Tag Archive: future catastrophe


Same New Same New – Future Shocks Part 16

Filed under: Future Shocks, Political — 5 Comments
April 23, 2008

As I had this one as a work in progress I see Big John has beaten me to it.  However John and I are coming from a very similar perspective and I find his post lends weight to my assumptions as he has a little more life experience of the days before ‘the man’ took over than I do.

I find it interesting that one of the principle criticisms of what many see as having been the embodiment of Communism is that everything is required to be the same, no variation because all is dictated by the State.  Leaving aside for the moment whether what they are basing this on is a valid system of comparison or whether this idea of a uniform-requiring State is correct to any left-wing ideology I wanted to try to see just how the alternatives to anything left of centre manufacture this difference, if they do so at all.

If one looks across the Western world and in particular the United States the reach of the corporations is practically all-pervasive across the board.  From one town to the next there is a worrying homogeneity that renders each town devoid of any singular identity.  Much of this can be seen most graphically in comedian and broadcaster Dave Gorman’s Unchained America in which Gorman seeks to travel from Los Angeles to New York without paying any money to ‘the Man’ ie the chain corporations of America.

Gorman’s choice of vehicle may be more in keeping with the romantic wooly ideals that one starts any such road trip rather than to do with any practical study as to what sort of vehicle one might actually need in order to safely conduct a trip but this in a way is part of the charm, along with his tendency to veer off at tangents that make interesting broadcasting if not fiscally or physically prudent.

Gorman’s presumption is that the trip will be relatively straightforward but this proves to be far from the case.  On his trips into towns called Independence across America, he finds either that the faceless corporations have rendered the town utterly indistinguishable or that the few places of character and individualism are in terminal decline, one particular gem closes on the very day he is there having served as a diner for the community for over 60 years.  It will not be replaced and is unlikely to be revived.

Interestingly the smaller independent places whilst ‘economically unstable’ do sometimes fulfil more one of the fundamental points attributed to Marx and Engels namely to provide workers with more of a stake in things and therefore an interest into their success.  There were numerous examples of multi-generational working through the family business.  It is not surprising that in this situation these people care about the business in which they work and the community feel of such places can lend itself to a belief that one is providing a service to the wider inhabitants and not merely in the pursuit of profit.  Of course this is not always going to be the case and standard employees may feel no more empowered than were they to be working at K-Mart or Wall-Mart or AN Other-Mart.

The people running these independent premises tend to be those with a sense of family tradition or occasionally a sense of the absurd or the non-conformist as embodied in the dog-shaped hotel that Gorman stayed in en route.  These are people, generally 50 and older who have lived through times where the homogeneity was not so pervasive, the 1950s with smaller more intimate shops outside and even often inside the cities, the 1960s with its social changes and cohesive ideals.  These are perhaps the few people that didn’t grow out of such intentions and sought to continue to live by their principles in one form or another.

What the corporate premises cannot provide the same is the value-added service that the independents can, it’s just that this is not appreciated in today’s world as it once was.  Everything now comes down to the bottom line price.  No longer is it important for the cashier to know your name, or what your usual order or to have a specialist expertise in their field and this means not only are we offered merely the selection due to the pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap philosophy but we are also given homogenous staff who have no field of expertise and cannot give any depth to the shopping experience.

Even the few places holding out like a Gaulish village against the invaders are having to make sacrifices, butchers are forced to buy in much of their stock wholesale in order to compete with the supermarkets on the prices of staples such as sausages and mince restricting themselves to the more premium speciality items.  Bakers are now usually chains producing the same items daily in one shop as another, and could the young today tell the difference between a Grocer’s and a Greengrocer’s let alone cite any place that they might have seen one?

I find as I get older that I look forward to the chat at the butcher’s on a Saturday morning as I pick up my meat for the weekend.  I know many who make the monthly trip to the farmer’s market in town mainly because they .  When even the local pubs in many towns are run by national companies serving the same beer at the same price and keeping it badly in the same way

This trend is not set to stem in its tide.  As the time in our lives as well as the budget gets steadily ever more squeezed people are understandably feeling that they are forced to count the cost above all other concerns, choosing to shop in the huge monolith one-stop supermarkets and their partners online and this is a service that can generally only be provided by the big guns and a token smattering of a select few enterprising farmers.

Gorman’s conclusion is that whilst he just about managed coast to coast with only one corporate petrol station payment and one burger that only made a brief foray into his stomach before rejection his journey was far from easy and like as not would be impossible in ten years time.  Big John’s idea of doing a similar thing in Britain I suspect would be beset with many similar problems especially through the more industrialised sections of the country, however owing to the smaller distances I imagine the refuelling would be less of a problem.  This should not make us be complacent about it, what has happened in America has frequently over the last 50 years translated itself over here in time as the culture melds itself into the hegemony and the businesses seek greater influences in the market.  Most of the time the smaller independent businesses survive now where there is far less economic viability as the great corporate entities are uninterested in the service ethos unless it carries a hefty profit worth their while.

There is therefore a real danger of Britain becoming awash with such uniformity, it already reminds me of the America in which I lived 18 years ago and not in a good way.  But can we really be surprised?  One cannot expect businesses to reign themselves in because they have become too successful.  Whilst the marketeers may talk about competition and freedom of choice being the ideal these do not make good business sense as much as having a monopoly on the market and the ability to keep overheads low and profits high, it is as if the competition phase is the fiscal capitalist revolutionary stage necessary to facilitate the vultures from picking off the corpses of the dead and the dying in order to facilitate their subsequent dominance.

Ironically when one looks at which ideology demands pureity and uniformity both racially, culturally and socially I think these are normally things associated with the right rather than the left so why is it still the perception that capitalism provides for a wealth of choice whilst any alternatives are the road to guaranteed totalitarian adherence and conformity?  For this one has to look at the great propaganda victory of the multi-nationals who now have us thinking that we have a mass of choice when actually we merely have a variety of ways to have the same thing and these are dictated by the middle men themselves.  The providers are squeezed in order that corporations can buy their raw materials for as low a price as possible and we are forced to pay the prices they want us to, whilst led to believe they are doing us a favour in doing so.

Go back to your shopping lists people and prepare for markets and local shops and local produce, it is the only way to make the stand.

Song Of The Day ~ Squeeze – Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)

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Gunning For Trouble – Future Shocks Part 15

Filed under: Future Shocks, Political — 2 Comments
August 26, 2007

As Liverpool mourns the death of an 11 year old boy, shot by another teenage boy on a bike the politicians are quick to come forward to claim they have the answer and will be implementing a series of strategies, the opposition claim in fact they have the answer and will implement a load of different strategies. Forgive my cynicism but I fail to see either of their chosen paths particularly relevent.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith thinks that a border force will stop people and guns from getting in. I’m sure that the Home Office is not at all jumping on the chance to slip some more anti-immigration legislation through tacked to some rhetoric about it being designed to get guns off our streets.

Conservative leader David Cameron’s answer is to give tax breaks to married couples, amounting most likely to around £20 a week. How they can see this as a panacea one can only speculate. I don’t know if they have really studied the figures or whether they, like Labour, have chosen to tailor make the problem to fit the solution they already wish to put in place anyway. Do they really feel that children from 2 parent families will never offend and that the culture that exists today will go away if parents are given a spare tenner each of a week. This is utter lunacy. I have a suspicion that many of the statistics that the Tories use come from a comparison that transcends local boundaries. Middle class children are less likely to offend, this is because their parents are often able to give them activities, a breadth of experience, some realistic chance of an education and employment not merely the fact that there may be 2 parents still together. It is true that a dual parent income may well enable a different upbringing but if the state provides things as it should be doing this fact will become an irrelevance.

The actual context of this area of Liverpool stems from the rivalry between the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Crew. This part of the city is pretty characterised by sink housing, unemployment, poverty and under-investment. There is little or no infrastructure in these areas nothing for children to do, same old story as in cities across the country. When the news crews did talk to Local councillors the message was clear that they didn’t feel that investment was coming in the area, and this combined with and contributed to a lack of education and jobs. Children from empoverished parents, and it doesn’t matter in this environment whether it be one or two parents present, see large sums of money and kudos changing hands in the gang and drug culture is it any wonder that it is a lure for some. Furthermore there is widespread evidence that those who choose not to get involved are persecuted as outsiders. This sort of peer pressure is already rife in children of these impressionable ages, if all your friends are dealing drugs and making money and carrying weapons…

A recent survey stated that Liverpool and Manchester were the easiest places in the country to get firearms. Whilst still a comparitively new and shocking phenomenon it is clear that this sort of crime is on the rise. As a whole crime remains in a slight downward trend over the long-term but in the short-term violent crime is increasing especially in specific city areas.

Children this age feel they are invincible, this is nothing new, we have all been there, the consequences of actions simply do not happen to us, statistics and warnings are only for those on paper. Kids used to go out mugging when I was growing up, occasionally they’d have got hold of a piece of wood or a flick knife, this was relatively common in the shit parts of West London I grew up in. Guns were pretty much confined to the US and the big boys. There weren’t a lot of guns on the streets but the mentality was there to use them of they were. The idea of carrying to protect oneself was a normal gambit for many I knew who carried knives. I carried one until someone made it clear to me that if you carry it you have to be prepared to use it and after pondering on this a while I decided I probably wouldn’t be.

Every now and again such an example will be deemed so terrible that it makes national headlines, but the events in cities such as Nottingham and parts of London barely make a ripple these days. Gun crime may be extreme but these days only murders tend to make the national news and it is generally put down to gang crime. People are shot with increasing regularity and kids are amongst the dead and wounded all the time.

When this does make the news we have a seeming scrum to offer opinions before 2 days later it has all died down. What is going on in the interim time before the next story? It would apear not a great deal. A policy being floated now is that witnesses will be compelled to give evidence and police claim, as always, that they will protect them. Their record on this is not good. This fails to take account of the fact that it is not cool to be a grass and those who are perceived to be so, whether or not there is any foundation in the accusation, are often beaten up, ostracised, mistrusted etc. Add to this the fact that if you are the wrong colour in the wrong place at the wrong time the police will stop and search or randomly arrest, this happens daily to black and asian youths alike depending on which area you are in and whom the police feel is the greatest threat. A culture of hating the police for their bigotry, harrassment and racism is becoming more and more engrained. This is not a environment conducive to obtaining information and whilst it persists the police will always be fighting a rearguard action.

