Tag: corporatism

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
Computing

Get ready for the Big Corporate Takeover of the Web

The Internet is not going to disappear any time soon, at least short of a nuclear holocaust or a world-wide power outage. Big business has simply invested too much money in it to let that happen. What's at stake is the pioneering concept of a free and open network of hyperlinked resources. Media leviathans may feel threatened by You Tube, but they'll learn to work with it. Although server farms and desktop PCs may still produce an annoying hum, they represent a tiny fraction of global electricity consumption. The dot com boom years let a lucky few exploit new opportunities, but ten years on most large Internet enterprises would not have seen the light of day or night were it not for huge capital investment from the usual suspects. To attract millions of paying visitors to one of over a billion Internet domains, you need to invest heavily in advertising. The other day I caught sight of a huge billboard for www.ask.com. Why bother spending millions on an antiquated poster campaign if people can search the Web for alternatives to Google (the default for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror users), Yahoo and Microsoft's Windows Live (the default for IE 7 users). Tech-savvy users with a modern browser (i.e. post IE 6 era) can always add a search engine to their search bar. I've added Clusty, Yahoo, Creative Commons, php.net, Wikipedia, Ask Dot Com, Google Maps UK and even Window Live to my Firefox search box. But most Web users just use whatever comes standard just like most users of word processors do not know how to save in a different format (File > Save as in most cases). Unless they see a huge billboard on the way to work or are advised by close friends to try another search, they might never dream of fiddling with their browser's default settings. Anyway I gave ask dot com spin. If you want to search a well known organisation, person or authorised information on a given subject, ask dot com will suit you fine. Your average BBC news fan and Daily Mail reader, accustomed to officially sanctioned truth, will love it. Want to learn about retiring Prime Minister Tony Blair? Let's cut out all the crap from numerous sites exposing the man's sheer hypocrisy and corruption and go straight to 10 Downing Street's site or New Labour's site or maybe a review of a favourable biography on Amazon Dot Com. This is great for your kids' homework too. Their Blair/Brownite teachers will give them full marks. Want to know about the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center? Again the only references to conspiracy theories are ones denouncing or debunking all theories that challenge the orthodox version of events. You certainly don't want your child suggesting in a school essay the physical impossibility of a near perfect vertical collapse of a 400 metre tall skyscraper without a controlled demolition using thermite. What if your child wishes to learn more about human reproduction? Many parents would understandably prefer their inquisitive children not to view certain pornographic sites, which in all honesty, offer little enlightenment on any aspect of sexuality. With ask dot com's filters you can rest assured that should your 5 year old daughter types pussy cat, she will only see listings hits pertaining to friendly furry felines.

In its early years the World Wide Web was mostly used by academia and computer geeks expanding rapidly to IT-literate businesses, but online shopping was confined to a technophile elite until 2002/3. Indeed globally it still is. Now even Sun-readers and Sky-TV addicts do their Tesco shopping online. They don't care about thei socio-environmental impact of Tesco's domination of the grocery trade. It's cool to shop online from the comfort of their sofa and they can have some more quality to time to play with their kids or maybe gamble online or engage in a mindless blether via MSN, preinstalled on their Tesco/PC World/Currys PC or perhaps upgrade their preinstalled edition of Norton AntiVirus (happily using over half of their brand new system's resources and requiring a memory upgrade to 4GB so they can crop that picture of kids on holiday in Ibiza last year). To test the technical competency of modern UK resident, ask if they trust Internet banking or consider IE6 a safe browser as long as they have donated £40 to Symantec. If they believe the hype about the Internet banking revolution, they probably have little understanding of its inner workings. Yes, key-logging software, often installed with the free gizmos (search bars and famncy cursors) you can install only on Windows, can capture confidential data even if your Internet connection is encrypted via SSL. Your only real protection against fraudsters is to set up a firewall, use a sensible non-Microsoft browser, (Firefox,Opera or Safari) and uninstall all crapware and best of all not use MS Windows, but don't expect anyone from corporate estalishment to tell you that. Indeed they'll tell you the opposite, e.g. Channel 4's 40D Player will only work with WIndows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer and basically we don't care a less if you accidentally download viruses if Internet Explorer activates My Web Search Bar. The whole debate about the platform-neutral provision of copyright-protected media using Digital Rights Management is rather tedious, as DRM empowers remote organisations to control content on your hard drive.

