappearance can be written off as unfortunate collateral damage of natural events beyond our control and possibly bad planning. You see as the human population becomes less sustainable, individual citizens become more expendable. Conversely, the more sustainable the economy is in the long term, the more valuable its citizens. This is why the blind optimism of perpetual growthers relies so much on upside-down thinking. If, like me, you loathe the prospect of mass famines, internecine warfare, an encroaching police state and widening rich-poor gap, you'd favour powering down, consuming less per capita and stabilising population by lowering the birth rate. If, however, you don't care, are too concerned about your private high consumption lifestyle, taking cheap flights and one car per adult for granted, and would rather buy into the notion that a finite planet can support unlimited growth, then expect the worst. But high-profile pseudo-intellectuals like Brendan O'Neill should know better. They know green activists abhor violence and the multibillion pound mass entertainment business is controlled by a tiny elite wielding enormous power over consumers. While Brendan O'Neill probably reads the Guardian and Independent and pretends to see elements of fascism in the likes of George Monbiot (in reality a very conformist moderate), the masses consume a diet of the Sun, Sky TV, Ryanair and online gambling with plenty of boozing and video-gaming opportunities. Indeed the very unintellectual masses are deluged daily with Shop-Until-You-Drop propaganda, so much so that UK consumer debt has reached 1.3 trillion pounds. Are we seriously to pretend that Rupert Murdoch, a key supporter of Thatcher, Blair, GW Bush and Howard as well as the tyrannical Chinese regime, has the best interests of ordinary working people at heart. Yet it is in his media outlets that we hear the most outspoken Growth at any Price propaganda. Has Spiked Online offered Jeremy Clarkson a column yet? Your average gas-guzzling motorist doesn't want to personally kill innocent Iraqis, Iranians or Venezuelans, but is perfectly prepared to believe a warped version of reality, in which they are victims of evil dictators whom our benevolent leaders have always opposed. Europeans driving across the wilds of Tanzania in their 4x4 Landrovers may wish car-less African villagers all the best, but are seldom prepared to admit that their lifestyle relies on resources that others are denied. Africa in the early 21st century has become a battleground between Chinese, European and Anglo-American energy and commodity corporations.

Remember when you could smoke on the London Underground?

The first time I travelled on the London underground, sometime in the mid 70s, passengers smoked nonchalantly. This was just before separate smoking and non-smoking cars had been introduced and would be unthinkable today for two reasons. First, because the non-smoking majority no longer tolerates tobacco pollution, but more to the point, because attempting to light up on most tube lines anytime between 7:30 and 9:00am could very easily ignite other passengers as the mean gap between standing persons is seldom more than an inch. Banning smoking on public transport led to a temporary improvement in air quality, soon offset by a higher density of passengers. You see if I don't have to share the same room with you, personally I don't care whether you smoke. Indeed if we share a large hall, I might tolerate your smoking fairly well, but if we have to share a metaphorical phone box, I might object. Spiked Online's panacea would have even more people happily choosing whether to smoke. We'd need to quadruple the London Underground network. First, we'd have to double it to cope with the current volume of passengers and then double it again to have separate networks for smokers and non-smokers. More people means subjugating ourselves to greater control over each others' lives. If you live in a small close-knit community you don't need extensive databases of sexual predators and potential terrorists, because everyone knows other members of the community and has time to vet occasional newcomers, but when people move house at the drop of a hat and few residents have any roots in the neighbourhood, we have to rely on the police, social services, CCTV cameras and RFID chips to defend us against dangerous individuals in our midst. Whether you like or not overcrowding not only reduces individual freedom and rights, but also tends to impact negatively on community relations.

Ironically the Spiked ' Sect tells would have us believe we can have our cake and eat it, i.e. we can continue to increase our burden on the ecosystem by relying even more on remote impenetrable technology and still enjoy personal lifestyle freedoms. Yet as sure as night follows day, technocratic elites take away our freedoms and put in their place a totally controlled fun culture.