A big deal has been made of the fact that the parents responsible for young offenders didn’t know where they were when they were committing the crimes. I know full well that when I was younger and went to school on my own on the bus I had the opportunity to get into trouble which I sometimes took and my Mother was not aware of where I was at a specific moment in time because she relied on good faith that I was getting the bus into school as I had been told. Should she have never let me out of her sight, I don’t believe this would have been good for my upbringing or self-reliance or social interaction.

It is being cited that central to this issue is that of home life but to my mind that is largely missing the point. Children do not spend all their time at home nor should they do so. We have to keep a healthy balance between allowing our children progressive freedom in order to face the outside world and facing the people in it and keeping them safe. Were our streets to be safe now we would have far less worry. The lack of social cohesion is always going to bite us in the arse and if we do not tackle this then no money, tax breaks or more plod is going to make much difference.

Looking at the youth as an entity is like holding up a mirror to our future. If we do not want things to escalate as they have done in the US where gun crime is far more normal then we must act now to give young people inclusion and a stake in the community in which they live. You cannot expect them to care for people or places when they have grown up in a culture that sees them only as a nuisance and to be locked up after the sun goes down. To my mind there should be a form of national service, it should be gender agnostic and put school leavers of 16 to work for 2 years and leavers of 18 for 1 year if going to University/Technical College (it is important not to favour merely the academic as this is not the only form of education) or 18 months if they are not going into some form of tertiary education. No buts, no exemptions. The work should be in hospitals, youth clubs, old folks homes, drying out hostels, nurseries. Everyone should get the chance to try these things out it is good for the community and good for the individual.

It can be achieved, even in this modern world but the will has to be there and at present that is open to question. Canada is right next to the US and yet it does not have the same level of gun crime as the US despite gun ownership being of similar proportion. If you invest with this in mind you are taking care of the future, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. But it has to be an integrated policy and it has to be continuous, there is no quick fix and there never will be. Until we start to address this we will watch young people kill themselves.

Song Of The Day ~Gary Numan & Tubeway Army – Are Friends Electric?

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How To Hoodwink A Population – Future Shocks Part 14 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Political — Leave a comment
August 27, 2006

I got an email from my twin the other day. She asked me whether I thought the timing of the current alert level in the UK regarding the perceived terrorist threat was too coincidental to be plausible, I thought by the tone of her message that she might be afraid that she was presenting some wildly speculative conspiracy theory. I answered that I felt she had read the situation quite correctly and I felt that if you were to take the film The Matrix as an allegorical story about the flow of general news and information across the Western world then I think it would portray things pretty acurately.

In addition to that recently I saw a news article that the police were issuing “unprecedented amounts of information regarding the recently arrested terror suspects.” I heard the information, much of it seeemed to relate to “possession of articles useful for preparing acts of terrorism” including instructions (no further qualifying information given) and maps, including maps of Afghanistan (no further qualifying information was given.) Now bearing in mind I have a copy of the Anarchist cookbook and a large 200 page atlas, I also possess the same information they have carted others off for. So if they want a reason to bang you up now, all they need is potential, this is no longer just some lunatic paranoid conspiracy theory it is exactly what they are doing, this to me spells one clear thing if they want to get you you’re fucked, after all who doesn’t have a map, some sugar, some bleach, or a can of petrol in the car? They still can’t determine what you’re thinking but they can lock you up just in case you might be thinking something they don’t want you to think.

Instrumental in this is the way it is all handled in the media, it is the frog and a pan of water analogy. Drop a frog into a pan of boiling water and the frog wriggles and writhes and dies in pain. However put a frog in a pan of cold water and heat the pan and the frog doesn’t notice the change in temperature and dies without a struggle. Were all the information presented to us in one go many would put 2 and 2 together, this cannot be alllowed to happen so it is trickled like the sand from the escape tunnels in the pocket of the POWs is sprinkled down the trouser leg into the yard. The proof of this is that if you present people with factual information about just how bad things have got they simply will not believe you, because they cannot conceive that such things would happen without them noticing.

The control of the flow of information and the desire to exercise social control by propaganda and tacit brainwashing is nothing new. The Nazis use of it is well-documented but increasingly less-taught, perhaps because through its teaching one would see the inevitable parallels. You might think that just rhetoric and sensationalistically extreme but I would suggest you look at the rise of a man called Alfred Hugenberg and his control of the German media in the 1920s-30s. If you cannot see the parallels between him and someone like Rupert Murdoch or Sylvio Berlusconi (the worst but by no means the only people to use their influence to attempt to brainwash the public to their own subjective view of reality.) then I would be very surprised indeed.

An example of how this media whitewash has been used is the way our parents and grandparents were subjected to was the treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. It is very widely reported the key to the crisis was Kennedy’s standing firm in the face of Soviet threat to the Free World and how he made the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev back down. This just simply isn’t true, it neglects to mention that the Soviet claim for the citing of the missiles was in fact the protection of Cuba from the United States, after all under Kennedy’s presidency the US had already attempted to perpetrate a coup d’etat in the Bay Of Pigs incident in 1961. One must remember that if this claim to be providing missiles as defence rather than as an aggressive act does not stand up to scrutiny then the US was just as guilty having placed its missiles to “protect” the United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey. In fact the US was far more the aggressor of the time since it possessed over 300 land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to the USSR’s 6 and overall according to the National Resources Defense Council’s Archive of Nuclear Data the US had 27,297 warheads to the USSR’s 3,332.

It was in fact the Soviets, principally Khrushchev who ensured that no retaliatory action was taken by Cuban forces against the aggressive US tactic of low-flying aircraft over Cuban territory seemingly in an attempt to provoke the first armed response. Khrushchev’s mistake was that in return for his decision to have the Cuban missile bases decommissioned the US withdrawal from Turkey was not widely publicised saving Kennedy the embarrassment of the climb-down. This failure ultimately led to Khrushchev’s removal from power 2 years later because the rest of the politburo felt that the propaganda war had been won by the US.

More recently the media propaganda situation has had to become more clinical, more systemic so much so that many people take it all for granted without questioning the legitimacy of the sources of information. We have news 24 hours a day but that does not mean we have all the news, we are reliant on certain key stations controlled by a very small number of organisations, the control must be absolute because it is no use trying to create fervour if the evidence from certain quarters contradicts it. These days you will find very little conflicting news.

After all if one charts major world events over the last five years they have gone something like this:

11/9/2001 World Trade Centre attacks. The US administration decides very quickly that since Al Qaeda have used training camps in Afghanistan, the Taliban are responsible for 9/11 and that gave the US carte blanche to exercise its “right” to a regime change. (Neither the fact that these camps had been setup with CIA funds, nor anything to do with the Caspian Oil Gas pipeline were mentioned.) After the Taliban had been removed from Kabul and a regime had been installed with a ‘safe pair of hands’ the US sought to turn its attention elsewhere knowing that the objectives for going into Afghanistan had been accomplished. Hamid Karzai’s election passed off with little fuss, no mention was made of the fact that in 1996/97 he was a consultant to American oil company Unocal on the US$2 billion project of a certain oil and gas pipeline between Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Caspian pipeline. Interestingly much of the traffic of this pipeline is designed to provide support for the Dabhol power plant near Mumbai, designed to provide up to 20% of India’s energy needs and majority owned by Enron. You can see one might be forgiven for thinking that it is the same names cropping up again and again.

I do not think the 11th of Sept attacks were a conspiracy or the organisation behind them a fabrication this would be historical revisionism but I do believe the US government made what it wanted to out of them, after all they strung the war on terror out to include a nation that had previously nothing to do with Al Queda or the 11th Sept attacks simply because they wanted to remove a guy they put in charge in the first place. (No mention was made at the time of UN resolution 1441 that US President George W. Bush had already long since decided that it was a question of when rather than if the US would invade Iraq, and according to his Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill despite there not being any evidence of WMDs, Bush’s resolve was firm that it would be done whatever. No mention was made of Saddam Hussein’s past links with the CIA).

During the height of the Northern Ireland conflict only an idiot would have thought that because there were bombs going off in England that all Irishmen were terrorists and yet this is the logic applied currently, that Islam is a violent religion and by extension all Muslims have a guilt by association tag. And yet another example of the subjective presentation of events does come out of the Irish case because whilst globally the vast majority will know something of the IRA and the republican actions, only those far more involved would be able to name loyalist paramilitaries or the political parties that represent them. Ian Paisley, a supposed man of the cloth, is allowed to peddle his ideology of hate and intolerance whilst any foot out of line on the other side results in politician and media frenzy.

I do believe that Iraq had WMDs at least it had possessed them within the 10 years leading up to the US invasion, whether or not they had already been used is another question but to my mind the smoking gun the US was allegedly looking for was something they held all along, namely the invoices to the weapons they themselves and their allies had sold. The US had shown little interest in the welfare of the Iraqi people when Saddam was massacring Kurds, nor did they leap to help the Iraqi resistance in 1991 when uprisings around Basra and the Southern provinces were brutally crushed.

Now after the toppling of the secular Saddam and the leaving of an Iraq in no fit state to resist the US takeover of infrastructure and oil distribution, the US looks around for someone else and suddenly the Syrians are “sponsoring terrorism”, but it’s too soon after Iraq and they can’t quite get the troops together and there’s this public outcry so that dies down for a bit but wait, the Iranians are developing nuclear technology and this could mean they’ll have a bomb, but that just doesn’t seem to capture the imagination of the other major nations, they aren’t buying it Russia and China are standing firm, and lo, miraculously Hizbollah come out of the woodwork after Lebannon has been stable for years and there’s talk of Syria getting involved and now finally they’ve got a proper scrap in the Middle East.

There is little analysis as to what is causing the problem in the this conflict, little criticism of the role of Israel, often the aggressor, whilst Hizbollah are subjected to widespread vitriolic condemnation. it can only be a matter of time before an individual in Hizbollah is singled out as the most evil person since… (notice also that the list of comparitive evil epitomes does not include certain people like Suharto, Pinochet, Kissinger, Nixon etc.) Nothing creates crazed frenzy and panic like a good old fashioned apocalyptic threat at home, that really galvanises people to hate the bad guy, proper pogromic lynch mob hysteria that is.

So I guess that’s a yes I do think the current terror alert in the UK rather conveniently timed. After all how can it be that the really big terrorist acts get through with no intelligence and yet capriciously timed others are found out, and strangely made public very quickly. Surely you would want people to remain calm, business to continue as usual, you’d keep it under wraps until it had been fully investigated and picked apart. In addition to this whilst it is claimed that security is on high alert across the country’s airports it is not especially evident in anything other than irritating bureaucracy and ridiculous rules and hand luggage. Perimeter fences remain easy areas to get to with full views of runways and the discovery of a 12 year old boy who got through all the security checks without even having any travel documents does not seem to backup the government and police assertions.