Does Internet smut debase women (men and children). Of course is does. Is Internet gambling even more addictive than bricks-and-mortar casinos? Probably. Does prolonged exposure and addiction to violent video games desensitise young minds to the true horrors of warfare? Again the weight of evidence and common sense suggests it does. The sad fact of the matter is that none of these pursuits either require a free and open World Wide Web or started with mass adoption of broadband Internet access. Porn has long used print media and videotapes. Virtual violence evolved mainly with game consoles plugged into TV sets and gambling has always thrived where governments let a few entrepreneural crooks entice the masses with dreams of limitless wealth. The Internet is just another vehicle. Phenemona like spam, viruses, spyware and phising simply destroys people's confidence in the Internet as a medium. What governments and karge organisations fear most is the continued democratisation of the Internet. They lose little sleep over morons who claim to have seen two-headed purple extraterrestrials in their back garden. They worry more about those intent on exposing the sheer hypocrisy an corruption of the ruling elite.

A.N. WIlson of the Daily Mail favourably reviewed Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, bemoaning staff cutbacks at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a result of the phenomenal expansion of Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia much more comprehensive than the Anglosaxon establishment's authorised fount of all knowledge worth knowing, it allows contributions from the general public. In reality numerous contributions on controversial or sensitive topics have already been censored by Wikipedia editors, partly an act of self-censorship to appear credible to the corporate and state elite. What worries large corporations is the wealth of information not yet censored and numerosity of links to unorthodox sources of information. They fear not so much that casual surfers may stumble on more disinformation, which thrives in the mainstream media, but they may find out what their masters are up to, verify facts and challenge their allegiance to the ruling elite.

By equating the massive potential the Internet has for unbridled commercial exploitation, cultural decay and brainwashing with the disinformation of amateurs daring to have their own say, Mr Wilson expects us to trust the likes of the BBC (who have broadcast their fair share of moronic violence) to decide what we may or may not access. They would like to see an unfree Web. Broadly speaking Windows Live, CNN, the BBC, Tesco, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a plethora of censored blogspots and moderated discussion groups (lest someone express a racist opinion of course). The entertainment industry lobby will ensure public access to online casinos and first person shooters. Plenty of eye candy, a wide selection of DRM-ed media and games, but we can kiss goodbye to our freedom of expression. It's your Internet, treat it like your neighbourhood. If you let crooks and gangsters seize control, you'll need heavily armed police and curfews to provide of minimum of security. But if you let a community spirit prosper in the treu spirit of peace and open debate, you might just hold your rulers to account.

My unpublished comment:

While I share Mr Wilson's concern over cultural decay, Internet smut and a growing obsession with virtual violence, I disagree over collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, which, warts and all, remains one of the Internet's greatest achievements. Why should we in a democratic society rely solely on state and corporate entities such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

The aforementioned social trends started long before most of us had an e-mail account, mainly thanks to multi-million dollar blockbusters, MTV and soap operas, produced by media leviathans who now see their grip on the collective psyche challenged by P2P file sharing. The Web has both reflected and accelerated existing trends, but with its increasing commercialisation we see its early democratising aspects drowned in an ocean of flashing ads, scams and disinformation. May I suggest the main concern of the British establishment is not protecting children from porn or violence, but silencing dissent?

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Brown Broadcasting Corporation

Call me a cynic, but the BBC seems to have transitioned magnificently from its role as a covet apologist for the Blair regime to a smooth public relations operation for the emerging Brown leadership. Such a transition requires no change in logo, editorial control or political outlook. Indeed, as the electorate has grown tired of Blair's persistent hectoring and lecturing on subjects about which he is so obvioulsy ill-informed, Gordon Brown will give the New Labour project a whole new lease of life. Some English voters may not like his Scottishness, but that's quite irrelevant as his chancellorship has overseen a continuation of the steady flow of high-paid jobs away from Scotland and Northern England to the South East of England with the near total demise of the country's manufacturing sector and the flight of call centre jobs abroad.

One wonders just how Gordon Brown retained his credentials as a prudent defender of the interests of ordinary working people tied to his Scottish roots in the Lang Toun of Kirkcaldy, an area with considerable social deprivation and paradoxically the UK's highest Ritalin prescription rate (and probably lowest consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables). For his political choices over the last decade as Chancellor of Exchequer have been neither prudent nor in the interests of the traditional working classes Mr Brown claims to represent.