A Note On the Spiked Sect

  • For those unfamiliar with Spiked Online, I'd better explain where it comes from. Posing as trendy progressives on the cutting edge of intellectual debate, the sect started life as breakaway faction from the old International Socialists, now Socialist Workers' Party, back in the mid 70s. They formed a far-left clique called the Revolutionary Communist Party, which took, shall we say without fear of contradiction, extreme stands on burning issues of the day, chiefly the civil war in the North of Ireland, steadfastly supporting the IRA and Sinn Fein even through some of the most indefensible atrocities against civilians. You name the issue and they tried to trump the rest of the radical left by assuming a more absolutist stance or dismissing more mainstream struggles as pointless syndicalism (like industrial action) or misguided counterrevolutionary revisionism. By the mid 80s they had honed their identity as the ultimate defenders of Marxist progress, seen purely in the simplistic terms that socialism represents not so much an alternative to the current world order but the next logical step in humanity's relentless progress from nomadism, through feudalism to capitalism and onwards to the dictatorship of the proletariat, guided by a vanguard party. Their vision of the future clearly reflected the prejudices of cosmopolitan Anglo-American elites. Rather than challenge rampant consumerism and large multinationals taking control of each and every aspect of people's lives, they embraced globalism as the ultimate humankind's destiny. Their focus moved away from the working class cause altogether as they attracted mainly upwardly mobile ambitious media studies students. However, they persevered with their role as the left's Devil's Advocate, especially when the left swallowed emotive humanitarian rhetoric on complex international crises such as the 1994 Rwandan democide, providing a semblance of radical anti-imperialism that appealed to small but influential clique of students.
  • By the late 1990s they had shed any pretence of competing on the far left, still dominated by the small neo-Trotskyite SWP. Their magazine, Living Marxism, became LM Mag and they began to campaign on largely lifestyle issues.
  • Just consider a selection of the Frank Füredi's clique's stances:
  • The human potential is boundless and thus any attempts to cut consumption, oppose technological solutions or plan for gradual population reduction should be opposed as reactionary opposition to progress itself. In any debate with RCPers on the environment sooner or later you'll be accused at best as a misguided opponent of progress and at worst of green fascism bordering on genocidal neo-Nazism.
  • Humanitarian disasters are often a figment of Western propaganda. The RCP campaigned vociferously to challenge media bias against Serbs in the Balkan Wars and against Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan tragedy.
  • We live a culture of fear, reluctant to embrace the technological solutions that could enable billions more human beings to enjoy the wonders of post-WW2 Western consumerism.
  • The adverse effects of modern consumer products, whether drugs, food or electronic devices, are hugely overstated and, with rare exceptions, greatly outweighed by their benefits. Here the latter-day RCP can appeal to many disillusioned with establishment control freakery over issues like smoking bans.
  • All regulation is bad. No nuanced position here as to whether we should call on the state to regulate us as private citizens or them as large corporate and state organisations. This stances places them in good company on the left on issues such as deregulation of cannabis or free speech, at one with the likes of Noam Chomsky. So they defend the right of racial supremacists to voice their scientific interpretations, but also dismiss the influence of mass entertainment on the minds of ordinary working people with little time to access to alternative media. So they say no to a ban on smacking, but also no limitations of the widespread prescription of psychoactive drugs. Ironically this stands in contrast with LM Mag's efforts to challenge media bias over Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Yugoslavia as your average Guardian reader would be depressingly unaware of the countercurrent perspectives that the RCP once championed. It would certainly appear that the new corporate-friendly Spiked Online brigade seem much concerned about defending the right of bug business to intoxicate and brainwash the masses through junk food and moronic electronic entertainment than they do about the freedom of genuine dissidents whose ideas are being silenced. Increasingly in the US and UK we see censorship of dissidents through an overload of mainstream disinformation and, where dissident ideas gain some currency, media belittling and bullying of all those who fail to sing from the right hymn sheet.
  • We have the universe to conquer. I recall this rallying cry from an RCP event I attended in 1985. Should appeal to Star Trek fans.
  • Multinationals are good and pave the way for a new borderless internationalism.
  • The Chinese and Indian economies are booming and poised to overtake Western European per capita consumption in the near future. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your life's savings.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Persuasion Industry

In one way or another a growing percentage of workers in the UK are engaged in various sectors of the persuasion industry. Call it new media, education, publishing, marketing, sales, customer relations, call centres, advertising, entertainment, legal services, lobbying, consulting, advice bureaux, research institutes, awareness raising charities, they are all in the multi-billion pound business of persuading. These businesses try to persuade us to buy products, borrow more money, adapt our lifestyles, seek diagnosis for some previously unheard-of medical condition, support a political party, place our faith in large corporations, support government policies, panic about media-fabricated problems. Even those of us not directly involved in the media sector service it by providing its infrastructure in the form of satellite dishes, computer hardware and software, catering, cosmetic surgery, hairdressing etc.

Let us have a look at some representative team players in the 21st century persuasion industry:

Public information officer:
With various titles such people impart filtered information on behalf of their clients, the key word here being filtered. Far from redressing bias, they merely serve the highest bidder making sure the only opinions available through trusted establishment media outlets reflects the interests of their clients. Many such public information officers work for organisations that are technically charities, but in reality fronts for big business. Consider the moral universe of a mental health information officer working for a research institute funded in large part by pharmaceutical multinationals. Such a person may dismiss the organisation's spurious funding as corporate benevolence and deceive herself that her work is actually helping sufferers of emotional disturbance overcome their problems, when in reality she is promoting drugs to mask people's problems. People like to be do-gooders and greater conformism tends to suppress any critical analysis of the adverse side effects of our jobs.
Personal loan advisor:
They sell you the myth that we can keep expropriating resources from the rest of the world as long as we let banks create virtual money out of thin air, but to repay your debt you have to be a good team player within the system. An indebted person is usually a more docile conformist person.
Teacher:
As a front-line propagandist, a teacher is responsible for moulding tomorrow's loyal workers, but increasingly focus not so much on encouraging children to teach themselves, but to learn acceptable behaviour. These days good self-confidence and team-playing are considered more important than trigonometry or critical analysis. Children are trained to be good project managers, but not to create the things we really need unless that is part of larger enterprise. For more read the writings of John Taylor Gatto.
Project Manager:

They smile, converse and write reports to co-ordinate and motivate the people who really do the actual work. As such they have no particular concrete expertise other than excellent people management skills, but despite their apparent empathy they are trained to consider the real human beings who implement their projects as mere resources, expendable in the same away as computer hardware. Their real task is to hide the real purpose of a project from the various resources involved in different stages of its implementation. The ideal project manager is thoroughly brainwashed with a special talent for subconscious denial.

In some firms these account for 25% to 50% of office staff. Project managers are required to talk the talk, but with a few honourable exceptions seldom have to walk the walk. All PMs, often recentgraduates, have bosses, essentially project manager managers, who impart instructions on how to manage the human resources to whom they allocate the actual work that needs to be done. The whole American business management model is based on the notion that technical staff tend to lack the so-called social skills needed to negotiate with irate corporate clients. However, some megabuck clients may not be pleased to learn that at least in the world of commercial software development PMs account for a sizeable slice of the human resources budget. Typically a PM in the IT sector graduated in computer sciences and tends to know an awful lot of theory infused with corporate propaganda. The need for best practices in project management soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as consultants routinely attribute the failure of projects to bad project management.