The trouble is we are rarely made privy to the intelligence they claim to base a lot of these alerts on, it is very wooley and non-specific and a raft of knee-jerk legislation usually follows, accompanied by much outcry and yet passed through the legislature just the same. This is the government of the state of constant heightened alert. If one takes the perception of the world at large and in particular that of the safety of people and property there is a perception that crime against the person is sufficiently on the increase to make people feel insecure in their own homes. Where has this perception come from? By and large most people find out about crime through their neighbours and the media. Since communities are being increasingly eroded the reliance on the media seems likely to become almost the only source of information.

If you listen to the government around election time they will tell you that crime is going down and has been for their tenure, they will in turn quote statistics to prove it whilst the opposition will look at the statistics for individual crimes and single out the ones that are going up. However when it comes around to the time of passing repressive home office legislation the government are quick to single out the upturn in certain types of crimes so as to make you afraid enough not to question their decision to further erode your civil rights. Since the opposition are just as right-wing as the government their critique is that the legislation doesn’t go far enough.

In the UK at the moment anyone would be forgiven for thinking that up until the last 5 years there was no such thing as anti-social behaviour and that we have seen this sudden surge in crime committed by an evil youth element. (No mention is made as to the lack of social spending focused on people between the ages of 10-16.)

Contrary to what the mass media might have you believe, Raymond Kelly, Commissioner of the NYPD says that crime overall is down 12% in the US and down 65% in New York. This is not to say that there are not genuine problems, gun crime amongst the young is emotive and shocking but hardly widespread which is why events like Columbine create national and international headlines. Interestingly the lobby who will campaign that there is too much sex and violence on our TVs never protest at the morbid fascination that the media has with real-life tragedy such as Columbine, after all they choose to see it as the vindication of their idea and not as could be suggested the propagation of the problem.

Yes you can switch off the TV, or not read the newspapers, but equally then you will not know what the masses are being fed and it is therefore more difficult to counteract it. The advent of digital cameras and blogging will undoubtedly lead to greater independence in the recording of information, albeit from many different subjective sources, but to determine what is the news is often easier than one thinks. Firstly disregard the pap, the celebrity shite, gossip and such bollocks, this is not news, it is noise. Secondly ask yourself who is doing the telling and what they may want to achieve by putting a particular point of view forward. Thirdly find a source of information that is diametrically opposed to the first source you found and compare the information they gave. Think of it in the sense of a football game. The news is who played and who won, if you ask 2 fans on opposing sides they will tell you many different things about events of the game but they will both tell you the same result because that part of the report is fact. The rest is conjecture.

If people fail to finally realise the processed homogenised information that is being fed to them then Orwell’s vision of 1984 becomes ever more real only with far more technological instruments than Orwell could ever have envisaged. After all, news published on websites, how many people have the power to check if what is there 1 week after an event is what was reported originally on the actual day?

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”
-George Orwell

Song Of The Day ~ Zero 7 feat. Sia Furler – You’re My Flame

Original Comments:


kevin g made this comment,
Took me a while to read your entry, but I understand your point. Control of the media is a tool as you supply the facts/statistics you “feel” the public needs to know. But the public are just as much sheep as they let on to be. I know far too many “patriotic”/flag waving fellow citizens who really have no clue of what’s going on outside the US! It’s funny that I posted a bunch of The The lyrics in an entry, as I was hoping to drive the point home, the relevance, as the songs were from the 1980’s and related much more to 2006, though I guess I didn’t make an impact, as you are surely to do. Thanks.
-Redbaron responds – Hi Kevin, I appreciate your patience and committment wading through what turned into something of a marathon. The public are sheep, but it is important for every one of us to keep speaking up against the force majeure. Besides anyone else who quotes The The lyrics deserves to have their message heard. Which song did you use? Heartland/Angel Of Deception?

comment added :: 27th August 2006, 17:01 GMT+01

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Jeux Sans Frontières – Future Shocks – Part 13 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
May 21, 2006

“No-one doubts the need for immigration controls, but it would be immoral to deport those already here that our economy depends on” -Jack Dromey Deputy General Secretary T&GWU (BBC article)

I am pleased that at least in part someone is finally questioning this ‘consensus’ on immigration and asylum. It is however only a moderate critique from within and I have to put forward 2 points of order here.

Firstly I do doubt the need for immigration controls. I guess it depends on your definition of need. It depends on what you see as a priority – whether it is people or possession. It seems to be an accepted fact that we cannot just have no control for this would open the floodgates and this is not a good thing. This is an interesting assumption, perhaps based at best partially on fact, there is after all no questioning that without any immigration control there would be more people seeking to live in this country. But I thought capitalism was about competition? Surely the competition for labour would in fact be good for business, it would streamline the workforce in a very Darwinist way. I am not saying that is a good thing from my perspective, I am simply pointing out that there is an anomaly when it comes to this isolationism rather like when it comes to the ‘Free Market’ which is in fact merely a series of trade tariffs and barriers to protect the rich countries from being undercut by the poorer ones.

The EU, or principally France has the Common Agricultural Policy, one of the biggest pieces of economic protectionism outside the US and what accounts for around 50% of the total EU budget. To illustrate the point even fellow EU countries that depend heavily on agriculture like Poland are not subject to the same protection as the French so it is a case of protectionism within protectionism. This does kind of pale into comparison with the US which has tariffs on almost anything of strategic importance and it uses political pressure to bring to bear weight on many other things. The US thinks nothing about forcing trade down routes that it controls or will profit from.

This is not strictly a post about trade, but it is a post about inequity and contradiction and expounding some myths that we tend to take for granted and the Western World’s idea of free trade is certainly a good example of that.

The second point of order to Mr Drobey’s comment is the economic premise that were there to be an amnesty (which is not going to happen but it is a point of debate) that the illegal workers currently employed within these borders would continue to be as much an asset to our economy as they currently are. This, I’m afraid is romantic idealism. The very reason illegal workers are employed here, just as there are so many Mexicans and other illegal aliens in the US is that these workers are not subject to the same legal protection offered to legitimate employees. They are not subject to the minimum wage standards nor national insurance or pension provision. This is clearly not the choice of the workers but that of the employers who can circumvent a great deal of red tape and save themselves a great deal of money both in the payment of paltry wages and the avoidance of insurance payments for every worker. Furthermore they are able to exploit worker productivity as workers can be sacked easily or threatened with being reported to the authorities if they do not tow the line.

The worker’s very disenfranchisement is their sole usefulness to the employers. Were any amnesty to be contemplated not only would employers prepared to take on illegal staff be potentially exposed but their cut-price labour would also be under-threat. If such an amnesty were put into place the workers as part of the amnesty would have lost what made them employable in the first place. There is every chance some may find new legitimate jobs but it would not stop the illegal trade in labour. Firms relying on low-paid workers would either go out of business or simply employ new illegal staff.

To stop illegal immigration it must be done at source and thus you must assess just what it is that causes it in the first place. On the one hand there is the intention of the immigrant. If one chooses to see an artificial differentiation between political or economic migrant one is distracted by a common smokescreen, it is an irrelevance the difference is merely in the detail and the source of persecution. The intent of the migrant is to seek a better life. No-one doubts the merit of the human desire to strive for self-improvement and yet in this case politicians and the media appear to be in complete denial of its existence or the force with which it can propel people. The greater the adversity the greater the hardship people are prepared to endure to alleviate suffering. To assume that by trying to stop people coming in we remove their reasons for uprooting is lunacy. The best way to stop people wishing to leave their homes is to make their homes places in which they are happy to stay.

If the richer countries were compelled to distribute their wealth to provide the same quality of life to the poorer nations as they enjoy themselves there would be far less immigration because there would be far less danger and dissatisfaction in countries of origin.

The second party in the illegal immigration is less to do with latent human self-advancement and self-protection and more to do with greed. Those that profit from the trafficking or slavery of people exploit misery, suffering and desperation for their own ends. And yet precious little money is spent by governments on stamping out these people, certainly a minute fraction compared with what is spent on preventing the individual immigrants from getting into or settling in countries. There are many companies that seek to increase profits by reducing overheads and reducing labour costs illegally is one way of doing so.

You can contrast the illegal labour situation with many criminal trades. Take the drug trade as one example. If you choose to apply the law primarily to users you may seek or even partially succeed in removing part of the market but you do nothing to reduce supply or potential new customers. If you focus only on the supply chain you may reduce the supply but not the demand. Efforts must be dual-focused to reduce the dependence on drugs thus tackling demand whilst at the same time removing the profitability of the drug trade and remove those that benefit the most from it thus tackling the supply.

Were borders to remain the immigration problem could only be tackled in the same two-pronged way. The only way I could see this happening and being a viable long-term policy is a sustained period of investment by the rich to redress the balance of global wealth coupled with a complete dismantling of all borders. The two must go hand in hand because the dismantling of the borders would act as a perfect incentive for countries to make damn sure that they do invest in poorer countries or else they may be faced with the sort of flood of immigration they have always been hyping up and predicting.

However were the borders to be taken down entirely, people’s concept of the space they have control or interest over becomes very different, as does the amount of people they feel represent a threat to their influence. Over time people’s notion of country will diminish and with it the sort of ridiculous patriotism so synonymous with it. Likewise the affinity they feel with people will be more confined to local issues and loyalties which tend to be more pragmatic. There would be no need for monarchies, duchies etc. People would be more likely to ensure that equality is taken on a local basis, it would be in their best interests to do so.

What is the actual foundation of national borders? What is there to say that they should remain in perpetuity? In fact taking Europe as but one example if we look at the shift in borders even over the last 100 years it proves the fluidity. After all whilst some islands consider themselves separate nation states, others form conglomerates either by diplomacy or military intervention. On a larger land mass like Eurasia there is no basis for divisions it is an arbitrary concept. The boundaries cross natural borders just as they often cross over traditional tribal boundaries. Along with religion these man-made constructed borders have caused some of the greatest strife of humanity and are still the basis of wars and bloodshed across the globes. These boundaries separate peoples as well as natural resources, they deprive some just as they endow others. The removal of these borders would be indeed an anarchic proposition and it would bring about the wholesale destruction of large-scale government in favour of more local representation. How this would work I do not know, I do not know if it could work entirely without some regional umbrella co-ordinating cross locality trades but the very dismantling of these borders would bring about a paradigm shift in the way we see ourselves and our place in the society around us. Living as we do in countries defined as large-scale land masses with populations of millions or billions we cannot fail to see ourselves as insignificant and unimportant. If however we were to judge ourselves based on our place within family or local groupings we would automatically see ourselves as having considerably more influence.