In the UK the best test of your overall class allegiance is not your annual income, your parents' income or even your academic background, but your favourite newspaper, whether print or online. Whether we like or not, there is a class of UK residents who instinctively buy one of the redtop tabloids, the Sun, Star, Mirror and in Scotland the Daily Record (aka the Daily Retard). As more school leavers go to university, you'll even see the shelves of student shops stacked with copies of these Celebrity Gossip comics. Without the blessing of a hanful of media magnates and their appointed editors-in-chief Thatcher would never have won such a resounding victory in 1979, 83 and 87, Kinnock might have won in 1992, but Tony Blair would never have swept to power in 1997 or retained sufficient public confidence despite his repeated warmongering, corruption and toadying to the whims of big business. The usual suspects in Scotland, the Daily Retard and the Scottish Sun, both of which have helped fuel anti-English sentiment in the past, tried their best to avert an SNP victory at the Polls. When New Labour's line manager in Holyrood, Jack McConnell, belittles the SNP's electoral gains, he does so in the full knowledge that without the gutter press the fate of the New Labour Mafia north of the border would be a whole lot worse. In short New Labour's tabloid propagandists appeal to the same tribal gut instincts that lead some to support Rangers or Celtic come what may.

Brown's left wing credentials are largely a figment of the media's and New Labour's spin machine's imagination. This is the same man who has consistently backed every single decision Tony Blair has taken on behalf of his corporate handlers. He had absolutely no qualms about hosting dinners in honour of Alan Greenberg, a person more responsible than almost anyone else for the imposition of neoliberal policies on the Third World leading to the decimation of public services and the selling off of local industries to predatory multinationals, a processs popularised as privatisation or inward investment. The only conceivable concession to those who fear a slide towards British involvement in a future US invasion of Iran seems to be his rhetorical support for a increased role of Parliament in decisions over war and peace. But let us not forget that a majority of New Labour MPs voted to support British participation in the invasion of Iraq, so why shouldn't the same bunch of lemmings fall for humanitarian propaganda that the likes of the Guardian and BBC have already begun to peddle to justify more military intervention in resource-rich regions?

Gordon Brown may give the New Labour project a temporary facelift, but don't be fooled. His prudence is as big a façade as his predecessor's integrity.

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Power Dynamics

New Labour’s Legacy

Results from recent regional and local elections should bring a few cheers to those, like me, who have long distrusted New Labour. While the letters in Tony Blair nearly form an anagram for Tory Plan B (if we replace i with p), David Cameron certainly follows in the deceptive footsteps of our Tone, as the gutter press once affectionately referred to the current prime minister. In Scotland the SNP has done surprisingly well, but thanks to last minute scaremongering by the terrible twins of the Scottish tabloid press, the Daily Record and Scottish Sun (both fervently anti-independence and ultra-Blairite) and possibly a wee bit of election rigging here and there, New Labour have just one fewer MSPs than the minority SNP administration. In Wales Plaid Cymru have made impressive gains outside their traditional heartland, but once again New Labour has hung on with the prospect of a coalition with the LibDems. So basically despite New Labour getting just 27% of the vote nationally, it's business as usual for the Blairite agenda. However, one thing is certain New Labour's lead actor is moving on to pastures new as a keynote speaker on the US conference circuit. More important New Labour under Gordon Gold-dumping Brown may well not win the next election, paving the way for Mr Cameron's entry into the world of international theatrics.

To understand New Labour's legacy we need not look so much at the legislation they did pass, some mildly positive such as devolution for Scotland and Wales or the introduction of the minimum wage and some negative such as greater surveillance of private citizens, but at their role in enabling the underlying socio-economic and governmental trends that have transformed our society. All these trends trace their roots to changes that took place long before Tony Blair had even become leader of the Labour Party, the unrestrained consumerism of the late 1980s, which in turn had been a reaction to the pessimistic realism of the late 70s and early 80s. The early Thatcher government preached "back to the basics" at school, better housekeeping with large reductions in social welfare spending, privatisation and high interest rates forcing thousands of traditional manufacturers into liquidation. For a few short years some on the left saw this as a sign of the final collapse of British capitalism. Gone were the days of jobs for life handed down from father to son, tight-knit communities built around single industrial activities like car manufacturing or coal mining. We saw the birth of a new service-oriented economy centred around the naked accumulation of capital and the shameless promotion of a consumerist lifestyle. Of course, the welfare state of the 60s and 70s did not disappear, it simply adapted to a new era and to meet new challenges. Indeed after the initial Thatcherite shock therapy, the Tory establishment began to sing a more reconciliatory tune. Despite the worst fears of some pundits state education and the beloved National Health Service survived the Thatcher and Major years albeit with a steady drift towards private provision, but few doubted where the Tories' true allegiances lay.

