Spectacular Christmas

posted 21 Dec 2009 11:40 by Dick Pountain

If any more proof were needed that Guy Debord died in vain, all the faked fuss about which mediocre pop record would be the No 1 hit this Christmas provides it. In the same week that the Copenhagen talks ended in failure, journalists who claim to represent the opinion of the nation's youth are seriously claiming the victory of Rage Against the Machine as some sort of act of resistance: the purchase of one record owned by Sony has triumphed over another record owned by Sony, and in the real world nothing has been changed (not even Sony's balance sheet). I don't think this is what Gramsci meant by cultural hegemony, but it is very much what Debord meant by spectacle. If you want a symbolic Christmas act that has real purchase on reality, how about roasting the X-Factor judges with apples in their mouths?

Not so Relaxed?

posted 12 Dec 2009 20:38 by Dick Pountain 
 

Alistair Darling's bonus supertax appears to be upsetting people in the City of London. Tim Linacre of brokers Panmure Gordon said "This piece of legislation was cobbled together over a weekend. It is politically inspired and economically illiterate. It is vague, unclear and nobody knows what it means." On the contrary, I know what it means, and so I believe do a lot of other people. It means that a Labour chancellor, standing at the steps to the scaffold for his government, has briefly re-acquired sufficient balls to hurt the people who've been looting the public purse for private enrichment for so long. Vince Cable has called the tax "an embarassment". There's truth in both these critical comments: the tax is politically inspired (hoorah), and it is too an embarassment, if that means the opposite of "intense relaxation"...

In Memoriam: Nina Fishman

posted 11 Dec 2009 00:14 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 14 Dec 2009 20:01 ] 
 

Nina Fishman, who died on Dec 5th, was a well-respected historian of the British labour movement and a much loved friend of mine. In the late 1970s Nina led me back from a wilderness of post-situationist disillusion into realistic left politics; Nina shamed me into overcoming my adolescent contempt for opera and introduced me to some of the best musical experiences of my life; in 1987 I helped Nina organise the first attempt to use tactical voting to unseat the Tories (it took two more elections to catch on); Nina launched the political supper club that supplied a bunch of North London lefties with mental stimulation for a decade. Before succumbing to her final illness, Nina completed her political biography of Arthur Horner the great miners' leader, to be published next year by Lawrence and Wishart. She will be sorely missed.

You can read Donald Sassoon's full Guardian obituary of Nina here and there is now an archive of Nina's writings.

Scabs and Abscesses

posted 12 Dec 2009 11:03 by Dick Pountain

Bill Clinton is the last source I'd expect for the most useful political distinction I've heard in years, but he supplies exactly that in "The Clinton Tapes" by Taylor Branch (excellent review by David Runciman in 17 Dec issue of London Review of Books here). Clinton told Branch that his most successful and satisfying foreign policy initiative was the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, while his greatest disappointment was lack of progress over Israel/Palestine. He explained the difference thus:

" Peacemaking quests came in two kinds: scabs and abscesses. A scab is a sore with a protective crust, which may heal with time and simple care. In fact, if you bother it too much, you can reopen the wound and cause infection. An abscess, on the other hand, inevitably gets worse without painful but cleansing intervention. ‘The Middle East is an abscess,’ he concluded. ‘Northern Ireland is a scab.’ "

Appropriately grisly and medical as it is, I find this metaphor very powerful. It derives from the operation of self-healing systems in the human body, and I'm always attracted to comparisons between the individual body and the "body politic".  Such parallels are always more than coincidence: both systems are complex and self-organising, and since the one (the human individual) is the "atom" from which the other is constructed, resemblances are not too surprising. The interesting question is, how does a practising politician tell a scab from an abscess? A modern doctor would send off samples for bacteriological tests, but a politician or a Victorian doctor would almost certainly have to rely on intuition. Clinton had good intuition about this, though very bad about certain other things. 

Warm and Cold Lies

posted 5 Dec 2009 17:44 by Dick Pountain

Lies and deceptions have always been potent political weapons, from the Trojan Horse all the way to the Zinoviev Letter. They are not the sole preserve of either Left or the Right, despite what adherents of those two wings would have you believ. We all know how Stalinism distorted the truth and rewrote history, the faces that disappeared from the photographs. However during the last decade lies have become a particular speciality of the Right, culminating in the deceptions used to launch the Iraq invasion, but most hilariously illustrated by the Bush neo-cons references to "making our own reality".