In fact the removal of borders is not entirely in the realms only of anarchist fantasy. The Benelux countries have for some time had an open border policy with one another and this has extended to the Schengen group of countries within the EU. The reason these countries feel able to do this is because they feel there is not a threat of people from within this group of countries immigrating en masse. It is therefore seen that the political and economic stability prevents the need for emigration. Were this to be replicated on a much wider scale it stands to reason that more borders could be removed.

I’ll grant you this is a long-term strategy, and one could not expect many of those currently in power to give it up willingly nor for people who have been educated and brought up under capitalism to be able to embrace a communal way of living overnight. For many years I wondered how on earth the anarchist principle of no borders could possibly work when actually that is not the important question at all. Not knowing how something is done does not make it impossible anymore than it makes it less interesting or valid to analyse. The crucial question in this instance is should or shouldn’t it be done? If one cannot think up any cogent reasons for not tearing down the borders, and by cogent reasons I mean ones that are of benefit to the vast majority not simply the rich minority, then it follows that this is a good proposal to strive to implement, therefore to write it off because we don’t know what comes next is mindless reactionary conservatism. I heard a former Conservative MP talk about how the Conservative party had changed the course of people in Britain by giving many people something to conserve, it became crystal clear that he could only think in materialistic terms and that those devoid of vast wealth or material possession could only be in the state of wanting vast wealth and material possession. What are the reasons for having borders if we really think about it?

Imagine there’s no countries,
It isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace…

Of course the song goes on “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…” Quite.

Song Of The Day ~ John Lennon – Imagine

Original Comments:


Tabacco made this comment,
RB:
I commented the following at my blog. You reduced the whole subject of Amnesty to its bare essentials:

BRILLIANTLY PHRASED BY THE RED BARON

Jeux Sans Frontières – Future Shocks – Part 13 http://redbaron.blog-city.com/jeux_sans_frontieres .htm

“The worker’s very disenfranchisement is their sole usefulness to the employers. Were any amnesty to be contemplated not only would employers prepared to take on illegal staff be potentially exposed but their cut-price labour would also be under-threat. If such an amnesty were put into place the workers as part of the amnesty would have lost what made them employable in the first place.”

Read the entire Article at website above.

Tabacco

comment added :: 21st May 2006, 17:30 GMT+01 :: http://tabacco.blog-city.com/

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Safe As Houses – Future Shocks – Part 12 (Orig. posted Blog City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
March 26, 2006

(I decided to rename my series “Future Shock”, had more of a punchy feel to it than “Looking to the Future”, not that I’m pandering to tabloidesque sensationalist headlining or anything you understand!)

So, having had the ‘must buy your house’ idea spoon-fed to us for years and despite the mass repossesion crisis in the late 80s because of the slow-down in the housing market and the rise in interest rates the rate of repossessions is now up 15% and rising. The problem is particularly acute in Ulster and other areas where personal debt is high amongst the working class and lower middle class. Areas where the differential in what can and can’t be bought with a standard workers pay packet is greatest.

You did not have to be an economist to see this one coming. House prices have been rising disproportionately to income for some years forcing people to take out larger mortgages of a higher multiple of their salaries. We have seen the raising of the normal 3.5x annual income as a general rule to anything up to 8x annual income and mortgage periods grow from 25 years to anything up to 50 years. For most the prospect of buying a house is subject to being able to use both family incomes.

Now whilst it is easy to judge in this situation and question the prudence of people taking out such financially punitive agreements one must first look at the fact that house prices in areas like London have gone up by so much as to be unaffordable by any other means. Even in SE London, traditionally the cheaper end a two bedroom flat will still cost you over £150,000. Now you would have to be earning close to £50,000 to be able to buy that under the old rules and most people earning £50k are not the sort of people looking to live in a 2 bedroom terraced in Catford. Furthermore most of the keyworkers: teachers, nurses, fire-fighters, ambulance workers and the like probably will struggle to earn half that amount. It is a well-known fact that fire-fighters in the London area who work 4 days on 3 days off shifts will sleep in the fire station whilst on-shift, then returning to their homes outside London when off. They do this because they cannot afford to buy homes for themselves and their families in London.

As a result people have been forced out of the cities and the surrounding areas prices have in turn risen. Add to this commuter costs etc. and already the problem becomes self-evident. As an alternative to this one can elect to rent (or if you cannot afford a house or have a poor credit rating you are forced to rent) of course renting is not immune from the house price lottery because if people are renting houses out and forced to pay higher monthly mortgage payments they must raise the rents, in turn those who have lower mortgage payments having bought their houses some time ago see the opportunity to make some extra cash and thus the prices rise.

There is another factor here as well, the local council tax, which is a blanket poll tax not charged on an individual or household’s ability to pay, nor even on the local ammenities that a household may receive, is levied based on the value of the property. With property prices inflated the councils are reassessing tax based on the current market value of a house and because the bands are smaller at the lower values the council taxes are rising more for those who can afford it least. This has a fundamental flaw because much like when the Poll Tax was brought in to replace Rates people are going to be expected to pay a great deal more money without any difference in service provision and without a thought for how they were expected to pay the extra. When the Poll Tax was introduced I lived at home with my Mother and Stepfather in a 2 bedroom house. Our rates were approximately £400 annually which seemed pretty fair since we lived in a village with 1 bus a day, no shops, and only refuse collection as a council service. The Poll Tax bill came in at £400 per person and meant £1200 for the household. Longrider writes that he feels punished by the prospected raising in Council Tax assessment values and obviously it is easy to see why. When ones house value goes up it would be a mistake to presume this constitutes in any way an amelioration of income. Naturally were one to sell said house it may be worth substantially more money than one originally paid for it but then so are all the other houses one might be thinking of buying.

As with any flat tax the council tax is based on an unfair premise that somehow one can levy taxation at an arbitrary rate. In this case it is the value of the house that people live in. Of course this neglects to take into any consideration whether the people living in said house are owner-occupiers, 2nd home owners or merely tenants. Whilst it is clear that a rise in house prices does not necessarily benefit owner-occupiers it is in fact quite detrimental to tenants who are likely to see rises in rent coupled with rises in council tax despite this being in no way linked to any changes in income.

The upper and upper middle classes who are better placed to invest in property have now for some time chosen to sink their money into this rather than more traditional savings methods as the buoyancy of the housing market has been seen as offering good capital return. This has meant many more buy to let mortgages as investors have bought houses for their children at university or simply as a means of income. With the pensions system at the moment in a parlous state it is small wonder that many have chosen the property market as their method of safeguarding their future. However many people do not have the initial capital to sink into such investments and therefore once again the deficit between the well-off and comfortably off and badly off widens.

Legislation in this country favours the property owner over the property dweller. As a tenant you can delay the issue but very rarely do anything about things such as eviction orders. Any rent commissions will only be able to assess rental values based on equivalent rents in equivalent properties all of which are inflated. With utilities in private hands there is no control over bills which have risen astronomically over the last few years. For a 2/3 bedroom house outside London you can now expect to pay £500 per month in rent, add to this £100 for council tax, £30 for gas, £30 for electricity, £30 for water, then there’ll be the phone bill which will be around £25 for line rental . This is £715 so far without having paid for any food and clothing and all the other assorted sundries. That translates to £8580 per year net, and add likely associated costs and you have more than £10,000 annual expenditure for the most cautious of households. That translates to around £15k minimum gross income needed just for subsistence survival, now if you take that down to its hourly rate (based on a 40 hour week) that is £7.21/ hour. At present the minimum wage in Britain is £5.05 per hour for workers aged 22 years and older (*£4.25 per hour for workers aged 18 – 21 years inclusive, £3 per hour which for all workers under the age of 18). It does not take a degree in economics to see that if you are losing 25% per hour that this translates to a massive shortfall week on week and year on year. Rents and other costs do not take into consideration what income you are on.

If childcare is added into the mix it makes the situation far more difficult. I used to pay £50 a week for 1 of my children to do 2 half day sessions at nursery a week. Bear in mind this means more than £1 an hour on a working week, and most parents who are forced to work full-time will pay far more than this. Financially-speaking I was not able to afford for my children to go to nursery any more than the 2 sessions whilst it was equally financially impossible for my ex to return to work because it was unlikely she would be earning more than the childcare costs alone.

I firmly believe that one of the reasons that the birth rate in this country and many other EU countries is going down is because of the financial implications of children on many of the couples that might traditionally have families. For example many couples on medium to low incomes have been forced to combine their incomes in order to afford a mortgage. This means the shortfall in income of one partner for a number of months is simply not viable if mortgage payments are to be met. Maternity payments do exist but only generally for people who have been in a company for a number of years, the remainder of mothers will either get incapacity benefit or be expected to live off their partner’s income.

I could go on about families not being able to afford the unpaid parental leaves to allow father’s to spend time with their children etc. etc. etc but I think the point is already made about what a profound effect the housing situaion has on the demographics of the population at large. It would be easy to think that house ownership has always been the norm but in fact in the time of Charles Dickens even the comfortable middle classes would have rented, some of them and the upper classes may have had family seats that had been passed down but certainly amongst those that had to live off income derived from their labour it would have been fairly unheard of to own a house.

It was to house these people that council housing was invented so that all people had the right to live in security. Sadly greed has resulted in a mass council house sell-off fundamentally started by Thatcher in the 1980s but continued by Labour albeit through slighty more covertly by handing over the rights to private companies. However one felt aboutt hat sell-off at the time the fact is that this was a case of short-termism in the extreme. As councils do not anymore have housing to offer the disenfranchised and dispossessed they will remain in temporary hostels, young people will be forced to remain in the family home for longer and couples will struggle to have a mortgage and children and forced to choose one or the other.

At the time of the initial sell-off one can reasonably argue that those in council housing were largely those that needed to be so, however no such guarantee exists anymore and in popular areas, in particular the metropolitan areas, prices of housing has risen to levels far beyond the reach of those for whom the council housing system was designed to protect.