So what are the greatest achievements of Tony Blair's junta:

  • Transfer of interest rate varying powers from a nominally elected Chancellor of the Exchequer to a bunch of unaccountable bankers at the Bank of England. How anyone could spin this as mildly progressive is beyond me, yet Blairites and Brownites alike frequently cite this as the foundation stone of the period of unprecedented consumer growth that followed.
  • Introduction of tuition fees for higher education, while simultaneously encouraging corporate and state entities to require degrees from everyone from hairdressers to environmental safety officers (read refuse disposal workers) and promoting absurd Mickey Mouse degrees.
  • Selling half of the UK gold reserveswhen the yellow metal was at an inflation-adjusted historic low, leading to a temporary boost for the US dollar, weakening the Euro and losing over £2 billion in 5 years .
  • Deregulating TV advertising and allowing the merger of major commercial networks.
  • Granting planning permission to large supermarkets to open more and large superstores, further eroding the dwindling market share of independent family-run stores.
  • Deregulating gambling and booze.
  • Deliberately subverting EU attempts to regulate adult pornography, gambling and violent video gaming, both multi-billion pound industries linked to UK businesses though often officially based abroad.
  • Regulating the culturally ingrained habits of millions of private citizens such as smoking.
  • Increasing surveillance of private citizens.
  • Overseeing a huge rise in the prescription of psychoactive drugs for mood disorders, while co-financing the promotion of new personality disorders.

Austere back-to-basics Thatcherism transitioned seamlessly to Cool Britannia Blairism, a non-entity as Anthony Blair himself has no real convictions other than his career, through the medium of MTV-style culture. Millions had been conditioned to associate homophobic, Tory-voting, church-going besuited businessmen with the old guard, and thus positively welcomed the new guard of casually dressed supercool metrosexual advertising execs. People see these products of the nouveau riche as somehow progressive, reminiscent of rebelliously philanthropic movie stars re-enacting the cultural revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. If there is any remnant correlation between conservative values and tastes and class, then we'll find much more old-fashioned mores among the provincial working classes and lower echelons of the traditional managerial classes, than among the emerging globalised ruling elite, stretching from Glibraltar-based gambling tycoons to CEOs of funky new media companies. The money is in fun culture, not in what we tend, disparagingly, to call Victorian values. Apparently it is easier to manipulate the masses if they are lulled into a false sense of joy and diverted from critical analysis of the doctrinal system. For some progress is measured in terms of the effective presentation of abstract rights and outlawing outmoded nasty habits and pursuits. So if progress means gay marriage, smoke-free pubs and an end to fox hunting, you'll be superficially pleased with New Labour's record. Instead we have dysfunctional family units with kids increasingly isolated, over five million adults on psychoactive drugs with side effects far worse than cigarettes and nearly one billion animals slain every year to meet our voracious demand. In this context New Labour's progressive achievements are very minor indeed and pale in comparison to their services to the US-centred corporate and military establishment, especially their friends at GSK, Tesco, BA Systems and KPMG to name but a few.

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All in the Mind War Crimes

On The Nature of Violence

Consuming re-enactments of violence in various forms has long brought considerable pleasure to large number of people, especially but by no means exclusively, males. Quite clearly many residents of middle class suburbs in towns and cities across the prosperous world are relatively shielded from the real-world physical violence that millions experience on a daily basis in much of the world, but with extraordinary levels of intensity in regions where wars of resistance and internecine conflict rage. David Edwards of Medialens quite correctly contrasted the almost daily massacres in Iraq with the occasional school and office shoot-outs in the US and Europe. 36 dead i the Virgina Tech massacre is a tragedy, sure, but hundreds slain day in day out is an affront against humanity. However, many who have moved from some of the world's worst conflict zones to the obsessively consumerist dystopia of the wider American empire feel ironically under greater threat.

Violence means much more than the simple exertion of physical force with the intent to maim or kill others, it means the exertion of physical, sensory, mental or economic force to deny others of their livelihood, whose definition varies according to cultural expectations. To make a simple example, the only difference between machine-gunning a family of African subsistence farmers and evicting the same family from their land while failing to provide them with alternative means of sustenance is immediacy. In the former scenario they die instantly, in the second they starve slowly. So is society as it has evolved recently in the UK become more or less violent?