It's in this context that you should judge those recent leaked emails from climate scientists. It may be the case that believers in the reality of Global Warming have been "fine-tuning" the data to make their case look stronger. The sceptics' side prefer the newer, Bush/neocon style of lying, by just flat out denying the facts on  the (observably effective) principle that any lie you tell three times becomes true. None of this matters a damn though, because lies only have any effect on human minds, not on nature. If the planet has decided to fry us all it will continue to do so whatever nonsense we spout about the matter...

Fear and Loathing in the Bagging Area

posted 26 Nov 2009 16:07 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 26 Nov 2009 16:27 ]

Dont'cha just love supermarkets' self-checkout machines? Whether they were invented to cut staff jobs or to speed customers' exit, they fail on both counts thanks to their crummy user-interfaces. On approaching the one in my local Sainsbury it offers a choice between "Start" and "I am using my own bag". Hmm, tough call, do I prefer to get out of here or do I prefer to brag about my green credentials? Obviously the latter, so I press it and end up staring at a button called "Done", while a female voice nags me about foreign objects in the bagging area. A helpful assistant presses "Done" for me in order to start the transaction. There appear to be more assistants helping people self-checkout than there are on the tills... 

Crooked Crux

posted 26 Nov 2009 13:38 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 26 Nov 2009 14:16 ]

The events of the last year offer a lot of support to a popular view that all politicians, bankers, journalists and perhaps businessmen in general are crooks. No doubt this comes close to being true in some parts of the world, but for us in the developed West it's a counsel of despair that cannot survive closer inspection - if all politicians were in fact real crooks then they would never have allowed the press to disclose their petty expenses fiddles, nor rolled over so supinely once discovered. Nevertheless an article in the current New York Review of Books called "Illicit Money, Can it be Stopped?" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23465) makes for deeply disturbing reading. The authors,  Eva Joly and Raymond Baker, explain how the colossal scale of money laundering, tax evasion and false commercial transactions taken together now account for over $1.5trillion annually, which would have paid for the US bank bailout, or several years of Obama's health reform plans. They describe the three main sources of these illicit money flows, which are bribery and theft; organized crime; and dodgy corporate dealings such as tax evasion and price fixing. Bribery and theft are endemic in many parts of the world, often carried out at the very highest levels of government. The largest modern example is Russia, where oligarchs have stolen between $200 and $500 billion of former state assets since the "privatisations" of the early 1990s. Organised crime includes drug production and trafficking, people smuggling, prostitution and pornography. Corporate shenanigans mainly involve tax evasion by the establishment of offshore entities through which goods are sold at false prices - a carefully structured scheme can ensure close to zero tax liability in the country of production, a hidden profit in the offshore company, and even a loss offsettable against tax in the country of final sale. What over 60% of these illicit money flows have in common is that they are disguised as international trade. To move dirty money abroad, you sell some commodity to a foreign customer at a falsely lowered price - they either give you a kick-back (agreed verbally and not invoiced) of the difference in cash, or else they are party to the false accounting, which makes the transaction almost invisible to investigation. Companies from Barclays and BAE to Enron and WorldCom have indulged in such practices, which may be quite legal given loopholes and weaknesses of international law. The Mafia buys up cover companies to use in laundering drug money by similar schemes. All such schemes depend upon pliable banking institutions, like those of Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and Vanuatu to operate. The article outlines some of the legal measures that governments like the EU and US, and the World Bank could (are in some cases are) taking to tackle these scams. What interested me most though is the picture it paints of a world economy in an advanced state of decomposition being slowly picked apart by predators and scavengers. The best exposition of this state of affairs that I've read in recent years is by James K. Galbraith (son of the other J. K. Galbraith) in his 2008 book "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" (Free Press). He suggests that, far from dismantling the social democratic institutions of economic control established in much of the West following WW2, neoliberal ideologues who have held power - in government, corporations and banks - for much of the last 30 years merely adapted them as levers with which to loot the economy. When Peter Mandelson claimed to be "intensely relaxed about people getting rich" he was equally relaxed about appending "...by legal means".