In conclusion then the knock-on effect purely in the housing crisis is a drop in the birth rates, an absence of key-workers, an increase in the homeless, an increase in the number of tenants in rented accommodation, an increase in those living in temporary housing such as B+Bs and hostels, an increase in houses being reposessed at any increase in interest rates, an increase in 2nd housing used for renting out and holiday accomodation by the more wealthy thus fractionalising communities. I can’t see these consequences being positive for any except the most well-off and they have quite enough advantages already. Whilst one expects the Conservative government of the 1980s to have pandered to the well-off, history will show unfortunately that the 1997-2010 Labour government only furthered the cause of the wealthy and simply added a small handful of people to the plutocracy whilst the majority starved.

Song Of The Day – Mistral – The Wanderer

Original Comments:


The Capt. made this comment,
Red Baron: It’s amazing how the two countries mirror each other. You are on POINT! I think a global revolution is in store for the world, coming from those of the working and middle class jointly setting the agenda. There is power there that hasn’t been `self realized’, but it’s gonna come. Folks better get ready.
The Capt.

-Redbaron responds – I sincerely hope you’re right Capt. I fail to see how continuing in the current vein can have a beneficial effect on most of the population of the world and therefore something has to give.-

comment added :: 29th March 2006, 17:31 GMT+01 :: http://thecapt.blog-city.com
john made this comment,
“With the pensions system at the moment in a parlous state it is small wonder that many have chosen the property market as their method of safeguarding their future”…Until they are forced to sell what they have spent a lifetime trying to own when local authorities grab their homes to pay for their residential care in old age. Very interesting post Baron.
-Redbaron responds – Yes indeed it is quite a quandry to which the only answer I can see is for the State to control and administer both housing and care, this way there is no carrot and stick approach where the carrot is taken away just on the point of being captured as there is now.-

comment added :: 31st March 2006, 15:43 GMT+01 :: http://bigjohn.blog-city.com

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Alienation – Future Shocks – Part 11 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
February 10, 2006

The other section hell bent on homogenising our daily lives are the industrialists who think nothing of turning high streets into a thing of the past in preference of the out of town retail park option. Such places tend to be synonymous with the same shop in the same place stocking the same goods. Naturally they do not do this for the good of the consumer, there are tangible business reasons for such a policy. Distribution is generally a lot better with the retail parks being on main roads often near arterial dual carriageways, ring roads and motorways, this means large lorries can easily access and thus maximise the loads that can be carried at any one time reducing the companies costs. In addition to this the transportation costs are borne by the employees and the customers rather than companies having to obtain parking in areas where property costs are high as they may have done previously. Customers are wooed by the prospect of a number of larger shops with greater selection in the one area, meals are catered for and this is all part of ensuring that people “make a day of it”

The effects of such a change are more far-reaching than we might have thought. It is indisputable that modern life has little or no community element to it and the shopping experience is another area where the previously more social way of doing things is replaced by a more insulat one. Most people will travel to retail parks by car rather than by communal public transport like buses. The act of going round these huge multiplexes is also an insular one, faceless sales assistants will serve you one week and may have gone back to college the next. There is little or no continuity of service because individualism is difficult to control and therefore largely discouraged. The days of knowing shopkeepers by name and having “the usual” lined up upon arrival are rapidly receding. We are rapidly losing the interaction that comes with day to day conversation with people we do not know, banter if you like is one of the greatest sufferers from this paradigm shift. Children and adults alike are no longer in situations where they would banter and are starting to lose the ability to do so. The traditional areas of shops and churches and pokey little local pubs and small intimate restaurants are replaced by supermarkets, large chain bars and restaurants designed to pack ’em in and turn ’em round asap. Is this part of the problem of lack of respect that the young now show to those around them? It’s possible, it is obviously not the sole reason and yet it cannot surely be underestimated that the decimation of communal society is a cause for the disassociation of many.

We are all under the impression that we are, at least financially, getting a good deal out of this, after all why would we have left the high street shops if not because supermarkets were much cheaper? To disprove this theory one only needs return to the markets and buy fresh seasonal food to find out how much cheaper it can be. When I returned to London at Christmas I went down one such a market to find that I was able to avail of a bag of bananas for £1 (Supermarket price approx. £1.50-£2), 8 mangoes £2 (supermarket price £1.50 each), 3 small pineapples £1 (supermarket price medium pineapple £1.50 each), 8 romero sweet peppers £1 (supermarket £1.50 for pack of 3), 12 orange capsicum £1 (supermarket £0.49p each), one string of garlic approx 40 cloves £1 (supermarket £1.50 for bag of 3 cloves), a bag of about 100 hot green chili peppers £1 (supermarket £0.50 packet of 4). Now in many respects this was more than I could eat, I gave a load of the chilis away and still have some left, the garlic is now sprouting and I’ve been using stacks of it, the peppers were used in pasta sauces and jambalaya and the quality of all the items I purchased was excellent.

One must look very critically at the supermarket phenomenon and just how they are managing to pervade every form of retail. The loss leader strategy is a well-known one and one the supermarkets use to good effect. By selling milk at less than the cost of producing it and selling cheap bread they entice people in for staple foods, and once you’re in there they’ve got you because like the retail park concept you may have travelled a little further, you’re going to make the most of it and get your weekly shop done at the same time and this “convenience” is the trap. Certain key items are designed to be cheap so as not to make you think whilst other prices designed to be less neticable are comparatively more expensive as I have just illustrated. Interestingly though you quite often get what you pay for, supermarket food often goes off very quickly, partially because it tends to be far less fresh and also in the case of things like bread because things have been added to make it do so. After all the sooner you run out of bread and milk the sooner you’ll be back for another crack.

Just as we cannot go on with our current energy policy, health policy, we cannot go on with this insular existence. We inhabit large “open plan” offices where people feel exposed and vulnerable and go introspective rather than being able to build a rapport with those around them. We sit in little metal boxes trying to get home and shouting at those in front and those at the sides for obstructing our progress. At the weekend we go to retail parks and buy the same items from the same shops regardless of georgraphy. It is a difficult trap not to fall into. The modern way of life is fast-paced and furious not to mention expensive, therefore time-saving and money-saving measures are tempting and almost seem to be the only way.

We all do it, for example spending time talking to people on the internet, where we may in fact know people better than many we know in real life. That wouldn’t be a problem as a compliment to the real world but as a replacement it is worrying. The social exclusion and detachment this forms perpetuates the problem. People may be being increasingly radicalised in their own homes but we wouldn’t know many of them will never come out.

Song Of The Day ~ Del Amitri – Nothing Ever Happens

Original Comments:


john made this comment,
All very true Baron. Until recently we had a local ‘community’ store which helped the many old folk around here by making up small orders and delivering them for free. It closed down due to a bloody Tesco Express opening in the high street. I expect others will follow.
comment added :: 15th February 2006, 16:00 GMT+01 :: http://bigjohn.blog-city.com
april made this comment,
Yes, RedBaron, it is all true. But why bemoan the fact? It is what it is. Change is a constant. If you are unhappy with the large shops, don’t frequent them. There will always be small shops to frequent, you just have to look harder for them. And there are good people everywhere, there always will be, even in the big chain stores, you just have to engage them; a smile usually works.
-Redbaron responds – Hello April, nice to see you again. You are right in part, at the moment there exists a choice but it is becoming at the expense of diversity. The trend is that small shops will cease to exist in many areas especially those where the population density is large enough to merit malls and superstores. Small shops cannot aford to specialist in the range they used to be able to because often the trade is now more sporadic. Furthermore whilst there may be good people in supermarkets they have no influence over the corporate policy. In a small shop if you would like them to tailor-make something to your specifications and requirements they are more able to accomodate. I’ve lived in the US where there was 1 Dairy Mart 3 miles away and the mall 6 miles away. The residential close I lived in had no community at all, when and where would people have any chance to meet?-

comment added :: 7th May 2006, 00:53 GMT+01
april made this comment,
Hi Red Baron, nice to be here. Yes, I agree with you about the workers having no influence over corporate policy. However, if one supermarket doesn’t cater to their customers, won’t they lose business? After all, they are in the business of making money, albeit not much (supermarkets don’t work on a very high markup, I understand) and if the consumer goes elsewhere, they lose money. Corporate policy being what it is, I think the consumer has more power now to get what they want, not less. Corporations are so afraid of lawsuits in the States, for instance, at one of the department stores where I support clients (I work with people with developmental disabilities) store management and staff cannot even stop people from shoplifting!! They can see them do it, yet cannot even speak to them about it for fear of a lawsuit. But I digress. RedBaron, people live by a pattern. What I mean is, we are creatures of habit, going to the same places day in and day out. The grocer, the coffee shop, or perhaps the tea shoppe where you live. Don’t you run into those same people daily? I know I do. I have absolutely no trouble engaging people in conversation. I do see what you’re talking about however. It bugs the crap out of me when someone is walking toward me and they refuse to make eye contact, or don’t return a smile, or indicate in some way that we have shared the same space, but I think that is just selfish ignorance, which exists, but not in as great numbers as some think. Anyway…now I’m just babbling, trying to convince you that life is good…
-Redbaron responds- April I think you are right in theory but I also think you may underestimate the tactics of the supermarkets. I don’t know about the US but over here they have many very clever ways of doing things, it is precisely our ‘creature of habit’ syndrome that can be the problem. Supermarkets work on a small markup in certain areas and even a loss leader in others like milk. However their offers and loyalty cards and extra points etc. are designed to have us buy what they want. If this tactic were unsucessfull then they would be losing money and not reporting huge profits as they are. They rely on us being used to doing a weekly shop in one place and trying to cut down on the need to go to multiple places for specifics. Because of their immense buying power they can buy cheap and sell cheap.

As for people, is it any wonder that in our isolationist world people are retreating into their shells more and more, they have been bred to do so by the constant media message of fear of violence etc. People remain in a heightened state of alert and that’s how the state likes it because it makes them maleable.

Life is good for some people now I do not doubt this, I just think it should and could be good for so many more people than the current system allows.-

comment added :: 10th May 2006, 03:13 GMT+01

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Blind Justice – Future Shocks – Part 9 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
January 4, 2006

Frans van Anraat may count himself a little unfortunate to have been given a 15 year jail term for complicity to war crimes particularly in the current geo-political climate. Of course Meneer van Anraat seeking to profit from the sale of constituent components of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein’s regime is something that he should rightly stand trial for and yet this beacon of world justice seems misplaced and hollow in the light of so much that has been going on in the last 50 years.

The weapons created using the components obtained from van Anraat were part of a “a political policy of systematic terror and illegal action against a certain population group,” namely Saddam’s repression against the Kurds in the Northern areas of Iraq in 1988. A crime widely reported that the US and the rest of the world chose to ignore at the time. Of course one must add the context here that Iraq was the US’s choice in the Middle East power struggle of the 1st Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq which ran from 1980-88.