Nominally, it may have actually become less violent. Parents seem much less willing to resort to physical force to rein in their offspring, mindful of the consequences if their sheer frustration leads them to overstep the mark. As noted elsewhere crime statistics rely heavily on classification and reporting, but based purely on calls to national helplines there has been a huge rise in parents falling victim to physical abuse by their sons and daughters. The mass media, including the liberal establishment's BBC, also seems preoccupied with the spectre of child abuse, especially when attributable to outmoded institutions such as the Church and where the blame can be placed clearly with sad sexually deprived individuals who unleash their fantasies on the innocent. As usual such a narrow focus misses the details of a much bigger picture. Child abuse is an abstract concept. Certainly extreme deprivation leading to severe malnutrition, life-threatening disease and violence leaving permanent physical and psychological scars affect a person's long-term potential.

However, to the surprise of many wishful thinking do-gooders, back in the 70s school kids often preferred a quick dose of corporal punishment to the prospect of several hours detention or humiliation in front of their parents. This doesn't mean corporal punishment is good, but may often in the real world be viewed as the lesser of two evils. Seriously, how many children ever ended up in hospital as a result of excessive corporal punishment? Now compare this with the number hospitalised as a result of school or street fights. If teenagers are drawn into a subculture of pervasive recreational drugs, having to resort to theft or prostitution to feed their habit, who should we blame? The parents, society or some alleged genetic weakness in the kids themselves? Increasingly social workers and health professionals turn to the third explanation, but often blame controlling or traditionally strict parents. To compete in today's superficial social rat race, parents need to act and look as cool as the media role models their kids aspire to. To win your teenage daughter's trust, you may need to undergo cosmetic surgery or simply let her have her way when friends invite her for a night out on the town. In a community where most children respected their parents and were not under media-induced peer pressure to participate actively in a deceptively named fun culture of all night raves, life was easy for sensible parents whose only wish was to steer their children away from danger. But Blair's Britain is not like that. Open your eyes and ears in any shopping centre, remove yourself temporarily from your early 21st century bubble and you'll soon realise you're surrounded by technicolor, high-fidelity bullies unleashing incessant doses of none-too-subtle psychological torture. “Heh, you, you're not as cool as these dudes!". If you dare to complain about the unbearable rap beat in a clothes store or, as I did once, in a book store, expect to be either ignored or if you insist to receive a mildly reassuring talk from some lowly shop manager about marketing. In any case be in no doubt, that your aversion to a non-stop blur is your problem, not theirs.

Violence may be defined, at least according to the free dictionary bundled with my computer:

  • Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
  • Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force : the violence of her own feelings.
  • The unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

Based on the latter two definitions, provocative imagery and noise intimidate as much or even more than physical force. The media like to remind us of the importance of mental health, but fail to examine their own role in adversely destabilising our sense of self. The media frequently practices another intimidatory form of violence, humiliation by association. Over the last week the media has successfully whipped up hysteria against the alleged abductor of a three year old girl on holiday in Portugal with her well-to-do parents. In the recent past we've seen masses of Sun-readers engage in animated protests, sometimes resorting to violence, against real and alleged paedophiles. Thus anyone unknown to the community at large and whose behaviour may at times seem suspect may fall victim to a paedo witch hunt. That's an awful lot of people in our atomised island state, where close-knit communities are largely a distant memory. Only a few months ago the media lynched a lonesome resident of Ipswich falsely accusing him of the murder of five prostitutes and publishing details of his MySpace activities. Should we arrest the remaining millions of alienated adults whose social life has been reduced to virtual tomfoolery. Why not arrest all those idiots on person.com who broadcast masturbation live from their Webcams? All this socially divisive fear-mongering generates intimidatory violence against anyone who fails to meet societal expectations and withdraws into an alienated existence. Violence is anything that harms people mentally or physically. No society is devoid of violence, but where conflict is minimised, so to is violence in all its forms. Otherwise psychological intimidation and alienation can soon manifest themselves physically either through self-harm, drug abuse or direct attacks against the person.

Categories
All in the Mind

In Association with Pfizer

Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation, with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running a What Inspired You? event, purportedly to raise awareness of scientific innovators, but conspicuously sponsored by Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, Zoloft and numerous other recreational and mind-altering drugs. Some of us may recall that back in the early 1980s Frank Furedi's gang posed on the extreme left in the Revolutionary Communist Party, frequently intervening at public meetings of the somewhat larger neo-Trotskyite group the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), but focusing its recruitment drive on ambitious students. They've certainly taken some controversial stances, often geared to attract dissidents from the thinking left. Around 1987-88 they regrouped around their glossy Living Marxism magazine and simply became the Living Marxism group, later rebranded as LM Mag. However, gradually they abandoned all pretence of Marxism, whatever that meant anyway, and began to hone a line of unbridled human potential whose greatest threat was posed by a culture of fear. They jumped on the bandwaggon of activists and journalists seeking to expose media bias over the 1990s' Balkan civil war and more provocatively challenged the orthodox media's Hutu-bashing analysis of the tragic internecine Rwandan slaughter in 1994. Unlike most peace activists, they concentrated their energies not on opposing war per se, but on attacking certain biases prevalent among the wishful thinking left, e.g. UN and NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia was largely welcomed by left-leaning Guardian columnists and much reasoned opposition to the 1999 aerial bombings of Kosovo and Serbia proper swallowed much of the mainstream propaganda over the inherent evil of Serb nationalists.

Only four years later in early 2003, following military intervention in Afghanistan, millions came out on the streets to voice their opposition to the pending invasion, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an infinitely greater thug than Slobodan Milosevic. Large sections of the thinking public had at last begun to question the emotional rhetoric over humanitarian intervention. More important, the intervention in Kosovo, sold successfully on humanitarian grounds, far from ushering in a new era of interethnic harmony and an end to ethnic cleansing, had put in power a bunch of xenophobic militants who relied on NATO troops to keep the peace and caused the exodus of tens of thousands more of Kosovans of all ethnic groups a fact the subservient British media failed to hide from the public. While NATO Had spent billions on intervention in the former Yugoslavia, it had turned a blind eye to a civil war in the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo inflicting 3-4 million deaths, in the aftermath of Rwandan democide (okay pedantics here, but to call it a genocide assumes one ethnic group sought the elimination of another, while in reality the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was more of class or caste than ethnicity). Just as the public began to question the benefits of military intervention to tackle conflicts with economic and, dare I say, environmental causes, Frank Furedi's gang seemed more preoccupied with attacking Green Fascists, health fanatics and anyone else who challenges corporate technocracy, but in a deceptively counter-current way. Thus their campaign against smoking bans appeals not only to libertarians and critical thinkers, fed up with the media's obsession with one cause among many of cancer, but also reinforces their key message that technology can always undo the damage caused by other technologies. Worried about lung cancer, well why not wait a while for technocrats to give you a new lung? Worried about the carcinogenic effects of E-numbered food additives, why not wait for the latest and greatest anti-cancer wonder drug? The future is bright, the future is .... shiny happy people consuming pharmaceutical products supported by peer-reviewed research. More disturbingly, based on personal experience in online discussions, ex-RCPers tend to belittle those who cast doubt on technocratic claims (e.g. SSRIs have greater benefits than side effects and safe for long-term use) with accusations like "loser" or words to that effect. In essence, they consider green fascists to have their own agenda, namely to deny the masses of huge technological advances.

Stanley Feldman works at University College London, whose students, a captive audience for big pharma propagandists and mainly from wealthy backgrounds, flock to Planet Organic and tend to avoid most of the junk Mr Feldman claims is relatively harmless. It would seem that the RCP brigade live in a bubble filled with paranoid health freaks, rather than in the much larger British reality where millions of happy shoppers happily fill their supermarket trolleys with TV-advertised junk and visit their GP only to receive a prescription for some of Pfizer's or GSK's most lucrative products. Maybe people are panicking for the right reasons, but thanks to so much corporate disinformation often identify the wrong targets.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Misery Industry

In the run-up to New labour's historic 1997 electoral victory, thespian extraordinaire Tony Blair launched his rallying soundbite "education, education, education". Any brief exposure to modern teaching techniques as they have continued to evolve since would reveal the necessity to revise that slogan to "edutainment, edutainment, edutainment" .

Outside the bustling edutainment sector with semi-privatised unis offering students free I-pods and advertising the prospects of vibrant night life and casual sexual encounters, the biggest boom sector under New Labour calls itself the entertainment industry. The figures are quite staggering, but hard to quantify. The components of the entertainment sector span multiple traditional categories such as alcoholic beverages, electronic media (movies and games), retail, catering, gambling, sports and leisure, covering anything from a ten-pin bowling alley to a nighclub, a TV broadcaster to an electronics retailer, a Laser Quest virtual shooting centre to theatres now frequented only by the more educated chattering classes. According to Prospects, the official guide to post-graduate employment ( Prospects: Sport and leisure ), 13.5% of the UK work force are employed in the leisure industry accounting for 10% of the economy, excluding the mass media, an additional 0.6%, and entertainment-oriented retail sales. Now just consider that much of the remaining population work in other branches of the non-essential service sector, whether in administration, finance or advertising.