Hmm, interesting, ok fair enough, so how does the van Anraat ruling square with “It is in Britain’s interests that Indonesia absorbs the territory [East Timor] as soon and as unobtrusively as possible, and when it comes to the crunch, we should keep our heads down.” (Former GB ambassador, Sir John Archibald Ford). British Aerospace Hawk aircraft sold to the Indonesian air force were observed on bombing runs across East Timor every year from 1984 until the Indonesians eventually withdrew from the territory after General Suharto (whose regime originally began purchases of the plane from the Wilson government in 1978) was no longer in charge.

How does this ruling square with U.S. covert operations between 1968 and 1975 to destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile and, after the violent 1973 coup, to bolster the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, a regime responsible for ‘the disappeared’ accused of state terrorism and genocide and the definite killing of 3,000 people and probably disposal of a further 1,100+ who remain unaccounted for?

How does this ruling square with the Nicaragua contra funded operations of the US that resulted in the destruction both of government and economy in Nicaragua and the loss of 60,000 lives? The Sandinista government had won international acclaim for its gains in literacy, health care, education, childcare, unions, and land reform. The US paid $178 billion to destabilise and eventually bring down the government in 1990.

van Anraat is not the first in the US-led succession of kangaroo trials. Taking things from Nuremburg on, it is worth analysing the actual numbers of those Nazis convicted. It is hardly surprising that Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, had enough work to keep him going until his death more than 50 years after the Nuremburg trials. The end of the Second World War maked the shift of the US’s enemy from Fascism to Communism and thus a principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend has been applied. Hence coutless Nazis were simply overlooked in the quest to rebuild West Germany as a buffer against the emergence of a Soviet-influenced Eastern Europe.

In more recent times one need look no further than the trial of Slobodan Milosevic another case of victor’s justice. The Milosevic trial has gone remarkably silent since the defendent decided he was going to actually stand up for himself and not wallow in the dock in contrite fashion. Time was it was in the news every day and yet a couple of sucessive days of Milosevic’s defence and he was micraculously dropped from the schedules. I can only suspect that the trial of Saddam will go much the same way should the bearded one attempt to put up any sort of cogent fight. It is rather coincidental that his defence team seem to have a life expectancy akin to First World War pilots and yet the prosecutors who one might think would be the targets of the remaining insurgents appear to be either anonymous or adequately protected.

Whilst the world allows one single country to prosecute all others whilst it itself refuses to even subject any of its citizens to international legal scrutiny there can be no justice.

I know there will be many Americans remain in the belief that the US is a force for good in the world. Whatever one thinks of the motives and however naive one may be regarding the involvement take a closer look at US involvement across the globe since WWII, you may find the following a good starting point for research. Take one of these conflicts and research why it happened. Look at why it has been “necessary” for the US to bomb over 50 countries since WWII. Look at how it has been possible for the US to in fact invade a British sovereign territory in 1983 when Thatcher was still in charge. If you choose to you will find twice as much again between the years of 1798 and 1948 so it is hardly a recent phenomenon.

  • 1946 – Iran – troops deployed in northern province.
  • 1946 – 1949 – China – Major US army presence of about 100,000 troops, fighting, training and advising local combatants.
  • 1947 – 1949 – Greece – US forces wage a 3-year counterinsurgency campaign.
  • 1948 – Italy – Heavy CIA involvement in national elections.
  • 1948 – 1954 – Philippines – Commando operations, “secret” CIA war.
  • 1950 – 1953 – Korea – Major forces engaged in war in Korean peninsula.
  • 1953 – Iran – CIA overthrows government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
  • 1954 – Vietnam – Financial and material support for colonial French military operations, leads eventually to direct US military involvement.
  • 1954 – Guatemala – CIA overthrows the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
  • 1958 – Lebanon – US marines and army units totaling 14,000 land.
  • 1958 – Panama – Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens.
  • 1959 – Haiti – US Marines land.
  • 1960 – Congo – CIA-backed overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
  • 1960 – 1964 – Vietnam – Gradual introduction of military advisors and special forces.
  • 1961 – Cuba – failure of CIA-backed and trained Bay of Pig invasion aimed at deposing Castro.
  • 1962 – Cuba – Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear threat and naval blockade (US aggressive tactics met with stonewall from Kruschev who refused to sanction retalitory actions)
  • 1962 – Laos – CIA-backed military coup.
  • 1963 – Ecuador – CIA backs military overthrow of President Jose Maria Valesco Ibarra.
  • 1964 – Panama – Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens.
  • 1964 – Brazil – CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government of Joao Goulart and Gen. Castello Branco takes power.
  • 1965 – 1975 – Vietnam – Large commitment of military forces, including air, naval and ground units numbering up to 500,000+ troops. Full-scale war, lasting for ten years.
  • 1965 – Indonesia – CIA-backed army coup overthrows President Sukarno and brings Gen. Suharto to power.
  • 1965 – Congo – CIA backed military coup overthrows President Joseph Kasavubu and brings Joseph Mobutu to power.
  • 1965 – Dominican Republic – 23,000 troops land.
  • 1965 – 1973 – Laos – Bombing campaign begin, lasting eight years.
  • 1966 – Ghana – CIA-backed military coup ousts President Kwame Nkrumah.
  • 1966 – 1967 – Guatemala – Extensive counter-insurgency operation.
  • 1969 – 1975 – Cambodia – CIA supports military coup against Prince Sihanouk, bringing Lon Nol to power. Intensive bombing for seven years along border with Vietnam.
  • 1970 – Oman – Counter-insurgency operation, including coordination with Iranian marine invasion.
  • 1971 – 1973 – Laos – Invasion by US and South Vietnames forces.
  • 1973 – Chile – CIA-backed military coup ousts government of President Salvador Allende. Gen. Augusto Pinochet comes to power.
  • 1975 – Cambodia – Marines land, engage in combat with government forces.
  • 1976 – 1992 – Angola – Military and CIA operations.
  • 1980 – Iran – Special operations units land in Iranian desert. Helicopter malfunction leads to aborting of planned raid.
  • 1981 – Libya – Naval jets shoot down two Libyan jets in maneuvers over the Mediterranean.
  • 1981 – 1992 – El Salvador – CIA and special forces begin a long counterinsurgency campaign.
  • 1981 – 1990 – Nicaragua – CIA directs exile “Contra” operations. US air units drop sea mines in harbors.
  • 1982 – 1984 – Lebanon – Marines land and naval forces fire on local combatants.
  • 1983 – Grenada – Military forces invade Grenada.
  • 1983 – 1989 – Honduras – Large program of military assistance aimed at conflict in Nicaragua.
  • 1984 – Iran – Two Iranian jets shot down over the Persian Gulf.
  • 1986 – Libya – US aircraft bomb the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, including direct strikes at the official residence of President Muamar al Qadaffi.
  • 1986 – Bolivia – Special Forces units engage in counter-insurgency.
  • 1987 – 1988 – Iran – Naval forces block Iranian shipping. Civilian airliner shot down by missile cruiser.
  • 1989 – Libya – Naval aircraft shoot down two Libyan jets over Gulf of Sidra.
  • 1989 – Philippines – CIA and Special Forces involved in counterinsurgency.
  • 1989 – 1990 – Panama – 27,000 troops as well as naval and air power used to overthrow government of President Noriega.
  • 1990 – Liberia – Troops deployed.
  • 1990 – 1991 – Iraq – Major military operation, including naval blockade, air strikes; large number of troops attack Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait.
  • 1991 – 2003 – Iraq – Control of Iraqi airspace in north and south of the country with periodic attacks on air and ground targets.
  • 1991 – Haiti – CIA-backed military coup ousts President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
  • 1992 – 1994 – Somalia – Special operations forces intervene.
  • 1992 – 1994 – Yugoslavia – Major role in NATO blockade of Serbia and Montenegro.
  • 1993 – 1995 – Bosnia – Active military involvement with air and ground forces.
  • 1994 – 1996 – Haiti – Troops depose military rulers and restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office.
  • 1995 – Croatia – Krajina Serb airfields attacked.
  • 1996 – 1997 – Zaire (Congo) – Marines involved in operations in eastern region of the country.
  • 1997 – Liberia – Troops deployed.
  • 1998 – Sudan – Air strikes destroy country’s major pharmaceutical plant.
  • 1998 – Afghanistan – Attack on targets in the country.
  • 1998 – Iraq – Four days of intensive air and missile strikes.
  • 1999 – Yugoslavia – Major involvement in NATO air strikes.
  • 2001 – Macedonia – NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels.
  • 2001 – Afghanistan – Air attacks and ground operations oust Taliban government and install a new regime.
  • 2003 – Iraq – Invasion with large ground, air and naval forces ousts government of Saddam Hussein and establishes new government.
  • 2003 – present – Iraq – Occupation force of 150,000 troops in protracted counter-insurgency war
  • 2004 – Haiti – Marines land. CIA-backed forces overthrow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Of course that’s the price of freedom isn’t it? World’s police force eh? Or perhaps more the actions of a country that is hell-bent on completely safeguarding its interests at all costs despite the price in human terms.

Song Of The Day ~ Big Audio Dynamite – E=mc²

Original Comments:


fiordizucca made this comment,
happy new year Barone 😉
comment added :: 4th January 2006, 15:43 GMT+01 :: http://fiordizucca.blogspot.com

John made this comment,
I believe that it was the British who invented ‘gunboat diplomacy’ but the Americans are now the masters of ‘gunpoint democracy’.
comment added :: 7th January 2006, 17:09 GMT+01 :: http://bigjohn.blog-city.com/

The Fat Boy made this comment,
RedBaron, I don’t agree with your political opinions, but you write well. Do you write for newspapers? Have you considered it?
-Redbaron responds – Thank you for the compliment, I do not write for newspapers at least not on politics or the like because I have a fundamental aversion to doing what I am told. I have written on more boring stuff but it isn’t nearly as fun!-

comment added :: 9th January 2006, 13:12 GMT+01 :: http://spongeblog.blog-city.com

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Iraq – Future Shocks – Part 5 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
November 30, 2005

It would be a surprise to most, if not all, the people who know me to hear me agree with George W. Bush but in one instance it is indeed true, however let me qualify that statement before you all pack up in disgust. Bush’s famous “You’re either with us or against us” was something of a defining moment of a president who attempts to make up in sound-bites what he lacks in intellect. Bush attempts with his use of the word ‘us’ to galvanise the Western World into an alliance against those ‘he’ defines as the enemy. The actuality of the ‘us’ he is using is the US corporate political establishment and when one realises this it becomes a lot easier to see how the polarisation that Bush almost prophesied has in fact come true. The Iraq war has had a practically unprecedented unifying effect on people across the world as normally disparate groups are united in their condemnation of US involvement in Iraq.