British students have long had a reputation for drinking, but I seem to recall back in the 1980s not many could afford indulge in nights out on the town more than once a week unless they had another source of income. Social life would revolve around the student bar and many would spend most evenings in swatting over their course work. Fast forward to the 21st century and student life has morphed into a non-stop partying session. Every lunchtime by the entrance of an image-obsessed Leeds Metropolitan University students earn a little extra cash to promote local night clubs, often performing stunts reminiscent of yesteryear's protesters. Even among teaching staff Curtis White's Middle Mind, the deluge of junk information that overwhelms what little remains of our independent imagination, dominates discourse. Hollywood movies, game consoles, commercial Websites, moronic TV, multi-millionnaire celebrities, consumer goods and the occasional pub crawl, interpolated only by the news agenda set by large corporations. Not surprisingly the aforementioned edutainmental establishment offers a BA Hospitality Business with Club & Casino Management . It's probably only a matter of time before they add Brothel Management to their repertoire. Welcome to Air Strip One anno 2006, where spending countless hours immersed in realistic simulations of death and destruction is apparently considered normal, indeed so normal that anyone who dares to question the morality of this pervasive pursuit awaits social exclusion, except in the safe confines of like-minded non-gamers. So they want to censor violent content from Youtube, but have they considered pulling all first-person shooter games from stores frequented by millions of young chiidren, often strategically located at kid height? No, it seems the only depravity they want to censor is that disseminated by ordinary folk, while respected corporate and state institutions fill our minds daily with the most abject technicolour vileness.

Regulating the Poor and Deregulating the Rich

If one trend were to summarise the Blair agenda, it is this. Give big business carte blanche to hook millions on their mind-altering pursuits and carcinogenic products, while imposing ever-greater restrictions on the freedom of private citizens, for their own benefit naturally.

Tobacco shares are probably not a very good buy just now as smoking has just been banned in all public buildings in Scotland and this ban looks set to extend to England next year. Revenue in public houses may decline at least in the short term in some deprived areas, but all is not bleak on the entertainment front. Apparently GSK and Aventis stand to profit enormously from the growing rate of prescription for their anti-depressants, if you're an investor follow my advice, sell tobacco shares and buy pharmaceuticals. Other opportunities loom on the horizon with considerable growth in the gambling sector, which will in turn fuel sales of both alcoholic beverages, party drugs and antidepressants. Prospects look good for the burgeoning debt relief and cash conversion business.

It may seem odd to some that the same government responsible for restricting the freedom to smoke in the name of public health, has extended pub opening hours, deregulated gambling, let the NHS dispense ever growing numbers of SSRI's (Prozac-like antidepressants) and Ritalin and oversee an explosion in the use of ecstasy in discos, night clubs and raves.

Evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease is quite compelling, but clearly it is not the only factor determining good health and longevity. Indeed some of the countries with the highest smoking rates such as Japan, Spain, France and Greece also have some of the highest life expectancies. May this have something to do with diet and lifestyle? So if you smoke 20 a day and eat junk food, it's kicking the latter habit that will statistically contribute more to lengthening your lifespan.

The whole point is it's none of the government's business to dictate such lifestyle choices, as long as citizens are well informed, are not under social or commercial pressure to adopt high risk habits and are protected against predatory and deceptive business practices.

However, the prevailing trend is to deregulate big business letting it make new inroads into the addiction sector, leading in years to come to a growing incidence of psychological problems. The same government that highlights the dangers of smoking, despite still getting huge revenues from the sale of tobacco, cohorts with its corporate friends in downplaying the adverse effects of of gambling, SSRIs, carginogenic food additives (i.e. aspartame contained in most deceptively labelled sugarfree or "no added sugar" drinks) and violent video games, all multibillion pound industries and an integral part of many young people's lives.

Consider the aspartame controversy and bear with me before you see the parallels with the tobacco controversy of the mid 20th century and its wider implications for manufacturing and controlling pleasure. There are broadly speaking three perspectives on the dangers of this pervasive sweetener. The industry has long claimed its safety is backed by research and may only pose a risk for minority groups such as phenylketonuriacs (PKU sufferers). Many aware of the alleged dangers, but regular consumers of products containing the substance, simply view it as a potential risk that may only affect them at extraordinarily high levels of consumption. They see millions consuming aspartame-containing products with no immediate side effects and even minor one benefit, aspartame does not rot your teeth as much as sugar (but other ingredients in fizzy drinks still do). Third a small minority avoid all foods likely to contain the substance because copiuous research suggests that the substance is a carcinogen even at normal levels of consumption (e.g. 3-4 aspartame-sweetened drinks and a packet of aspartame-sweetened chewing gum a day). Now if the third group were just a bunch of ill-informed conspiracy-theorists and aspartame were truly safe, you'd expect the industry to proudly and unashamedly advertise the fact. Coke Zero would be rebranded Coke Extra, now with aspartame instead of tooth-rotting sugar, Tookthkind Ribena (which incidentally still contributes to tooth decay even without added sugar) would inform parents in large print Now with added aspartame for your child's benefit. Instead we are entertained with misleading labels such as sugarfree (i.e. always contains aspartame) and no added sugar (probably contains aspartame), while the corporate health media do a little aspartame promotion by simply warning of the dangers of excessive sugar consumption, usually without distinguishing different forms of sugar (glucose, sucrose, lactose and fructose) or the fact that our body needs some sugar, a fact testified by the presence of lactose in maternal milk and fructose-containing berries in the paleolithic diet of our forebears (though later we acquired a much a sweeter tooth). Now cast your mind back to the 1940s when copious evidence available then not only linked tobacco with lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but proved its addictiveness. It took the tobacco industry 50 years to admit the health hazards of their lucrative products. Of course, in the meantime not all regular smokers dropped dead instantly and, ironically, mean life expectancy continued to rise. Many lived into their 70s, 80s or 90s despite their tobacco vice, while others who died early of lung cancer or heart failure had their illnesses attributed to other causes. Indeed smoking among the working classes only gained its quasi-universality in the aftermath of the 1914-18 Great War with millions returning from the trenches as nicotine addicts. Now what if, as some research would suggest, aspartame at normal rates of consumption is as carcinogenic as smoking 20 cigarettes a day? If that turns out to be the case, industry and government standards authorities would have misled the next generation by getting them hooked young with their sugarfree diet-conscious drinks, specifically targeted at kids. Since the introduction of aspartame into the food supply in the mid 1980s the incidence of diabetes and childhood obesity has skyrocketed and, ironically, per capita sugar consumption has declined. Yes the biggest rise in longevity occurred in the 1960s and 70s when over half the adult population smoked and almost everyone took sugar with their tea or coffee, but most had at least one square meal a day served at home on the dining room table rather than microwaved and consumed on the sofa before a 40" plasma screen. If aspartame has no other side effects, it makes otherwise boring food much sweeter and yummier, acting alongside MSG (monosodium glutamate) as a major appetite enhancer and encouraging a predilection for hyper-sweetened foods. If you're worried about sugared tea or coffee rotting your teeth, simply get used to taking these beverages unsweetened! If your waistline concerns you, why not just cut down on cakes and dairy products. But in a society that buys into the myth of a free lunch, we believe we can indulge without consequences and technology will always come to the rescue.

What's wrong with having fun?

Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer. We all aspire to enjoying life, but a better question would be: Why do we need such high doses of frivolous amusement to stay emotionally afloat?. If commercialised leisure centres, home cinemas and a never-ending drone of fast-beat dance music in stores and bars made us so happy, why are so many of prone to depression? Now imagine looking forward to a quiet walk in the park with a half hour break to read an enthralling novel only to find a bunch of twenty-somethings holding a daytime rave completely oblivious to your desire for tranquility? It soon becomes clear that the ecstatic joy of the few leads to the misery of the many, either because they cannot emulate the sexually appealing and self-confident charm of successful revellers or because they feel undermined or threatened by their mindless hedonism. How many of us have been to discos, nightclubs or on pub crawls, only to return with a huge hole in our bank balance and a hangover, in the vane hope that the disinhibition and stupor that booze and loud music invoke will revolutionise our social life, help us meet a dream partner or at least lead to a desperate one night stand? If you thought everyone else out there was having a whale of a time in the brave new world of post-industrial pleasure, think again. Most are at home glued to the TV, bidding on ebay, immersed in a virtual word of fantasy battles or maybe amusing themselves with titbits from www.youtube.com. We are presented with a dazzling spectacle, whose primary purpose is to distract us from leading fruitful and rewarding lives, the only source of long term happiness for those of us unlucky enough not to win the lottery. Once distracted, our animalistic behaviour can be monitored and and our lives more pervasively controlled. For if adults can be mesmerised into behaving like spoilt children on steroids, some will inevitably overstep the mark and require 24/7 surveillance, enabling the corporate and state establishment to clamp down on its real enemies, sober critical thinkers.