It has also unified the violent insurrection against the US aggressor in a way that was not the case when they invaded Iraq in the first place. More and more the US has put itself up as a target to be shot at, Blair as Bush’s faithful poodle has been happy to lead Britain down the same path and there are increasing signs in Basra that the attempts to project a harmonious relationship in the British sector are far from the truth.

According to former US diplomat Peter Galbraith – in Jan 2003 Bush invited 3 members of Iraqi resistance to watch Superbowl with him. During this meeting these 3 realised that Bush was not aware at this point that there was a difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Whilst this is unsurprising that Bush himself is so ill-informed it seems staggering that none of his advisors had sought to rectify the fact. Galbraith goes on that since most people do not consider themselves Iraqi before they consider themselves Sunni or Shia or Kurd the idea of forming a united Iraq is Mission Impossible. We must not forget that Iraq is a modern construct of territories in Mesopotamia and Kurdistan, their is no sense of long handed-down national identity like we know in Europe. Suffice to say it was a mess the British made last time they buggered about with it. Much the same can of course be said for Palestine and Ireland!

In March 2003 US war planners met to discuss the practicalities of the ousting of Saddam – Phase 4c for reconstruction of Iraq had not nearly as much depth as Phase 3 which was combat, which is curious when you think that the vastly superior US military should have had little problem overcoming the Iraqi resistance in the initial phases of a rebellion, and certainly if the propaganda was true and the Iraqis would be welcoming the US with open arms then there would be little insurgency thereafter.

However it would be wrong to assume that it was only in the US that such idiocy was going on. On the eve of the invasion Toby Dodge of London University gave a likely case scenario to the Labour government which in fact detailed almost exactly what did indeed happen based on the historical precedent as well as the prospected operations. George Joffe of Cambridge University had similar meeting, whilst Joffe tried to explain the potential problems of such an attempt to follow the Americans in their crusade against Saddam, Blair responded “…but he’s evil isn’t he?” And this appeared to be enough justification for him.

Whether simply ridiculous naivety or a calculated facade, US expectation was that they would be met by rejoicing in the streets of Baghdad and Basra according to Cheney. I have already documented a quote that was reported by journalists at the time the US forces moved into Iraq where one Iraqi man in response to the journalist’s question “Are you pleased to see the Americans come to liberate Iraq” stated “Americans, Saddam, we don’t care who as long as you bring peace.” This tempers the euphoria somewhat. It also goes some way to explain the situation now.

The reality in Iraq is not exactly what the US and UK administration flanked by their ’embedded’ media acolytes would have us believe. It is, even now still difficult for non-embedded Western reporters to get around in order to report what is genuinely going on in Iraq, embedded journalists whilst having a greater degree of security by virtue of their military escorts get a state department view of events from Washington and London and not Iraq. Journalists like Robert Fisk who are not embedded illustrate that this state department view is either hopelessly out of touch or criminally negligent to the point of being no better than right-wing state-sponsored agit-prop.

Elections and constitutions are “theatrical events staged for US media consumption disregarding everyday state of Iraq for Iraqis” in response to mass civilian casualties one US source stated “Such tragedies only happen because Zarkawi and his thugs are driving around using car bombs.” This staggeringly insensitive and ill-conceived notion serves only to elucidate the real feeling of US officials as to the state of Iraq.

The news mentions less the situation currently in Sadr City, as if it has all gone rather quiet. The reality is that the US have left Shia militia in charge, Iraqi police and the US army have “reached agreements” with the Mahdi army the group of Moqtada Al Sadr but they claim these are agreements with local representatives as civilians and not as a massed group. The British have done the same in Basra. The result of this has been to allow fundamentalist Shia leaders to create a political theocracy the like of which has not existed in the region in such a way before. The same situation exists with the Peshmurga in Kurdistan. The US is even trying to negotiate with the Ba’athist militia in areas that are still showing signs of resistance in Baghdad and Fallujah, the same insurgents who, according to US military sources in the media are, working with Al Queda. So much for helping bring democracy to Iraq the US is intent on a quick sell-out. The second part really of what has been a simple ram-raid operation for the oil in the shop window. .

For many Iraqi women the current era marks for the first time them being forced to wear veils etc. and be subjected to a fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia law the like of which in Iran has been the subject of much condemnation by the US and UK establishments. Women are being executed for “prostitution” when this could mean nothing more than suspected adultery. These executions are not of course the result of any recognised judicial proceedings but the rough justice that fundamentalists of any variant are likely to favour.

Peter Oborne, political editor of The Spectator, concluded in a problem for the Channel 4 series Dispatches that the invasion of Iraq has failed. I believe this is far from the case because one has to evaluate what the actual goal of the invasion was.

If one believed, like I suspect Oborne does, that the goal was to remove a dangerous dictator and bring about a Western style democracy in Iraq then yes, it is clear this will not be the end result for Iraq. This seems a rather simplistic and establishment viewpoint on the matter though. Contrastingly if one believed, as I do, that US has no desire to have full functioning democracy in Iraq as this would bring about a stable secular country which would unquestionably constitute far more of a threat to the access to oil for the US and its companies involved in Iraq and beyond. Interestingly the US army operatives in Iraq are not permitted to arrest Al-Sadr despite him being wanted for murder. Al-Sadr, is the perfect young pretender to Saddam, left in place just in case the US army should need a bad guy if the whole Al-Zarkawi story ever falls apart.

This sort of conflict is likely to become ever more likely and ever more desperate as it is clear that the US domestic and foreign policy would far rather cling to the old order based on their dominance and control of oil. This means any country that has oil production or is integral to the stability of an oil producing region is going to have to watch itself for a while lest they find Uncle Sam on the borders. However US power is not what it is and it has already over-reached itself by attempting to fight battles on too many simultaneous fronts hence the debacle in Iraq. It would certainly be foolish to attempt any operations against countries such as Venezuela.

Finally one must not forget that the US never signed up to the International War Times Tribunal nor the International Criminal Court. This gives US operatives whether open or covert carte blanche to commit any acts of atrocity necessary to achieve the military objective whilst undermining the legitimacy and efficacy of the 2 supra-national judicial institutions. That is not to say that the US will not use them to moot out its brand of victor’s justice of course as we have seen in the case of Slobodan Milosevic. The US is quite happy to manipulate all sorts of laws to its own ends, for example Rumsfeld was quick to condemn the footage of US captives in Iraq as being contrary to the Geneva Convention. Al Jazeera were quick to point out of course that Guantanamo Bay and the detention of prisoners of war without due process or rights of any kind, the abuses in Abu Gharaib and Baghram, the invasion of a country against the UN security council, if not all directly in contravention of the Geneva Convention they are certainly fundamentally against the very principle.

US operations since the declaration of war on terror have become increasingly more worrying and outside the law. One only needs think of the aforementioned incarceration in Guantanamo Bay, the systematic abuse of prisoners of war in American custody both in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond and I will be covering the strategy of ‘extraordinary rendition’ later. The CIA operations across the world and the failure of the US to hold any of its active personnel responsible for any conduct is an international scandal. I’m afraid as the US’s grip on power rescinds proportional to the oil reserves left in the world we can expect to see more of the US’s failure to conform to any standards of decency and humanity. The question only remains, which country will be next on their list?

Song Of The Day ~ Editors – Bullets

Original Comments:


Cancergiggles made this comment,
Yes Dom. I’ve been watching extraordinary rendition for many months. George and Tony are war criminals!
comment added :: 1st December 2005, 22:38 GMT+01

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The Health Of Nations – Future Shocks – Part 4 (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
November 27, 2005

Yes, another of these thorny issues that we have had under constant scrutiny in the media and government is that of healthcare provision. Whether it be the current Labour government seeking to make Messers Atlee and Bevan turn in their grave by the slow dismantling of the National Health Service the 1946 Labour Government established, or the Conservatives who would in their dreams do away with the NHS entirely and seek an insurance system to ensure that their supporters got the best provision available and those that didn’t support them were slowly killed off, a sort of Tory political darwinism!

One way we can see that governments completely misunderstand what the public want has been graphically illustrated by Tony Blair responding to questions at the House of Commons liaison committee, (which is made up of the chairmen of all its select committees – rather like the Politburo!) Blair recognises that principle voter concern is that there has been systematic under-investment in public services spanning countless administrations, however he makes a serious misjudgement when he continues, “At the same time, the public is saying: ‘If you put more money into these services, we want them to be more responsive to us as consumers’. We should respond to that as a government and do it fairly.” This is not people’s primary concern about public services, responsiveness and accountabilty are all very important but the most important is that public services provide functioning services and that these should be of the highest calibre only after they have suceeded in that endeavour does it become important for the behind the scenes operations to run smoothly. Blair thinks otherwise, his emphasis is made clear by the statement “The idea is to get to the situation where people see that the money we have put into public services is matched by change and reform,” Again this is not the most critical thing in most people’s lives. The fact that there is still a postcode lottery and their hospital does not have an A&E department or the specialists it needs will not be assauged for most people even if the Customer Complaints department is second to none. The same is true of services such as libraries, public transport and the like, it is no consolation if you have a shit bus service if the company running it is accountable and responsive.

Now I’ll grant you what Blair may be referring to is responsiveness etc. to deal with the provision of a service etc. etc. at least I hope that’s what he means beneath that mountain of spin, one can’t really know for sure. But herein lies the problem, what the public want more than anything else is not to have to put up with the political bullshit anymore.

I have never quite understood why the focus for healthcare appears to be with far greater weighting on cure rather than prevention. For all the negative aspects of what people perceive as a nanny state one of the areas that could be most easily justified would be a strong attitude on prevention of disease and malaise. If we take the various notions of drug abuse as a prime example one has to be very careful to draw a line between an individual’s right to choose how they live their life and the potential drain on the resources of healthcare that this person may be. This line is already drawn in society with the outlawing of certain narcotics and the licensing and taxation of others. At the moment though the individual’s right to choose seems more like a euphemism for an abdication of responsibility by the state.

For example, in the case of smoking the government would stand to lose a substantial amount of money were they to genuinely wage war on smoking and treat smokers as proper drug addicts who need to be given rehabilitation. Thus they play a game of cat and mouse whereby tobacco is readily available whilst the areas in which it is permissable to smoke it are whittled down. This is simply unacceptable as it hands initiative to the freedom of choice lobby whilst not offering any defence as to the government acting in the population’s best interests.

Rather like the pensions, education and energy issues we are told that there are tough choices to be made and yet it always seems outlined that there is no actual choice and it wouldn’t be for us to make it if there were. Hospitals and their departments are still being closed and/or moved. Despite huge opposition there appears to be no way of halting the steady progress to foundation hospitals and an even greater postcode lottery than there is now. Foundation hospitals appear to be a way for governments again to avoid the big issue which is that all the NHS needs funding, not just the shiny fashionable parts of it. Whether or not this is intentionally the precursor to the privatisation of the NHS is not important because the end result is likely to be this anyway especially if after the end of this or the next Parliament the Tories were to get in. The Tories are only of the opinion that the NHS should remain free for as long as they feel they cannot get away with dismantling it. Ideologically they do not stand for free public utilities and therefore to make an exception for the NHS is nothing more than temporary political expediency.

What appears no longer to be en vogue is for every person in the country to have local access to all essential healthcare free at the point of use and this should encompass all everyday forms such as access to General Practice Doctors, Dentists, medicines, homecare for the elderly, paedeatric care for children and accident and emergency services. More specialist care should be provided within at least a regional level, it is perhaps optimistic initially to assume that every hospital in the country would have the specialist cardiac units and orthapedics and the like though this should without question be the goal of a state healthcare system. This is most certainly not the case at present. Access to good general practice is often sketchy with patients having to ring up at a particular time of day along with everyone else that wants to book an appointment with their doctor on that day, it is a first come first served basis there is no dispensation for the type of patient or the seriousness of the complaint. Dental care is so prohibitively expensive that it is impossible for most people to even consider all but the very basic of checkups. Prescription charges are such that I have on many occasions decided that I’ll whether the storm of an infection or such like reather than pay £12.50 for 2 sets of tablets. How a parent on low income may cope if more than one child over age 16 comes down with something I don’t know.

Again, though what I have just outlined as a ‘blue sky’ scenario is very much all tailored around a strategy of curing ills rather than stopping them occuring in the first place. Therefore these measures should be in place as a final safety net when all else fails and not an everyday occurance to mop up for the failures in other areas of general health and well-being. It is well known that poverty is a major cause of many very curable diseases, furthermore poor dental hygiene leads to many other problems and general malaise. If poverty is too great a cause for the government to tackle (though heaven knows if the government won’t who’s job is it?) then why not look at some of the other root causes of problems in order to try to stop them before they start. Smoking, obesity, TB, sexually transmitted diseases, heart disease, addiction-related illnesses and some forms of cancer are far better treated by addressing the causes than having to try to address the symptoms.

So why is this not being done? Tobacco companies make large amounts of money and cigarette sales account for a lot of tax revenue. Fast food companies are also creaming large profits at the expense of the taxpayer as the demands of modern life force people to concentrate less on good food and more on the time it takes for them to eat meals before getting back to work. Big business has a knack of being able to ensure they have enough lobbying pressure not to be legislated against so that sorts out why the first two remain a problem. STDs, heart disease and addiction-related illnesses all require effort to ensure that lifestyles are conducive to health rather than problems and this is clearly not being done. Furthermore the sort of screening programs and equipment that would be required to catch many of these diseases in their infacy are high-cost in the initial stages without yielding profit or often tangible results in the short-term. This is exactly why it is paramount that such things stay in public hands without the introduction of the nature of profit which cannnot have any positive bearing on increasing the likelihood of the prevention of disease.

If the nature of the prevention of disease is taken seriously and invested accordingly over time more and more of the budget will be available into medical and scientific research into diseases for which we currently have no cure. At the moment people are dying all over the world both developed and developing of diseases that are perfectly curable and indeed preventable if only the medication and environment existed to do so. Whilst this travesty persists we will be doomed to be fighting the battle from 3 steps behind and never even making it to the front line.

Song Of The Day ~ Good Charlotte – Boys & Girls

Original Comments:


The Fat Boy made this comment,
RB, I love Good Charlotte, too. glad we can agree on something : )
comment added :: 29th November 2005, 09:36 GMT+01 :: http://spongeblog.blog-city.com

baracuda made this comment,
http://ia300836.eu.archive.org/1/items/grapple-in- the-big-apple/grapple-in-the-big-apple_64kb.mp3
Don’t know if you’ve heard this, it’s an mp3 of Hitchins v Galloway in New York.

comment added :: 29th November 2005, 23:07 GMT+01 :: http://blog-chorus.blogspot.com/

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No Exploitation Without Education – Future Shocks – Part 3 (Orig. posted Blog City)

Filed under: Ex Blog-City, Future Shocks, Political — Leave a comment
November 25, 2005

No looking to the future series would be complete without a look at the real future, namely the generations to come, our children and their children. The perils that are facing them across the world are magnified by virtue of the fact that even before they have to clean up our mess they must first navigate the education system, and this is for those that have that as an option let alone the millions without adequate food and water.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation has just published a report saying that the 1996 targets of halving the number of the starving by 2015 will not be met. At present 6 million children die every year from malnutrition or starvation, many deaths are actually caused by diseases like diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia, but victims would survive if they were not already weakened by a lack of food. At the present rate of development only South America and the Caribbean are on course to meet Millennium Development Goal targets. The FAO reports estimate that 852 million people were undernourished during 2000-2002. In fact the proportion of those in sub-saharan Africa has risen from 170.4 million around 1990 to 203.5 million, which makes something of a mockery of the gesturing of the G8 leaders at the summit in Edinburgh last summer.

In Uganda in 1997 primary education was made free and the primary school population rose from just under 3 million to over 7 million almost overnight. However secondary school is not free and costs around 60,000 Shillings (around £20) per term. This is around 6 weeks wages for the average Ugandan, which is more than enough for earning parents let alone parents who are ill with HIV/AIDS or TB and that doesn’t begin to cover the orphans. The fees cannot be waived because if they are the schools do not have the money to pay the teachers who generally are paid months in arrears.

Children not educated in secondary school are likely to become domestic servants. Female “housegirls” are like as not to be used for sex. Ugandan schools therefore witness a sight alien to those of us in the west, where students are trying to break into school rather than out. Hardly surprising when it is considered that school fees not only comprise the access to education and a future but also include a meal at lunchtime, in a country where 23% of the population are malnourished.

To see some of these children talk about how important school and education is for them one cannot help but feel that for every one who is unable to go a spark of hope is snuffed out. It’s not as if children in Uganda don’t have enough to worry about 100,000 children in Uganda alone die of malaria every year. In Africa as a whole a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. Malaria has killed more people throughout history than all the other causes of human death put together. There may not be a quick fix for such a disease because simple antibiotics and the like will only be effective for a certain period of time before the disease mutates and develops resistance.

It is easy to think that it is just in the developing world where this burgeoning education system requires investment to allow it to benefit the whole population in time and over the generations. This would be a false assumption and either a naive or an arrogant one were one to properly examine our education system in the West. Here the social and financial apartheid of the state and private school systems creates division almost as soon as it is possible to do so. Some local authorities have good nursery education but free nurseries do not start in Britain until age 3. Well-off parents of course have the option of sending children to often facility-rich private nurseries which are often the only institutions pre-secondary school to offer a modern language. At primary school level the postcode lottery comes to the fore again. Offsted reports are scrutinised for every primary school in an area and the good ones affect house prices of the catchment area drastically, once again favouring the more affluent.

Of course results in primary school are seen as the best indication of progress and potential for future direction. Britain’s schools do not respond well to non-conformity of any kind, most of the state schools do not have the resources to, and the private schools can choose children that don’t exhibit it in order to keep the results high and overhead costs low. Of course the better the school the greater the likelihood of a broader range of subjects and sporting facilities etc. The broader the range of subjects on offer the increase in chances that a pupil be given the opportunity to find ones that s/he excels in. Aptitude generally leads easily to success in schools whilst students offered a narrow selection are far more likely to respond with ambivalence.

I have raised the question many times before of who benefits if all children get the best quality of education? It is not just the child nor even the parents but the whole of society, the more children whose aptitude can be assessed the greater the possibilities that they can find a direction that is of interest and benfit to them in later life and this will invariably lead to them feeling more part of society and society gaining the more for such. The inequitous state of education in this country and others like it is a national and international disgrace. That in the 21st century we are unable to adequately guarantee a good and consistent level of education to every child in the land should be something that shames every government that leaves office with the situation unresolved.

In the West currently there is ever more disenfranchisement from society as the education system fails more and more people within it. If one is not of academic normality and this can mean too compentent as not gifted in this area, the education system has little option. To add insult to injury we have been taught over many generations to prize academic excellence above all other and thus for those who fulfill it the possibilities are far greater than for those who do not. One could be the best mechanic in the country but would receive less plaudits from most than a mediocre Dr. On account of the postcode lottery even the academically gifted have no guarantee of receiving the education that will bring out their talents if their parents are not wealthy. The well-off have rather more options, the academic children can be sent to good private or “public” schools to receive a far better level of education than most state schools can offer, whilst the less academically-able child of rich parents can be sent to the sort of institution thaat will look after its own in order that alumnii can rely on a degree of old school tie support to see them right in later years. Private schools are not bounded by the same curriculum restrictions as state schools and therefore have a far greater degree of autonomy to be able to offer that broader range of subjects that can mean so much. Thus even the less well-able can prosper if they are born of the well-off and hedge their bets so as not to come across as ‘unacademic’.

So, as we have seen in both Africa and Britain the differences are not so great, if you are schooled academically you are perceived as being of greater value than if you are not. This must change across the world, there can be no real progress without it. The weighting of the bookish above the dextrous is holding back the progress of human society. Every child without exception must be provided with the best education possible to provide and the broadest range of experiences, only this way can we tackle ignorance and apathy and create people with both social awareness and social responsibility.

In the light of this, to see hundreds of billions chucked on warfare is tantamount to seeing governments dismantle schools that haven’t been built yet. it is our responsibility to reverse that trend.

Song Of The Day ~ Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls

Original Comments:


The Fat Boy made this comment,
NYC has an excellent public education system, except for the violence.
-Redbaron responds – Cuba has an excellent healthcare system except for Guantanamo!-

comment added :: 29th November 2005, 09:42 GMT+01 :: http://spongeblog.blog-city.com

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